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.

Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements:

Strong pagan worldview with strong false religion/theology and strong occult elements but mixed with some Christian and moral elements, including some Christian symbols and metaphors in a dark battle against demonic evil, which posits a world where, sometimes, a dead person with intense feelings of love for another person or other people who died can return to life and set things right in a story about an evil man has made a pact with the Devil and has killed a young man’s “soul mate” lover, young man returns to life to obtain justice for his lover and save them both from Hell and movie creates sympathy for the hero to defeat the evil villain and save his lover, but something goes wrong and the young man is doomed to never to rejoin his lover after she resurrects, and so he sacrifices himself to be doomed to save her, but he still hopes that one day they will reunite in Heaven or the Afterlife, plus there are some Romantic notions about innocence and love mixed in within the movie’s worldview content;

Foul Language:

At least 39 obscenities (including many “f” words) and one strong profanity using the name of Jesus;

Violence:

Lots of extreme violence (among the most brutal we’ve ever seen at MOVIEGUIDE® in its history), and some strong violence includes two young lovers are captured and suffocated to death using two plastic bags in pretty graphic scene, and the title character shoots many bad guys to death in brutal ways, the most brutal such deaths occur in lengthy battle in lobby of opera house while opera is performed with the title character comes back to life and can’t be killed, stabbing many bad guys to death with a samurai sword and shooting bad guys in brutal ways including inserting the sword into one bad guy’s mouth and splitting another guy’s head, bad guys shoot the title character multiple times but he can’t be killed though he often stumbles and falls then rises again, bad guy stabs the title character through the chest with the character’s own sword, but the title character survives, title character breaks arms and legs of some bad guys during all the fighting, bad guy shoots a friend of the title character’s through the head, brutal fight between the title character and the main villain, people descend downward into deep water that in a symbolic way is supposed to lead them to Hell, main villain has made a deal with Satan to send “innocent” victims to Hell so the villain could live forever, one scene show the main villain whispering to a young woman and making her brutally kill another young woman (that’s how the villain allegedly makes the “innocent” girls he entices fit for Hell);

Sex:

Depicted scene of fornication in two shots, and an example of implied fornication;

Nudity:

Rear male nudity during sex, and some images of upper male nudity;

Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse:

No tobacco use but two scenes of apparent marijuana smoking, and a scene where a young man and woman take an illicit pill of some kind; and,

Miscellaneous Immorality:

Villain made a pact with the Devil, villain commands a criminal enterprise, villain deceives young people to corrupt them and gain new victims for Satan.

THE CROW (2024) is a reboot of a 1994 movie about a supernatural avenger who rises from the grave to get justice for him and his soul mate who were murdered by an evil man who’s made a deal with the Devil to corrupt innocent souls and send them to Hell. Based on a comic book series created in 1989, THE CROW has a strong, slightly mixed pagan worldview with false theology and occult themes combined with some light Christian, moral content, lots of strong foul language, some sexual immorality, and some of the most extreme and brutal violence MOVIEGUIDE® has ever seen in a movie.

The movie begins with a young woman named Shelly running from the henchman of an evil man named Vincent. Vincent has made a deal with the Devil to corrupt the souls of innocent young people and send them to Hell, in exchange for immortality. Vincent prefers young women, especially budding musical artists.

Shelly finds refuge in an isolated facility for juvenile delinquents, where she falls in love with a tattooed young man named Eric. However, Vincent’s minions, with help from Shelly’s corrupt mother, find her location. So, Eric helps Shelly escape the facility. Sadly, though, Vincent is able to finally track them down, and his men suffocate Eric and Shelly to death with plastic bags in a disturbing scene of murder.

Eric imagines Shelly and him falling downward to the bottom of the ocean. However, he suddenly wakes up in a railyard surrounded by crows. A mysterious older man tells Eric that, when a person dies, sometimes something so bad happens that your soul “cannot rest until you put the wrong things right.”

Eric vows to kill all the people who took part in Shelly’s murder. The older man promises that, if Eric keeps his love for Shelly “pure,” they can both return from the dead.

A violent battle between Eric and Vincent’s forces ensues on the streets of New York, culminating in an opera house and at Vincent’s country estate.

THE CROW is a paint-by-numbers revenge thriller with flashes of gothic horror. It has a strong pagan worldview containing false religion and occult elements. These are mixed with some Christian allusions and symbols and Romantic, Christian notions of innocence and sacrificial love. THE CROW also has lots of strong foul language, brief sexual immorality, and some of the most extreme and brutal violence MOVIEGUIDE® has ever seen in a movie.

Set at the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, Touch opens as Kristofer (played by Icelandic musician Egill Olafsson) discovers his memory is fading and, heeding the advice of his doctor to resolve any unfinished business, sets off for London, despite the imminent threat of a worldwide lockdown.

Through a series of flashbacks, we meet the younger Kristofer (played by the director’s son Palmi Kormakur) in London at the end of the 1960s.

Disillusioned by the contemporary political landscape, he drops out of university and takes a job washing dishes at a Japanese restaurant, where he is taken under the wing of the proprietor, Takahashi (Masahiro Motoki).

He meets Takahashi’s beautiful daughter Miko (model Koki, also known as Mitsuki Kimura, the daughter of Japanese pop icons Takuya Kimura and Shizuka Kudo) at the restaurant, and the pair soon begin a passionate affair.

The structure of Touch sees the events of the past and present converge in a climactic revelation that explains why Kristofer and Miko’s relationship ended.

Suffice to say, Miko and her father fled Hiroshima shortly after the atomic bomb was dropped in August 1945, with the dream of starting a new life in London.

Try as they might, the lingering impact of the event and the stigma of being hibakusha – atomic bomb survivors – would continue to impact their lives for many decades to come.

In Touch, his direction is gentle and unobtrusive, almost to a fault. The film’s perspective aligns with Kristofer, as he, and the audience, is kept in the dark while the film’s Japanese characters wrestle with their trauma off screen.

Rather than attempt to explore the deep emotional scars that burden Miko and her family, the film prioritises the nostalgic reminiscences of Kristofer’s first love.

During these moments, Touch captures moments of genuine warmth and youthful passion. But elsewhere the film proves hollow and reductive.

Miko and her family’s struggles remain largely unexplored, portrayed by Olafur and his director as simply the mystifying enigmas of an exotic people.