Something for nearly everyone at cinemas this weekend: A boxing biopic, an epic set in the Pacific Northwest, a new Predator flick and an anguishing postpartum story. Also quieter titles: a recreation of a 1970s interview with a celebrated New York art scene photographer, and a father-daughter drama from the filmmaker behind the 2022 standout The Worst Person in the World.

Christy

In theaters Friday

Christy Martin, whose life story is featured in the new film Christy, grew up a coal miner’s daughter in West Virginia. After playing Little League baseball and basketball with the boys, she got a basketball scholarship to college. Then she began boxing in local amateur tough-man contests. She wore pink trunks, had a mean left hook, and enjoyed trash-talking her opponents. She kept winning fights, and was the first woman signed by promoter and boxing impresario Don King.

In the 1990s, Christy Martin was considered the most exciting and successful female boxer. She won titles, fought at Madison Square Garden and made it onto the cover of Sports Illustrated. She was later inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. Martin says inside the boxing ring, she felt safe. But her private life was a different story. For two decades, she suffered her husband’s emotional and physical brutality. Actress Sydney Sweeney portrays Martin in the film, which is more than a rise-to-fame biopic: Christy depicts how Martin’s then-husband tried to make good on decades of threats, and how Christy survived being stabbed and shot by him in 2010. — Mandalit del Barco

Die My Love 

In theaters Friday

Director and co-writer Lynne Ramsay adapts Ariana Harwicz’s novel Die, My Love and gives Jennifer Lawrence the challenging role of Grace, a new mother in the throes of severe postpartum depression. Grace feels ignored in the isolated, rural family home she shares with her aloof partner Jackson (Robert Pattinson). Lawrence is a compelling presence and more than game to go through the pangs the part calls for, and she shares some strong scenes with Sissy Spacek, playing Jackson’s empathetic mother Pam. But the storytelling is too abstract and at a remove to fully lock in emotionally, and as Grace’s descent takes unsurprising turns, I was reminded of other, more successful works conveying this delicate subject matter — A Woman Under the Influence, for one. — Aisha Harris 

Predator: Badlands 

In theaters Friday 

In sequels and novels, comics and video games, various Predators have faced off against everything from Aliens to Batman to, recently, a very resourceful young Comanche woman, in 2022’s Prey. Predator: Badlands is the latest iteration of the franchise about an alien race that hunts things using all sorts of space-gadgets. In this version, Dek, the runt of his Predator litter, goes to the deadly planet of Genna to hunt down a hideous monster, because he’s determined to prove to his clan that he’s got what it takes to belong to the species of intergalactic badasses that audiences first met back in a 1987 Schwarzenegger movie. This Predator, played by Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, is aided by the top half of an abandoned robot named Thia, played by Elle Fanning. — Glen Weldon 

Peter Hujar’s Day

In limited theaters Friday 

Writer and director Ira Sachs’ character-portrait two-hander will likely sound stagy and static, but it turns out to be not just resonant, but surprisingly cinematic as played by Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall. Sachs is recreating an interview that writer Linda Rosenkrantz recorded with photographer Peter Hujar on Dec. 19, 1974, for a never-published book about the daily lives of artists. The two were friends, and she asked him to relate in detail his activities of the day before. The original audio tape was lost, but a typewritten transcript of the interview lived on, donated by Rosenkrantz to the Morgan Library and Museum in New York City. It was published as a book in 2021.

The film’s recreation finds Hujar, fidgeting and chainsmoking as he namedrops casually about members of the 1970s downtown art scene — Susan Sontag, Lauren Hutton, Bob (Robert) Wilson, Fran Lebowitz, William S. Burroughs — to regale Rosenkrantz, who is comparatively laconic. The most sustained (and most amusing) anecdote begins with Hujar debating whether to wear his red ski jacket or a more bohemian coat to shoot Allen Ginsberg for The New York Times. He decides on the jacket, and regrets it as he heads to Ginsberg’s apartment for the shoot. The beat poet proves a difficult, testy subject, but Hujar gets the shot he needs. Then he buys liverwurst for a sandwich, develops the photos in his darkroom, has a few conversations, lets a friend whose hot water isn’t working take a shower. It’s all minor key, but thoroughly engaging, somewhat in the manner of Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre, or perhaps the less formal artists-gabbing films of Andy Warhol. The director lets daylight fade to a candlelit evening meal as the minutia of Peter Hujar’s Day becomes an understated aria for Whishaw, and a spoken-word concert both for Hall’s active listener — and for the movie audience. — Bob Mondello 

Sentimental Value

In limited theaters Friday 

Joachim Trier’s eloquent drama centers on the two long-neglected daughters of a film director (Stellan Skarsgård) overly caught up in his career. Nora (Renate Reinsve, the star of Trier’s The Worst Person in the World) is suffering a case of stage fright when we meet her, possibly because she knows her father won’t show up. Her opening night will end in triumph with her sister Agnes (Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas), an academic and former child performer in their father’s biggest artistic triumph, present to back her up.

Shortly after, at their mother’s funeral, things are the other way around — Agnes a basket case and Nora the strong one — when dad shows up, not to mourn the wife he left long ago, but to drop off a script he’s written for Nora. She angrily turns him down, and he reluctantly casts a visiting American star (Elle Fanning), having her alter her hair color to match Nora’s. Trier anchors the film in the ornate Victorian home that’s been in the family for generations. If its walls could talk, they’d tell of mom dying by suicide, the girls growing up, and dad’s new movie, which is set at the home, almost incestuously. The dynamics are fraught, the performances as understated as they are heartbreaking. And the plot, which keeps you guessing up to the final moments of the final scene, is riveting. — Bob Mondello 

Train Dreams

In limited theaters Friday; streaming on Netflix Nov. 21 

The grandeur of the Pacific Northwest, and the irrevocability of change, love, memory, cruelty and heartbreak all come together in Clint Bentley’s gorgeous historical drama set in the early 20th century. It’s the age of the steam locomotive and westward expansion, centered on an intimate portrait of Robert Grainier (Joel Edgerton) a taciturn day laborer and logger who meets Gladys (Felicity Jones), the love of his life and the mother of a daughter he seldom sees, since he’s forever off working to support them. Grainier is passive, amazed, and often bewildered in a story crammed with incident — a Chinese coworker tossed off a bridge in a fit of anti-immigrant pique, a felled tree killing three loggers, a comet streaking in the night sky, memories made and lost, stones laid out in a square to mark the future walls of a log cabin, a forest fire laying waste to dreams. It’s breathtaking, with Terrence Malick-esque visuals and wrenching emotions. — Bob Mondello 

When Xavier “X” Atencio was plucked by Walt Disney in 1965 to be one of his early theme park designers, he was slotted on a number of projects that placed him out of his comfort zone.

Atencio, for instance, never would have envisioned himself a songwriter.

One of Atencio’s first major projects with Walt Disney Imagineering — WED Enterprises (for Walter Elias Disney), as it was known at the time — was Pirates of the Caribbean. In the mid-’60s when Atencio joined the Pirates team, the attraction was well underway, with the likes of fellow animators-turned-theme park designers Marc Davis and Claude Coats crafting many of its exaggerated characters and enveloping environments. Atencio’s job? Make it all make sense by giving it a cohesive story. While Atencio had once dreamed of being a journalist, his work as an animator had led him astray of a writer’s path.

Atencio would not only figure it out but end up as the draftsman of one of Disneyland’s most recognizable songs, “Yo Ho (A Pirate’s Life for Me).” In the process, he was key in creating the template for the modern theme park dark ride, a term often applied to slow-moving indoor attractions. Such career twists and turns are detailed in a new book about Atencio, who died in 2017. “Xavier ‘X’ Atencio: The Legacy of an Artist, Imagineer, and Disney Legend” (Disney Editions), written by three of his family members, follows Atencio’s unexpected trajectory, starting from his roots in animation (his resume includes “Fantasia,” the Oscar-winning short “Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom” and even stop-motion work in “Mary Poppins”).

For Pirates of the Caribbean, Atencio is said to have received little direction from Disney, only that the park’s patriarch was unhappy with previous stabs at a narration and dialogue, finding them leaning a bit stodgy. So he knew, essentially, what not to do. Atencio, according to the book, immersed himself in films like Disney’s own “Treasure Island” and pop-cultural interpretations of pirates, striving for something that felt borderline caricature rather than ripped from the history books.

Indeed, Atencio’s words — some of those quoted in the book, such as “Avast there! Ye come seeking adventure and salty old pirates, aye?” — have become shorthand for how to speak like a pirate. The first scene written for the attraction was the mid-point auction sequence, a section of the ride that was changed in 2017 due to its outdated cultural implications. In the original, a proud redheaded woman is the lead prisoner in a bridal auction, but today the “wench” has graduated to pirate status of her own and is helping to auction off stolen goods.

At first, Atencio thought he had over-written the scene, noticing that dialogue overlapped with one another. In a now-famous theme park moment, and one retold in the book, Atencio apologized to Disney, who shrugged off Atencio’s insecurity.

“Hey, X, when you go to a cocktail party, you pick up a little conversation here, another conversation there,” Disney told the animator. “Each time people will go through, they’ll find something new.”

This was the green light that Atencio, Davis and Coats needed to continue developing their attraction as one that would be a tableau of scenes rather than a strict plot.

Tying it all together, Atencio thought, should be a song. Not a songwriter himself, of course, Atencio sketched out a few lyrics and a simple melody. As the authors write, he turned to the thesaurus and made lists of traditional “pirating” words. He presented it to Disney and, to Atencio’s surprise, the company founder promptly gave him the sign off.

“Yo Ho (A Pirate’s Life for Me),” Atencio would relay, was a challenge as the ride doesn’t have a typical beginning and ending, meaning the tune needed to work with whatever pirate vignette we were sailing by. Ultimately, the song, with music by George Bruns, underlines the ride’s humorous feel, allowing the looting, the pillaging and the chasing of women, another scene that has been altered over the years, to be delivered with a playful bent.

The auction scene of Pirates of the Caribbean in its current incarnation as seen at Walt Disney World Resort’s Magic Kingdom.

(Charles Sykes / Invision / Associated Press)

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The song “altered the trajectory” of Atencio’s career. While Atencio was not considered a musical person — “No, not at all,” says his daughter Tori Atencio McCullough, one of the book’s co-authors — the biography reveals how music became a signature aspect of his work. The short “Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom,” for instance, is a humorous tale about the discovery of music. And elsewhere in Atencio’s career he worked on the band-focused opening animations for “Mickey Mouse Club.”

“That one has a pretty cool kind of modern instrument medley in the middle,” Kelsey McCullough, Atencio’s granddaughter and another one of the book’s authors, says of “Mickey Mouse Club.” “It was interesting, because when we lined everything up, it was like, ‘Of course he felt like the ride needed a song.’ Everything he had been doing up to that point had a song in it. Once we looked it at from that perspective, it was sort of unsurprising to us. He was doing a lot around music.”

Xavier “X” Atencio contributed concepts to Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion, including its famous one-eyed cat.

(Reprinted from “Xavier ‘X’ Atencio: The Legacy of An Artist, Imagineer, and Disney Legend” / Disney Enterprises Inc. / Disney Editions)

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Atencio would go on to write lyrics for the Country Bear Jamboree and the Haunted Mansion. While the Haunted Mansion vacillates between spooky and lighthearted imagery, it’s Atencio’s “Grim Grinning Ghosts” that telegraphs the ride’s tone and makes it clear it’s a celebratory attraction, one in which many of those in the afterlife prefer to live it up rather than haunt.

Despite his newfound music career, Atencio never gave up drawing and contributing concepts to Disney theme park attractions. Two of my favorites are captured in the book — his abstract flights through molecular lights for the defunct Adventure Thru Inner Space and his one-eyed black cat for the Haunted Mansion. The latter has become a fabled Mansion character over the years. Atencio’s fiendish feline would have followed guests throughout the ride, a creature said to despise living humans and with predatory, possessive instincts.

In Atencio’s concept art, the cat featured elongated, vampire-like fangs and a piercing red eye. In a nod to Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Black Cat,” it had just one eyeball, which sat in its socket with all the subtlety of a fire alarm. Discarded eventually — a raven essentially fills a similar role — the cat today has been resurrected for the Mansion, most notably in a revised attic scene where the kitty is spotted near a mournful bride.

Xavier “X” Atencio retired from Disney in 1984 after four-plus decades with the company. He drew his own retirement announcement.

(Reprinted from “Xavier ‘X’ Atencio: The Legacy of An Artist, Imagineer, and Disney Legend” / Disney Enterprises Inc. / Disney Editions)

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Co-author Bobbie Lucas, a relative of Atencio’s colloquially referred to by the family as his “grandchild-in-law,” was asked what ties all of Atencio’s work together.

“No matter the different style or no matter the era, there’s such a sense of life and humanity,” Lucas says. “There’s a sense of play.”

Play is a fitting way to describe Atencio’s contributions to two of Disneyland’s most beloved attractions, where pirates and ghosts are captured at their most frivolous and jovial.

“I like that,” Lucas adds. “I like someone who will put their heart on their sleeve and show you that in their art.”