‘The Order’ (2024)
This tightly-wound mixture of political thriller and police procedural from the director Justin Kurzel was sadly lost in the shuffle of the year-end prestige pictures. It dramatizes the true story of the title organization, a more-extreme splinter group of the Aryan Nation that was linked to multiple crimes, motivated both by money and by hate, in the early 1980s, including the killing of the Denver talk radio host Alan Berg. Jude Law, working in the gruff, lived-in manner of a middle-aged Gene Hackman, stars as an F.B.I. agent who is tracking the Order’s activities, while Tye Sheridan as a local deputy, and Jurnee Smollett as an F.B.I. colleague, lend ample support. (Marc Maron also impresses in a brief but powerful turn as Berg.) And as Robert Jay Mathews, the leader of the Order, Nicholas Hoult deftly conveys the surface appeal of such a horrific figure — and the emptiness at his center.
‘The Outrun’ (2024)
You may think you’ve seen this story of a young woman, recently out of rehabilitation for drugs and alcohol, more than once before, and for good reason; the recovery narrative is certainly a durable one in contemporary memoir and fiction. But you haven’t seen this story brought to life by Saoirse Ronan. The staggeringly gifted Irish actress occupies every frame of the director Nora Fingscheidt’s adaptation of Amy Liptrot’s 2016 memoir (Fingscheidt and Liptrot wrote the script), and she never fails to hold your attention. Even when the beats of her character’s journey are familiar, individual moments are so honestly inhabited, so vivid and electric, that they feel fresh. And the filmmakers impose a bracingly unconventional structure on the story, intercutting various phases of their protagonist’s fall and rise via stream-of-consciousness triggers and unexpected connections. Fingscheidt deploys vivid audio and visual depictions of how it looks and sounds (and therefore feels) to be inebriated, but ultimately, “The Outrun” isn’t about filmmaking flash. It’s the story of a woman’s journey to sanity and self-preservation, and it’s a richly rewarding one.
‘Lost River’ (2015)
This surrealist urban dreamscape is the first and (so far) only directorial effort by the actor Ryan Gosling, who also wrote the screenplay. Tonally and stylistically, it recalls the work of Nicolas Winding Refn, with whom Gosling collaborated on “Drive” and “Only God Forgives,” but also reveals the charismatic actor as a distinctive visual stylist, who finds both nightmare and fairy tale imagery in the less-populated corners of Detroit; he’s also unsurprisingly good with actors, orchestrating nuanced work from Saoirse Ronan (again), Iain De Caestecker, Ben Mendelsohn, Matt Smith and, in her best non-“Mad Men” turn to date, the film’s star Christina Hendricks.
‘Bad Behaviour’ (2024)
Jennifer Connelly is marvelous — wryly cynical, righteously indignant, raw and wounded — as Lucy, a former actor attempting to attain something resembling inner peace at a spiritual retreat run by a beatific self-help guru (played with inspired comic emptiness by Ben Whishaw). The writer and director is an actor herself, Alice Englert, who also plays Lucy’s daughter, Dylan, and she mines their strained relationship for both relatable laughs and startling poignancy; this is the kind of movie that lulls you into a snarky complacency, and then sucker-punches you with its piercing insights and emotional truth. This is Englert’s first feature as a writer-director; hopefully, it won’t be her last.
‘Hello, I Must Be Going’ (2012)
Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.
The actor Melanie Lynskey, currently wowing viewers on “Yellowjackets,” found a breakthrough role in this tender comedy-drama from the screenwriter Sarah Koskoff and the director Todd Louiso. It’s essentially a coming-of-age movie, albeit on a slightly delayed schedule; Lynskey’s Amy has moved back in with her parents following a painful divorce, and finds little motivation to do much of anything — except hang out with the much-younger stepson (Christopher Abbott) of one of her father’s would-be clients. Lynskey and Abbott are excellent together, carving out a dynamic of equal parts sexual sparks and shared sadness, and Koskoff’s perceptive screenplay understands Amy’s listlessness with uncommon perception.
‘The Silent Hour’ (2024)
Brad Anderson has had an odd and fascinating career as a feature filmmaker, which he launched with Sundance-friendly indie romantic comedies before moving into the genre space with the psychological horror film “Session 9.” His latest is an action picture in the unkillable subset of “‘Die Hard’” riffs; this one amounts to “Die Hard in an abandoned apartment building,” and works splendidly on that level. Joel Kinnaman is Frank, a police detective who is losing his hearing after an accident on the job. He is sent to take a statement from Ava (Sandra Mae Frank), a deaf witness to a murder. But unluckily enough, the killers were dirty cops, so Frank and Ava end up fighting for their lives against pursuers with at least one major advantage. Dan Hall’s screenplay works through several ingenious complications, while Anderson adroitly builds to moments of suspense that hit like fastballs. Also worth noting: the intricate sound design, which takes pains to put the viewer in Frank’s head, to great effect.
‘By Sidney Lumet’ (2016)
Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.
Five years after Sidney Lumet’s death at 86, the director Nancy Buirski assembled this tribute to the prolific and talented New York filmmaker, using interviews shot but not used for a profile in 2008. The results are a fairly straightforward bio-doc, but that’s all it needs to be. Lumet’s filmography (which included “12 Angry Men,” “Serpico,” “Dog Day Afternoon” and “The Verdict”) was so loaded with classics, and he was such a warm and engaging storyteller, that this assemblage of clips and anecdotes goes down as smoothly as an egg cream on a Sunday afternoon.
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