The Hot Rock (Peter Yates, 1972). This adaptation of a Donald Westlake novel — featuring a screenplay that was William Goldman’s first produced work following his Oscar win for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid — is a lithe and cheeky heist film. Robert Redford plays John Dortmunder, a professional thief freshly released from his latest stay is prison. Mere minutes pass before he’s roped into a new scheme involving the theft of an African gem on display in the Brooklyn Museum. What follows is a series of setbacks — all smartly plausible — that require Dortmunder and his assembled squad to engage in increasingly elaborate schemes in a continued quest to secure the elusive stone. Yates directs with a unruffled briskness and the widescreen cinematography by Edward R. Brown captures early-seventies New York in all its picturesque squalor. If not every caper convinces, the filmmakers are appealingly committed enough to engender some forgiveness of narrative wobbles. And the film boasts Redford right in the heart of the prolonged peak of his movie star dazzle, when he could effortlessly hold the screen. He spends much of the film in a mode of beleaguered irritation — a Redford specialty — but the closing moments offer a reminder that, no matter how much the actor may have preferred otherwise, he was always at his most convincing when he’s strutting through a world that he’s decisively bested.

Krisha (Trey Edward Shults, 2015). Krisha (Krisha Fairchild) is a woman returning to the family fold with a visible anxiety, as if worried about the volcano that’s sure to erupt at some point during the visit. The text is strictly domestic drama, mundane and recognizable. The visual presentation is a wonderfully florid and tensely edited, as if a skilled student was given the classroom assignment of repurposing a staid weepie into a fierce horror film. In shifting the parameters on how this sort of story can be staged, Shults (who also wrote the screenplay) taps into the deepest wells of roiling emotions the characters endure as the attempted reconciliation plays out as predictably doomed. Never has a tumbling pan of food been filmed with such a precise sense of fevered tragedy.

Tiger Shark (Howard Hawks, 1932). One of four films that Hawks directed (or co-directed) with a 1932 copyright date, Tiger Shark depicts the troubled tale of tuna boat captain Mike Mascarenhas (Edward G. Robinson). As the film begins, he’s blistering under the hard sun in a lifeboat. And then a shark bites off his hand. Things don’t necessarily get worse from there, but they don’t really get all that much better, either. The pulpy melodrama of the story has a certain allure, and its fascinating to watch this relatively early production strive for verisimilitude in its depiction of the brutality of having the ocean as a workplace. The biggest draw, though, is the performance of Robinson, doing inspired character work as the captain with a tendency to inflate his appeal and accomplishments. What could play as ego and delusion is instead built upon an endearing vulnerability.