In any case, I would certainly love to have the confidence of the series’ producer, Ng Kin-hung, who started shooting this third film – reuniting with The Brotherhood of Rebel’s director, screenwriters and lead actors and even recycling its narrative framework – before the latter was released in cinemas.

As in that film, The Unwavering Brotherhood tells the story of three mid-level gangsters – Wah (Bosco Wong Chung-chak), Fei (Louis Cheung Kai-chung) and Kwok (Carlos Chan Ka-lok) – who make some very bad decisions for themselves and inadvertently bring about the downfall of their beloved triad faction leader.

Returning director Terry Ng Ka-wai’s engaging, if familiar movie again boils down to a test of loyalty for the trio, this time after they are ambushed on a money transfer assignment; the conflicts here stem primarily from Fei’s need to pay for surgery for his severely ill sister (Angel Lam Chin-ting) and Kwok’s gambling in the stock market.

Next to the leading trio of blood brothers it is, surprisingly, their boss, the honourable Fa Kam, and his fiercest rival for leadership inside the syndicate, Kwan (played respectively by Mark Cheng Ho-nam and Michael Tao Dai-yu in eye-catching supporting roles), who prove the most watchable.

Cheng, who was in both Young and Dangerous 5 (1998) and Election 2 (2006), is hugely charismatic as the endlessly amiable father figure to the protagonists. Meanwhile Tao, who is not at all known for nuanced acting in spite of his range of TV drama leading roles, is suitably despicable as the villain.

The Unwavering Brotherhood offers the kind of comfort watch that long-time aficionados of Hong Kong gangster movies should readily seek out. Instead of wasting time reinventing the wheel, the film simply adopts the same old genre formula and briskly shuffles its tragic heroes to their predictably bitter end.

YOU GOTTA BELIEVE is a sports drama based on the inspiring true story of a Little League team from Dallas, Texas who defy the odds. The movie tells the team’s journey through the eyes of Robert, the first baseman, whose father, Bobby, has terminal cancer. The boys rally around their teammate and dedicate their season to Bobby. Coach Jon begins to take coaching the boys seriously, and the team’s underdog story begins. Eventually, the team has a chance to prove themselves at the Little League World Series.

YOU GOTTA BELIEVE is a fantastic addition to the sports drama genre. It has a heartfelt story of perseverance, team camaraderie, and never giving up. The movie is based on the true story of Robert, his father’s battle with cancer, and their amazing Little League run in 2002. YOU GOTTA BELIEVE tells an inspiring, well-structured story with some phenomenal acting. The movie isn’t explicitly faith-based, but it has a brief moment of prayer. However, YOU GOTTA BELIEVE also has several relatively light obscenities and one light humorous innuendo. So, MOVIEGUIDE® advises caution for younger audiences, especially pre-teen children.

(BB, CC, L, V, S, A, M):

Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements:

Strong moral worldview, with a strong father and son relationship, stresses the importance of never giving up, sticking together as a family and as a team, and perseverance through hardships, plus a man prays to God in one scene;

Foul Language:

Six or seven obscenities (including one BS word, a crude reference to male anatomy, and four or five “d” words), plus there’s a use of “mother-sucker” and a man ill with cancer throws up throughout the movie;

Violence:

A player gets injured, and his ankle is swollen, a man in the movie has cancer, and players get into a brawl, but no blood or gore is shown;

Sex:

No sex scenes, but there’s a quick light joke/innuendo about sex or lovemaking that’s easily missed (someone jokes that a woman should put her husband on a “schedule”);

Nudity:

No nudity;

Alcohol Use:

Man drinks a beer, and someone asks for a drink as a joke;

Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse:

No smoking or drugs; and,

Miscellaneous Immorality:

A younger brother has a rabbit’s foot that he hopes will allow his brother to run fast, but it doesn’t work, and he throws it away, plus the boys on the Little League team are fond of calling each other and opponents names (none of the names are very graphic or obscene, but this continues throughout the movie).

YOU GOTTA BELIEVE is a sports drama about the true story of a Little League baseball team in Dallas, Texas that banded together and dedicated their inspiring, underdog season in 2002 to their coach, Bobby, who has terminal cancer and is the father of the first baseman, Robert. YOU OTTA BELIEVE is an incredibly well-told story, with loads of heart and inspiring moments, about an underdog team that defies all odds, and the movie promotes family, perseverance, looking out for other people, and prayer, but there is some foul language and name-calling.

Bobby and Jon coach a little league team in Dallas Fort Worth, Texas. Their regular season comes to an end after a tough loss in their final game of the season. Bobby tries to encourage Jon to take the team more seriously next year.

Jon and the team are offered to represent their district as an All-Star team. However, Jon is reluctant to say yes after their difficult season.

Meanwhile, Bobby passes out one day while throwing to his son, Robert, at home. He learns he has terminal cancer. While Bobby begins treatment, Jon agrees to take on coaching the Little League team to represent their district.

Competition is high, but Jon and other people begin to seriously coach the team. As the underdogs, they dedicate their season to Bobby, and their inspiring run to the 2002 Little League World Championship begins.

YOU GOTTA BELIEVE is a great sports drama about an underdog team that defies all odds. It also has a heartfelt story about a father’s love for his son and perseverance in the face of terminal cancer. YOU GOTTA BELIEVE stresses the importance of family, never giving up and sticking together as a family and as a team.

There is a scene where Bobby asks God to not take him away from his family, but the movie doesn’t have an explicitly Christian worldview. “You Gotta Believe” becomes their mantra in the movie, but that belief is directed inward toward themselves, or outwards toward their teammates, not toward God or faith. YOU GOTTA BELIEVE also has a brief scene where Robert’s younger brother has a rabbit’s foot charm that he hopes will allow his brother to run fast. It doesn’t work, however, and he throws it away.

YOU GOTTA BELIEVE has some truly inspiring and heartfelt moments. However, due to brief foul language, and adult themes of cancer and death, Movieguide® advises caution for children and young teenagers.

In one of the best scenes in I’ll Be Right There, a character reveals a family story involving an improbable getaway driver. Taking in this tale is her middle-aged daughter, who knows a thing or two about driving — although her role behind the wheel is more along the lines of schlepping to and fro than making a break for it. These two strong women are played, respectively, by Jeannie Berlin and Edie Falco, actors of ineffable down-to-earth zing. When, later in the movie, the screen fills with a slo-mo shot of them running side by side down a hospital corridor, it feels like a winking, loving gift, one of the giddy dividends from this wry take on family and midlife anxieties.

Set and shot in a Northeastern hamlet (Pearl River, in New York’s Rockland County), director Brendan Walsh’s second feature (after Centigrade) is a modestly scaled affair that benefits from its unfussy sense of place and its superb casting. I’ll Be Right There navigates a territory between comforting and thorny — much as its central character, Falco’s Wanda, weary of being the voice of reason in the midst of a whole lotta drama, balances reasonable exasperation and deep wells of patience while tending to one family member in distress after another.

Wanda is the divorced mother of two sort-of grown-up kids. Daughter Sarah (Kayli Carter) is eight months pregnant and has her heart set on a church wedding, before her due date, to Eugene (Jack Mulhern), an even-keeled fellow as easygoing as she is given to hysteria. Wanda’s floundering son, Mark (Charlie Tahan of Ozark, who will reunite with Carter in the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown), has overcome problems with addiction but maintains a slippery relationship with the truth, to the chagrin of his therapist (Geoffrey Owens).

Wanda’s ex-husband, Henry (Bradley Whitford), has his hands full with a new brood of kids and is a bit of a whining kid himself. Her mild-mannered boyfriend, Marshall, played with unexpected restraint by Michael Rapaport, is in the quiet grip of some sort of existential angst. He blurts out a non sequitur marriage proposal and then, in the next breath, rescinds it, embarrassed that he’s overstepped. Even if she weren’t cheating on Marshall, having recently discovered her Sapphic side, marrying him would be the last thing on Wanda’s list of goals. If she had one.

Her relationship with young college professor Sophie (Sepideh Moafi, of Black Bird and The Killing of Two Lovers) is a secret, but not one that she’s guarding too closely. Henry’s and Sarah’s responses to the revelation are sharply written and played, but more to the point is Wanda’s dawning realization that the romance isn’t all that. Sophie, who excels at compartmentalizing, tends to show up on Wanda’s front porch at odd hours, sometimes drunk and always horny.

And then there’s Wanda’s new friendship with Albert (Michael Beach), a high school classmate who recently returned to town. Though his being a firefighter and a devoted divorced dad might be a too-easy shorthand for earnest, solid goodness, there’s also something fresh and winning in the way he’s both flustered and impressed when Wanda mentions her bisexual dating status.

Working from a screenplay by Jim Beggarly (A Country Called Home, A Year and Change), Walsh struggles in the early going to strike the desired tone between dark comedy and something more anodyne — even with Falco and Berlin at the center of the opening sequence, which revolves around 68-year-old Grace (Berlin) receiving a cancer diagnosis that’s better than the one she expected. The gallows humor feels strained, and the insistent chirpiness of James Righton’s score is too much. Things settle down and find their footing with Tahan’s first scene, which provides a jolt of more complicated humor.

Responding to various SOS messages from Grace, Sarah and Mark at all hours, Wanda is always on call; the movie’s title expresses an emotional refrain. At the helm of her blue station wagon, she spends good portions of her days crisscrossing town to provide comfort and rescue. It’s at night that she does her work as a bookkeeper. The scenes of her doing the books at bars and restaurants in the small downtown are alive with something workaday yet unexpected, captured with vibrancy in Aaron Medick’s camerawork, while Righton’s score takes on an angsty and effective undertow. (Elsewhere it hits pitch-perfect comic notes.) There’s family quality time, too, captured in scenes at a local ice cream place, where three generations of women talk about, or around, what’s going on. Or what went on decades earlier.

It would be an exaggeration to call this feature an actors’ showcase, but it’s certainly an actors’ movie, which might explain the involvement as exec producers of Falco and Jesse Eisenberg (who appeared in Free Samples, Beggarly’s first produced screenplay). In addition to Wanda’s interactions with other characters — complete with eye-rolls and precision application of the skeptical raised eyebrow — Falco finds the subtle edge in a couple of breakthrough breakdowns, with Rapaport and Berlin each providing the perfect counterbalance. Falco and Whitford are spot-on in the choice scenes they share, effortlessly slipping into the well-worn grooves and rhythms of their characters’ animosity.

Carter and Tahan lend nuance to their more broadly written roles, while Berlin keeps you hooked with everything about her — not least the syncopated rhythms of her line readings, especially when the lines have built-in snap. “It’s not gambling,” the casino habitué tells her daughter, “if you know how to play.”

Falco, involving as ever, might not be engaged in a wild gamble here, but there’s a certain risk in the ways that she and the movie circle a neat conclusion. And there’s wisdom in the way they wind up somewhere far messier, sweeter and more satisfying.