Dumb Money (Craig Gillespie, 2023). To make his own variant of The Big Short, director Craig Gillespie looks to the fiasco that the financial world blundered into when several novice speculators started buying up and hoarding GameStop’s stocks. Working from a screenplay co-credited to Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo, Gillespie careens between several different characters. Every role is well acted by the individual members of the film’s absolutely stacked cast, but there’s sometimes only so much they can do with scenes that are only glancing blows. There’s a vivid energy to the storytelling keeps the tedious business world details from becoming a slog and makes the plentiful barbed observations about maliciously orchestrated class divisions that much more cutting. Because the real life situation took place across early 2021, Gillespie accurately includes details related to COVID, such as different approaches to masking and vaccinations; there’s an especially nice scene with a nurse, played by America Ferrera, briefly bonding with a stranger across some gas pumps. It’s deeply real moments such as that which give Dumb Money a poignancy beyond its rascally muckraking.

The Good Guys and the Bad Guys (Burt Kennedy, 1969). This wry Western stars Robert Mitchum as Jim Flagg, a lawman who apprehends his old adversary Big John McKay (George Kennedy) ahead of a planned train robbery. Trading their impressions of approaching obsolescence, the pair find they’ve largely aged out their animosity. They team up to stop the gang of young bandits who still have plans to steal from the locomotive approaching Flagg’s jurisdiction. Burt Kennedy directs The Good Guys and the Bad Guys with a noticeable pleasure for the scenes in which his two leads build a rapport around their shared, fractious history. The film is a dandy two-hander that is occasionally disrupted by the noisy reassertion of its main plot. In particular, all the rigamarole around the thwarting of the train robbery plays as too cartoonishly antic. It’s at odds with the rest of the film’s weathered charms.

Eileen (William Oldroyd, 2023). Never let it be said that Anne Hathaway doesn’t truly commit to her roles. She’s a delight as the snappy, confident psychologist who bedazzles a new coworker (Thomasin McKenzie, solid in the role, if falling into a bit of a rut as a mousy brunette who comes under the sway of a nineteen-sixties blonde). Boasting stylish direction by William Oldroyd, Eileen feels like its going to be a slow burn, moody psychological drama, and then the third act gives a hard spin of the wheel to take a hairpin turn into much wilder territory. Whether the character decision has been adequately set up is a matter of reasonable debate, but the jolt it gives the film is hard to deny. That’s true of a lot of the material on screen. If the plot mechanics and narrative flourishes don’t always work in the moment, they add up effectively, which makes Eileen into a tidy, pleasingly seedy modern noir.