Nightbitch (Marielle Heller, 2024). In adapting Rachel Yoder’s 2021 novel, Nightbitch, writer-director Marielle Heller has interesting, provocative points to make about modern American motherhood. Amy Adams plays an character simply named “Mother” in the closing credits. A onetime artist, she is now a stay-at-home mom looking after a rambunctious two year old (Arleigh and Emmett Snowden share the role) mostly on her own as her husband (Scott McNairy) is regularly away on business. Worn down by sleepless nights and the unappealing kinship with fellow moms who are miles apart from the cultured friends she used to spend time with, the distance she feels from her former self starts to manifest as a sensation that she’s transforming into a dog. Heller is coy about just how real these fantasies of canine transmogrification are, rightly preferring to set it up as a metaphor and explore all its angles. Unfortunately, Heller also can’t seem to settle on a tone, letting it wander aimlessly between satire, farce, domestic drama, and unsettled thriller. The film is also hampered by voiceover narration that underlines the thesis too sharply. Sometimes Nightbitch is arch and sometimes it’s sincere, but it’s rarely convincing. Adams is admirably game in a role that genuinely requires her to get down in the mud, but she’s stuck with playing a conceit more than a character.

A Colt Is My Passport (Takashi Nomura, 1967). This wild, Japanese film noir follows a hitman (Joe Shishido) whose enlisted for a job that gets him in the middle of warring yakuza bosses. He’s a cool character, but that icy quality only offers so much protection where ample backdoor deals and double-crosses are playing out. The twisting, turning story can be a little hard to follow, which not so much a flaw as a sign that the filmmakers were paying proper attention when they studied the often perplexing plots of the Hollywood classics of the shadow-scarred subgenre. Takashi Nomura directs A Colt Is My Passport with a bristling forcefulness and headlong energy. He knows when to let heavy mood carry a scene and when a more kinetic approach is needed. There’s one shootout scene that takes place on the open terrain of a landfill site that is an absolute dynamo of beautifully hectic action.

Juror #2 (Clint Eastwood, 2024). I was engaged enough by the potboiler verve of Clint Eastwood’s likely swan song to give it a lot of latitude for a good chunk of its running time. In the film, Justin Kemp (Nicholas Hoult) is a magazine writer and a fretful father to be who is called in for jury duty. He is chosen to be one of the twelve peers determining if guilt can be determined beyond a reasonable doubt in the case of an imposing man (Gabriel Basso) accused of killing his girlfriend (Francesca Eastwood) after a messy fight in a bar. As the facts of the case are laid out, Justin realizes he was in that very bar on the night in question and just might have even more culpable connections to what transpired. A dedicated miner of subtext can hit a mother lode with Juror #2. There’s a whole lot of mulling about modern U.S. justice and morality to be found the screenplay, which is credited to Jonathan Abrams. As has often been the case, those who believe Eastwood is making a pointed cultural statement with the film are probably misinterpreting his art. As with Mystic River, Million Dollar Bay, and other entries in the Eastwood filmography offered up as proof of his auteur bona fides, it’s the pulpiness not the politics that he responds to. For me, the pile-up of implausibilities and creaking coincidences eventually grows too majestically high, and all the projected philosophizing in the cinematic world doesn’t stop the structure from teetering.