Pick of the Week: “Captain America: Civil War” — On the one hand, you can see the gears moving as the latest installment in the Marvel Cinematic Universe moves the pieces in place, setting up the rivalry between Iron Man and Captain America, the rest of the Avengers falling in line behind them. On the other hand, watching those gears is a lot of fun at times, especially a big superhero throwdown at an airport that is like nothing less than a kid pouring all his action figures out of the box and making them fight each other.

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Pick of the Week:  “Other People” — My full review is here. It sounds like every other indie movie ever made. A gay comedy writer comes home to his repressed suburban family to take care of his dying mother. But “SNL” writer Chris Kelly’s debut is wonderful, focusing on the little moments between the big moments that matter. Molly Shannon is terrific as the mom. And, believe it or not, it’s also very funny.

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What other artist would put, in the same film, both remembrances of living through 9/11 and footage of a rat terrier playing Christmas carols on the keyboard?

It’s Laurie Anderson, of course, the “multimedia artist” (she’s not wild about that label) who for decades has mixed music and spoken word, images and stories, metaphysical musings and bad jokes, comedy and tragedy in her live performances. Caveat: I’ve been a fan of hers for ages.

She hasn’t made a movie in 30 years (since the terrific concert film “Home of the Brave”), which makes the new “Heart of a Dog” welcome. Even if the circumstances surrounding its creation are less than happy.

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If you’re looking for movies to stream over the holidays, it might be good to focus on the ones that will be gone with a wink and a nod on January 1. Just as Netflix kicks off each month with a bunch of new movies, it often quietly drops others. Sometimes they go to other streaming sites like Hulu and Amazon Prime, sometimes they resurface back on Netflix a few months later, sometimes — well, who knows where they go?

Here are five good movies that are confirmed to be leaving Netflix on Jan. 1. Watch them while you can:

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” — Bummed to see that one of my oldest daughter’s favorites will be leaving Netflix, with Blake Edwards’ sparkling and a little sad comedy about a New York party girl (Audrey Hepburn) embodying the romance and the possibilities of the Big Apple — even if you’re faking it till you make it.

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Thank goodness Britain has such a rigid class system, or else its novelists and playwrights (and filmmakers) wouldn’t have such rich material to work from.

That’s certainly the case with “Howard’s End,” the Oscar-nominated 1991 adaptation of E.M Forster’s  panoramic 1910 novel that goes up and down the rungs of England’s social strata, from the top to the bottom and back again. We see how each class views the other. The top looks down (“The poor are poor, one is sorry for them, but there it is,” remarks wealthy industrialist Henry (Anthony Hopkins)) and the bottom looks up (“If one is rich and fails, one can simply try another profession,” says destitute clerk Leonard Bast (Samuel West). “For the rest of us, if you lose a position by the age of 20, you’re done for.”)

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Ah, the old New York City of the late ’80s. The graffiti, the crime in the streets, the garbage bags piled everywhere, the rent-controlled apartments where even a middling pot dealer can pay rent. Start spreading the news, I’m leaving today.

Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini’s “Ten Thousand Saints” makes this filthy, pre-Guiliani Big Apple its own character — in a climactic scene, two characters wander into the 1988 Tompkins Square Park riots, considered the first salvo in the gentrification wars that transformed the city.

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