Five Fall Movies Worth Catching Up With

A murder of crows makes off with Prue’s baby brother, which gives Travis Knight’s film one clear thing to do before it has to explain the forest. Prue goes after him. The distance between a recognizable Portland and a place with its own factions and histories can then be measured in a child’s steps. That transition is one of Laika’s strengths. The eye can follow a person into an image before the story asks for agreement about what the image means. A branch has weight, a bird takes up room, and a small figure has to find a way through a landscape that feels capable of resisting her.

The film’s pleasure in discovering fresh parts of the forest occasionally comes at the expense of staying with Prue and Curtis long enough to learn what a detour costs them. It is still worth taking that risk with the movie. There is an especially fine idea in a child going into the woods for a plainly personal reason and finding inhabitants whose lives were in progress before she came. Start here if the fall has been offering you too many supposedly vast worlds whose farthest corners feel as if they were built for the next installment.

In 1949, Thomas Mann has engagements on both sides of occupied Germany. There are ceremonies to attend, people ready to confer honors and a ruined country that makes the proceedings hard to separate from the purposes of whoever organized them. Paweł Pawlikowski keeps that public story close to a much smaller arrangement. Sandra Hüller’s Erika has to get her father from one place to another. Hanns Zischler plays a celebrated novelist who can manage a room by speaking and still depend on the person beside him to notice how much the room has taken out of him.

The film is brief enough to fit into an evening without crowding it. The images are severe, but there is life in the different things father and daughter notice inside them. Erika can understand an invitation as both a real honor and something the organizers can turn to their advantage. Mann can be entirely sincere in accepting it. A larger historical production might smooth those perspectives into a single interpretation of the trip. Here they stay different as the car keeps moving, which is a more exact way to show what an exile’s return asks of the people who have to live through it.

Noah Segan gives John Turturro a fine opening proposition. Harry Lehman is good at an occupation the city has made less rewarding. He can still notice where a stranger’s attention has gone and make himself ordinary in the same space. The wallet he takes has a better chance of containing cards that can be canceled than cash that will keep him going. The film has affection for Harry and for an older New York, but its best source of feeling is a present-tense problem. He has to make a living with the city he has.

A stolen drive sets off the pursuit. The reasons to care about it come earlier, in the small contacts between Harry and the people who will still take his call. Steve Buscemi and Giancarlo Esposito make long acquaintance feel like something with both value and a dwindling supply. Turturro’s work at home with Harry’s wife gives his vigilance another purpose. This is the best choice here for someone who wants the momentum of a crime picture and the company of a character who would be worth following on a day when nothing especially dangerous happened.

The difficult question in Lance Hammer’s film arrives in a home where people already know how to take care of one another in a hundred small ways. Leslie has advanced dementia. Her husband Martin and her daughter Amanda each know parts of the life in which her current needs arose, and each can see things the other has reason to miss. Anna Calder-Marshall gives Leslie enough presence for the audience to feel what is at stake when someone interprets a movement or decides to speak on her behalf. Tom Courtenay and Juliette Binoche keep years of feeling alive inside a disagreement that can turn on a few minutes of the present.

The film is demanding in the way a serious conversation with somebody you love can be demanding. Both the need to act and the cost of acting remain real after you have decided what you believe. Hammer’s restraint gives an ordinary touch or pause the duration it needs to become a problem of judgment. Set aside time for this one. Its attention to Leslie takes a while to adjust to, and the adjustment is part of the experience.

Jordan Firstman gives his surprise-parenthood comedy a working nightlife scene. Peter’s job requires him to recognize who belongs at a party, who feels out of place and which person can help without making a problem worse. Arlo, the ten-year-old son he did not know he had, gives him a much quieter set of circumstances in which to try out that knowledge. Reggie Absolom understands the comic value of a child waiting for an adult to finish explaining himself. The film gets better as Peter and Arlo discover things they can enjoy about one another before they are required to become a persuasive family.

The story has turns you can see coming. Its welcome surprise is the affection Firstman has for the life Peter already leads. The friends around him have obligations and opinions, and the clubs have their own work to be done. It gives the film a source of comedy well beyond the arrival of a child. Club Kid is the most immediately sociable movie on this list and a good place to end it. An evening that began with Peter trying to make himself useful to everybody might leave you thinking about the one person who needs him to show up again tomorrow.