It’s a light week for wide new releases, as the Thanksgiving weekend looms, bringing with it an onslaught of both box-office bonanza bids and annual award aspirants. That makes it a good time to spotlight a couple of recent releases that have managed to avoid coverage in this space thus far. (Plus one of the aforementioned bids.)

Rose Byrne, best known as a sharply comic performer in stuff like the current Apple TV series Platonic, makes a legitimate bid for the acclaim of critics and her peers in writer-director Mary Bronstein’s If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. She’s in practically every frame as Linda, a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown as she juggles, with increasing desperation and resentment, her responsibilities as a parent, a spouse, and a professional therapist. Her husband is constantly travelling for work, leaving Linda to deal with their young, never-named daughter, who suffers from a mysterious eating disorder that requires her to be attached to a feeding tube. A busted pipe has flooded their apartment and created a hole in its ceiling, forcing the two of them to take up residence in a nearby seedy motel, where Linda chafes against the acerbic desk clerk (Ivy Wolk) but develops a tentative friendship with her manager (the rapper A$AP Rocky).

As the demands from her family, her patients, and her daughter’s doctors becomes more and more relentless, Linda seeks solace from her own therapist, played by Conan O’Brien in a convincingly restrained enough way to banish his caffeinated talk-show-host persona from your mind. Their sessions are gripping and, for Linda, infuriating: she just wants someone to tell her what to do, how to balance the endless, competing draws on her soul. The spate of films centered on American women reaching the ends of their ropes over the last few years—Promising Young Woman, Nightbitch, and the recent Die, My Love, among others—reflects a fed-up zeitgeist that recalls a similar focus on feminist frustrations of the 1970s. But unlike movies such as Wanda, A Woman Under the Influence, or An Unmarried Woman, this wave is less interested in female characters trying to find their place in an evolving but still masculine world than in those who are driven to madness and/or rebellion against a society that, despite whatever progress is made or claimed, persists in asking the impossible of women and blaming them when they fail to deliver.

Bronstein, whose only previous feature was the 2008 mumblecore-esque Yeast (an early Greta Gerwig appearance), incorporates subjective and disturbing sequences that capture Linda’s increasingly vertiginous mindset and tenuous grasp on reality. Her boldest gambit, though, is the decision to keep Linda’s husband’s and child’s faces completely off-screen for the vast majority of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You. They exist entirely as disembodied voices, either on the phone or in, say, the back seat of the car, from which Delaney Quinn’s plaintive, grating whine as the daughter is enough to invoke in viewers the same combination of pity and resentment to which any honest parent will admit to occasionally indulging, and which pushes Linda further into maternal self-loathing. (I’ll refrain from mentioning who plays Linda’s husband when he finally shows up toward the finale, since it’s fun to try to identify him by voice alone.) If it’s not obvious by now, this isn’t a fun film, and at times Bronstein and Byrne push Linda’s overwhelming dread and dissociation in our faces a bit too forcefully. The emotional truth and the unpulled punches of its narrative, though, are gripping and genuine. (Already kicked from theaters, it’s available for rental or purchase through major digital platforms.)

Do we really need, some may wonder, another film depicting the momentous tribunals following World War II that exposed the world to the true horrors of the Nazi regime and set the standard (however lamely emulated) for all future judicial treatment of crimes against humanity? To them I would say, “Um, maybe pick up a newspaper?” 1961’s Judgment at Nuremberg threw a star-studded cast at the topic and was the first Hollywood film to include actual footage of Holocaust atrocities; later, Alec Baldwin played Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson in the 2000 miniseries Nuremberg. The former, however, dealt with a different one of the twelve tribunals conducted in 1947, while the latter serves as more of a well-acted hagiography of Jackson than a historical lesson, which is exactly what writer-director James Vanderbilt has in mind with his Nuremberg.

The three centers of gravity in this telling are Jackson (Michael Shannon), appointed by President Truman as Chief of Consul of the Nuremberg proceedings; former Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe), the highest-ranking Nazi on trial; and Dr. Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), the Army psychiatrist ordered to engage with Göring, who used the opportunity to study the nature of evil and came away with an answer that he, along with almost everyone else, didn’t like. It’s smart, straightforward filmmaking with a conscience of the sort that Judgment at Nuremberg director Stanley Kramer would surely approve, and Crowe digs into the role of the wily, unrepentant, corpulent Göring with clear relish. (Brian Cox did the same in the 2000 TV version.) Shannon nails the upstanding yet ferocious Jackson, and the film seems to get most of the historical details right, including that fact that (minor spoiler) it’s the British prosecutor David Maxwell Fyfe (Richard E. Grant) who has the most successful cross-examination strategy against the former Luftwaffe commander.

This is primarily Kelley’s story, though: Vanderbilt has adapted Jack El-Hai’s book The Nazi and the Psychiatrist, which relied on Kelley’s long-private personal papers to chronicle the complicated relationship that he developed with Göring over their multiple meetings. As the doctor probes the prisoner’s psyche, he’s desperate to learn what it is about the Germans, or at least these individual Germans, that allowed them to commit such heinous acts of evil. What makes them different from ordinary people, from you and me? Decades before the Stanford prison experiments or the work of Stanley Milgram, Kelley came to the same answer: Nothing. He’s a fascinating and tragic figure, and it’s a shame that Malek’s is the weakest of the three lead performances—his anguish and despair as his conclusion comes into focus never hits as hard as it should.

Vanderbilt, who wrote the screenplay for David Fincher’s 2007 Zodiac (also adapting a nonfiction book), went on from that to specialize in action flicks, Spider-Man movies, and Scream installments. The only other feature he’s directed, though, is 2015’s Truth, in which Robert Redford, as 60 Minutes’ Dan Rather, fell victim to forged documents related to George W. Bush’s military record during the 2014 Presidential campaign. That film and Nuremberg each explore flawed protagonists whose Icarian pursuit of hidden knowledge led to professional disrepute and a steep personal cost. Kelley, unlike Rather, didn’t stumble by mistaking a falsehood for fact, but by getting too close to, if not the sun, then the fires of Hell. (Currently playing at multiple locations)

There are two main reasons that Wicked: For Good doesn’t reach the giddy, gravity-defying heights of its predecessor. One is that Wicked got to introduce this new, subversive take on the Wizard of Oz mythos, in which Glinda the Good Witch (Ariana Grande) and Elphaba the Wicked Witch of the West (Cynthia Erivo) started off as besties, with the unusually-pigmented Elphaba only making her heel turn after being treated like crap by the rest of the sanctimonious residents of Emerald City. The ideas are fresh (at least for those who haven’t read the source novel or seen the stage adaptation), the memeable relationship between the two leads develops in crisp and surprising ways, and we get the pleasure of meeting the other analogues to characters that eventually pop up in L. Frank Baum’s books. (The Wicked movies are made by Universal, and MGM [now Amazon] owns the rights to the 1939 classic film and all the elements introduced in it, which is why those famous slippers aren’t ruby here.)

The second part of the saga, however, is more of a downer, and not only because we all know Elphaba’s soggy fate (don’t we?). The first hour or so jogs in place as the now exiled, demonized Elphaba stews in the wilderness while Glinda and Fiyero (Jonathan Bailey), Elphaba’s estranged beau, try to moderate the fascist policies of Oz’s power couple, Madame Morrible (Michelle Yeoh) and the ostensibly Wonderful Wizard (Jeff Goldblum). (Is it crass of me to note that, between these films, his Marvel cameos, and his Apartments.com commercials, Goldblum’s current louche, absent-minded professor schtick is getting old?)

Rather too quickly, events catch up with those familiar to Judy Garland fans worldwide, as (this can’t be a spoiler, can it?) Dorothy’s Kansas house flattens the Wicked Witch of the East, and we realize this is where we came in. There’s some fun, but not enough, in watching threads that tie into the canonical tale emerge, including the identities of Dorothy’s traveling companions, but the final resolution between Glinda and Elphaba is unsatisfying both dramatically and politically.

The other reason Wicked: For Good ends up something of an endurance test is that it doesn’t know when to end. Unwilling to let its audience make reasonable assumptions about how things move forward in Oz following the departure of the Wizard’s hot air balloon, the movie insists on giving every character and plot thread its own bespoke resolution. One gets the sense that the decision to separate this story into two features totaling four hours and fifty-eight minutes rather than one running, say, three and a half hours, was made more with an eye toward reaping consecutive holiday season financial rewards than for creative reasons related to, say, pacing. Fans will no doubt eat it up, and more power to them, but frankly I couldn’t wait to get home. There’s no place like it. (Wide release)

You had me at “Michael Shannon as President James Garfield.” If the iron-jawed Chicagoan as a Supreme Court Justice in Nuremberg does the trick for you, his move to the executive branch in this Netflix miniseries probably will as well. It’s a bit of a left turn for the intense star of scrappy indie films such as Bug, Take Shelter, and Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, each of which featured him as an obsessive man with a very alien view of the world, to be playing statesmen and politicians. On first blush, he’s more of a fit for the role of Charles Giteau, the relentless job seeker who assassinated Garfield in 1881. But to Mike Makowsky, the creator of Death by Lightning, Giteau is more of a Matthew MacFadyen type: a striver, a misfit, a generally harmless background figure who, beneath his glad-handing façade, is a deeply ambitious man. Over four episodes, which probably could have been three, the paths of Giteau and Garfield converge, with (at least on Garfield’s side) a bevy of Gilded Age VIPs along for the ride. Chief among them is Garfield’s vice president, Chester A. Arthur, played as a corrupt, drunken, sausage-obsessed buffoon by Nick Offerman. Arthur allies with New York Senator Roscoe Conkling (Shea Whigham), with Maine Senator James Blaine (Bradley Whitford) scuttling around the edges as the vagaries of Republican Party politics in the early Jim Crow era are made surprisingly clear and engaging. (Blaine was an interesting figure, a progressive but virulently anti-Catholic lawmaker who inspired many state laws prohibiting public funding of religious schools.) Betty Gilpin has the thankless role of eventual First Lady Lucretia “Crete” Garfield, who tries her best to stake a claim amid this coterie of elaborately coiffed liberal White male actors, who all seem to be having quite the time. The vibe isn’t quite as subversively anachronistic as series such as The Great and Dickinson, but there’s a garrulous wit, and more than a few LOLs, to be savored.

This is a niche topic covering a now-obscure chapter in the American story, as so much of the post-Civil War, pre-WWI period seems to be. It certainly shouldn’t be taken as historical gospel (any President Arthur fan can tell you that), but it’s entertaining enough to be genuinely educational, at least as a primer on one of the four men to have killed a President and a glimpse of how his crime changed the nation’s course. (Streaming on Netflix)

Also opening

Jay Kelly: “Famous movie actor Jay Kelly (George Clooney) embarks on a journey of self-discovery, confronting his past and present with his devoted manager Ron (Adam Sandler). Poignant and humor-filled, pitched at the intersection of regrets and glories.” (Hollywood, on 35mm; Netflix 12/5)

Rental Family: “An American actor (Brendan Fraser) in Tokyo struggling to find purpose lands an unusual gig: working for a Japanese ‘rental family’ agency, playing stand-in roles for strangers. He rediscovers purpose, belonging, and the beauty of human connection.” (multiple locations)

Sisu: Road to Revenge: “A man returns to dismantle his family’s house, where they were murdered in war, to rebuild it elsewhere. When the killer, a Red Army commander, tracks him down, a brutal cross-country pursuit begins.” (multiple locations)

Repertory

Friday 11/21

• A Chinese Ghost Story [1987] (Hollywood)
• Falling Down [1993] (Cinemagic)
• Fight Club [1999] (Cinema 21; also 11/22)
• Goldeneye [1995] (Kiggins)
• The Green Mile [1999] (Academy; through 11/27)
• Jason X [2001] (Clinton)
• Landscape Film: Roberto Burle Marx [2018] (5th Avenue; through 11/23)
• The Passion of Joan of Arc [1927] (Academy; through 11/27)
• Pee-Wee as Himself [2025] (Tomorrow; director Matt Wolf in attendance)
• Straight Time [1978] (Academy; through 11/27)
• Thanksgiving [2023] (Cinemagic, also 11/26)

Saturday 11/22

• A Chinese Ghost Story 2 [1990] (Hollywood)
• Cry-Baby [1990] (Kiggins, with shadowcast performance)
• The Fantastic Mr. Fox [2009] (Salem; also 11/25)
• Inception [2010] (Cinemagic; also 11/23 & 11/25)
• The Island of Dr. Moreau [1996] (Clinton)s
• The Italian Job [1969] (Cinemagic; also 11/25 & 11/26)
• Metropolis [1927] (Hollywood [Pipe Organ Pictures])
• Rififi [1955] (Cinemagic; also 11/24 & 11/26)
• To Be or Not to Be [1942] (Cinema 21)

Sunday 11/23

• A Chinese Ghost Story 3 [1991] (Hollywood)
• Chulas Fronteras [1976] & The Maestro: King of the Cowboy Artists [1994] (Hollywood)
• L’Inferno [1911] (Tomorrow; live score by Lori Goldston & Corey J. Brewer)
• The Color of Pomegranates [1969] (Tomorrow)
• Thief [1981] (Cinemagic; also 11/24)

Monday 11/24

• You’ve Got Mail [1998] (Salem)

Tuesday 11/25

• The Great Waldo Pepper [1975] (Hollywood)

Wednesday 11/26

• The Snow Queen [1986] (Clinton [Church of Film])
• The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 [1986] (Hollywood, preceded by live music from The Turkeynecks)