The same old story

Premature

Crit

Nothing in this story of young love that we haven't seen before, nothing very dramatic except to the extent that young love is the quintessence of drama, but it all feels fresh, and yes, that's partly because the film is set on and around 145th Street and populated not by the pretty white people we're accustomed to seeing young and in love the screen but by pretty brown people who stake a hungry claim to that screen. Quotidian colorblind heartbreak, cowritten and directed by Rashaad Ernesto Green.

Ordinary Love

Crit

Likewise, nothing here we haven't seen before: cancer as it affects not just one body but the body that is couplehood. And the sharp writing (by Owen McCafferty) is  sometimes too sharp to be contextually believable. But Lesley Manville and Liam Neeson sell it, and raise it. But what kept distracting me was: where in Northern Ireland is this set?

• Trailer for Military Wives: Kristin Scott Thomas and Sharon Horgan, but it looks like a clichéfest.

Enter the dragon

Latter-day M4

So called because while I did only 3 movies, the final M is for Mormon, as in Book of, which was just as much fun as I'd long anticipated (it celebrates its ninth anniversary next month!), but we don't do live here.

Dolor y gloria (Pain and glory)

VE

The scattered past as heroin dreams in Pedro Almodóvar's largely autobiographical and literally titled film. Always been a big Pedro fan, always struggled to say why. Let's just say this: humanity in extremis. Banderas the best I've ever seen him, Cruz plays frustration perfectly, and the kid cast as young Salvador, Asier Flores, gives one of those kid performances so good it seems like it's not acting.

This came to the hard-to-get-to theater on the edge of town and left before I knew it was there, so while I wouldn't ordinarily have included it in a Manhattan trip, it was a must today.

Portrait de la jeune fille en feu (Portrait of a lady on fire)

VE

This, in contrast, probably will come to my downtown theater [update: yup], but because it was so convenient and I didn't have a crowded itinerary of musts, I treated myself to a screening on Village East's big screen.

A film about gaze, female in this case, and perhaps more sympathetic and less unwelcome for that, but still complicated, especially as the gazed-at turns gazer, both at the gazer and at herself through an imagined perspective of the gazer's eyes. As I said, complicated.

Also a thrilling festival of sisterhood, with men onscreen for maybe 5 minutes, and pretty much just in the way for that. No surprise that we're so disposable.

Buffaloed

Quad

Not remotely a great film, but it manages one great feat: makes us sympathize with and root for a character whose behavior and moral standards are despicable. Credit Zoey Deutsch for making debt collection seem like something a human being might do.

• A wealth of trailers, most notably for the documentaries Ella Fitzgerald: Just One of Those Things and The Booksellers, the extra-odd Extra Ordinary, and the wtf? Run This Town.