Writer-director Greta Gerwig’s picture is assured, ingenious, and alternatively, hilarious and moving. A coming-of-age story that touches on the themes of leaving home and the mother-daughter relationship is not exactly original, but in Gerwig’s hands, it is fresh. Lady Bird (Saiorse Ronan of last year’s beautiful Brooklyn) is a Catholic school senior in Sacramento navigating her college choices, academic ennui, sexual inexperience, insecurity, and her family’s economic frailty, all while negotiating an increasingly strained relationship with her passive-aggressive (and sometimes, aggressive-aggressive) mother (Laurie Metcalf).

Gerwig stitches a narrative together with brisk and evocative vignettes, and her characters carry the nuance and surprise of real people. Lady Bird’s reach for popularity and desire for something beyond what she deems the stodgy and suffocating Sacramento might normally make her empathetic, but she is of her age, which means selfish and even cruel, in her ambition. This harsh light prevents the film from becoming maudlin. She’s a real girl and her world feels authentic. I watched the film with my wife and daughter, and their knowing glances and nonverbal communication throughout certified the truth of its nature.

I was reminded of different films at different times while watching Lady Bird. Gerwig’s command of pace and sharp timing evokes Wes Anderson’s The Royal Tenenbaums, shorn of his mannered style. Her strong portrayal of the bond of family and place also brought to mind last years’ incredibly under appreciated 20th Century Women. Finally, the mother-daughter dynamic on the eve of separation made me think of Nicole Holofcener’s Enough Said.

I don’t mean to convey that Gerwig’s picture is derivative, only exceedingly accomplished. These are great pictures for purposes of comparison.

This is one of the best of the year, and I expect nominations for best picture, best director and best original screenplay. At a time when Hollywood may very well want to go with films that are smaller and more pure, keep this one in mind when filling out your Oscar ballot.

A funny and wry comedy about an improv group in New York City that is splintered when one of its members makes it to “the show”, a stand-in for Saturday Night Live called Weekend Live. The elevation exposes fissures within the group, eventually sealing its doom . Nonetheless, through the process of promotion and disintegration, the members realize how integral the group is/was to their lives and how their involvement fits into their ambitions.

This is a sweet movie, written and directed by Mike Birbiglia, who also stars as one of the improv group members. Some of the drama is beyond the talents of the actors, almost all of them are immediately recognizable from some Comedy Central or other endeavor, and it is on occasion a little gooey. But, otherwise, this is good clean fun, bettered by a biting, almost cruel caricature of Lorne Michaels as the head honcho at Weekend Live.

A man (Colin Farrell) whose wife leaves him checks himself into a facility resembling a hotel, where he is given 45 days to find a new life mate amongst its other inhabitants.  If he fails to do so, he will be transformed into the animal of his choice. Hence, the title.

When the story stayed in the hotel, it maintained my interest. Writer-director Yorgos Lanthrimos creates an increasing feel of dread and desperation as the guests jockey for position, and while the picture is often the blackest of the black, there is comedy to be found. 

Unfortunately, Lanthimos leaves the strange, self-contained bubble and takes us to a wider society. There, loners — individuals as zealous about being single as the government is about coupledom – hide out in the woods while the authorities enforce duos to such an extent that security personnel harass lone shoppers at the mall. Lanthimos doubles down again and again on the absurd. Eventually, the movie becomes exhausting, a chore rather than a delight.

Worse, it’s all too clever by half, and ultimately, casually cruel, to no real end. People are miserable and they suck or they are delusional Moonies.

That said, my tastes for this sort of thing are reflexively vanilla to an almost disabling degree. The critics adored it, and it cleaned up at Cannes.