Lady Macbeth (William Oldroyd, 2017). Adapted from a similarly-titled nineteenth century novella by Nikolai Leskov, Lady Macbeth follows a young woman named Katherine (Florence Pugh), who is plopped into a chilly marriage to Alexander (Paul Hilton), the unkind scion of a rural estate. She carves out what satisfaction and happiness she can find, largely through an affair with one of her husband’s brutish employees (Cosmo Jarvis). William Oldroyd, making his feature directorial debut has a fine eye for visual composition and a brave sense of restraint. The film’s most dramatic moments play out with striking understatement, and the score (by Dan Jones) practically redefines minimalism in cinematic music. The film’s greatest attribute is the lead performance by Pugh, who unveils her character’s inner being by degrees. Lady Macbeth is uniformly admirable, but Pugh is riveting. Her acting lingers.

The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2017). I’ve rarely stirred as much agitated counterargument as when I celebrated Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster as one of the best films of 2016. So I offer up my more muted appreciation of Greek filmmaker’s follow-up with the cautionary assurance that his bleak sense of humor and vicious cynicism about loving human relationships remains firmly in place. The film begins with the unlikely friendship between a surgeon (Colin Farrell) and a teenaged boy (Barry Keoghan). As the story unfolds, it is revealed that that two share a medical tragedy in the past, which leads to the film’s primary dilemma, as retribution is delivered in the form of unexplainable metaphysical gamesmanship. It’s the darkest of jokes, played as heavy, European drama. While the various actors (also including Nicole Kidman) successful convey the confusing anguish of it all, The Killing of a Sacred Deer sometimes comes across as a little too facile, in part because Lanthimos isn’t quite as thorough in building his off-kilter universe. There are times when it’s difficult to parse whether the harsh absurdity of it all is meant to be an intrusion on the otherwise mundane or wholly representative of the existence in which the characters dwell. The confusion undercuts the themes and the fundamental storytelling.

Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond (Chris Smith, 2017). Building on the base of behind-the-scenes footage that Jim Carrey has evidently kept bundled up in an office somewhere for about twenty years, Chris Smith crafts a documentary about artistic obsession. When Carrey played Andy Kaufman in the Milos Forman film Man on the Moon, the actor famously locked himself so deeply into the role that he wouldn’t answer to his own name on set. That choice was a fitting tribute to the prankish comic legend Carrey was playing, but it also caused plenty of dismay during the production. As Carrey tells it, straight to Smith’s camera, it also left a lasting impression on him. In the modern reflections, Carrey comes across as a lost soul, shuffling across the mortal plane with only increasingly threadbare philosophy to keep him warm. Of course, Carrey is the only one offering retrospective analysis of the experience, when it may have been illuminating to get corroborating testimony from some of the others who collaborated on Man on the Moon. Part of the slippery brilliance of Smith’s documentary is the way it could be yet another put-on.