“20th Century Women” (Amazon Prime) — My full review is here. Mike Mills’ film is semi-autobiographical, but his ’70s teenage stand-in really fades into the background as his film looks at several strong, influential women in his orbit, including Annette Bening as his prickly, baffled mother and Greta Gerwig as one of her older, worldly tenants. Not for nothing, the film also serves as a potent reminder of the impact that Planned Parenthood has had on countless’ women’s lives over the decades.
“I Am Not Your Negro” (Amazon Prime) — My full review is here. Author James Baldwin’s words on race in America come to fiery life in this documentary, which artfully puts ’60s civil rights struggles hand in hand with Black Lives Matter protests to show how a society in which one man is allowed to subjugate another has a moral sickness that infects both oppressed and oppressor.
“Boyhood” (Netflix) — My full review is here. Richard Linklater’s wonderful cinematic experiment was shot over a 12-year period, charting a boy’s growth into adulthood and his parents’ growth from crazy kids in love to sadder, wiser middle-aged adults. Linklater uses time as his canvas, focusing on the little moments between the so-called big ones, to show how we change over the years without even realizing it’s happening to us.
“The Lobster” (Amazon Prime) — My full review is here. Greek writer-director Yorges Lathimos’ first English-language film has a premise that might seem like an SNL skit, in which single people are forced by a dystopian society to gather at a hotel for bizarre speed-dating rituals, and if they don’t find a soulmate, they get turned into an animal. But the film is both ridiculous and deadly serious in using its surreal premise to examine modern love, and what people will give up of themselves to get it.
Pick of the Week: “Sing Street” — My full review is here. John Carney (“Once”) delivers a delightful ode to candy-coated ’80s pop in this tale of a shy teenage boy at a brutal Dublin public school who finds his voice with the help of some friends, a beguiling older girl, and a folder full of great song lyrics. If you don’t have “Drive It Like You Stole It” in your head for the next week, I worry for you.
Pick of the Week: “The Witness“: My full review is here. The best documentary I’ve seen this year is this haunting and healing film about the notorious Kitty Genovese murder, in which a woman was reportedly killed on the streets of New York in 1964, her screams heard but unanswered by her neighbors. Decades later, Genovese’s brother Bill goes searching for the real answers, and finds that the original reports got a lot wrong. By grappling with the truth of her death, Bill is finally able to reclaim her life — the scene of him watching as an actress recreates the moments of his sister’s death on the exact spot where it happened is one of the most powerful things I’ve seen in a movie theater this year.
Pick of the week: “Zootopia” (Netflix) — My full review is here. This candy-coated Disney animated film doesn’t sugarcoat the complexities of race relations, as a bunny rookie cop (Ginnifer Goodwin) comes to the big city and learn that all the animals there don’t live in quite the harmonious mosaic that she thought. It’s relentlessly clever, funny and resonant — when a villain who has been pitting one group of animals against another exclaims “Fear always works!,” one can’t help but think of a certain 2016 presidential campaign or two. (Okay, just one.)
Pick of the Week: “The Finest Hours” (Netflix) — My full review is here. Before Chris Pine and Ben Foster starred in the excellent Texas crime thriller “Hell or High Water,” they were co-stars in this old-fashioned rescue drama, based on a true-life event in which a Coast Guard crew battled an epic storm to save the crew of a sinking ship. Casey Affleck may be the film’s MVP as the ship’s quietly heroic engineer.
Pick of the week: “The Confirmation” (Netflix) — My full review is here. You want the very definition of a hidden treasure on Netflix? It’s this gem from Bob Nelson, who wrote Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska” and brings his unsentimental but affectionate eye for small-town characters to his debut as a writer-director. Clive Owen plays an alcoholic divorced dad who brings his eight-year-old son (the wonderful Jaeden Lieberher) on a quest to find his stolen toolbox. It’s a riff on “The Bicycle Thief,” both eloquent and no-nonsense, and Owen and son run across a ton of great character actors on their journey, including Patton Oswalt, Maria Bello, Matthew Modine and Robert Forster. This one’s a keeper.
Pick of the Week: “Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation“ (Amazon Prime and Hulu) — When word of a fifth “M:I” was announced, I thought “Really?” Sure, Brad Bird’s “Ghost Protocol” was the high point of the franchise for me, but did Tom Cruise really need to go to the well for a fifth time? As it turns out, “Rogue Nation” (directed by Christopher McQuarrie) is sparkling entertainment that blends the humor and panache of caper films of yore with cutting-edge stunts. Bring on No. 6.
Pick of the Week: “Z for Zachariah” (Amazon Prime) — My full review is here. Despite a stellar cast that includes Margot Robbie (“Suicide Squad”), Chris Pine (“Star Trek Beyond”) and Chiwetel Ejiofor (“12 Years a Slave”), this Craig Zobel sci-fi drama never really caught fire and never played theatrically in Madison. Too bad, because it downplays the sci-fi and plays up the character drama, set in an idyllic valley apparently immune to the ravages of an apocalypse. A man and a woman meet there. And then another man shows up, setting up a love triangle with perhaps the future of humanity at stake.
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