Down with Love (Peyton Reed, 2003). This sweetly spoofy riff on the ribald romantic comedies of the nineteen-fifties and nineteen-sixties, particularly those starring Doris Day and Rock Hudson, boasts a zingy script (credited to Eve Ahlert and Dennis Drake), a superb cast, and jubilant directing. Set in 1962, the film gives its full affection to Barbara Novak (Renée Zellweger), the author of a new book that champions women declaring their independence from caddish men. Her spirited feminism stirs the ire of playboy magazine writer Catcher Block (Ewan McGregor), whose scheme to publish a career-crashing exposé about Barbara involves wooing her in the guise of a kind-hearted, chaste astronaut. Not all of the comedy works, but few movies since have had such a glorious sense of play. Director Peyton Reed brings assembles the film with a brisk energy and knows how to brings the actors right up to the edge of jokey overplaying without teetering over it. In particular, David Hyde Pierce puts wicked spin on every last line reading as Catcher’s tense, eager cohort. Down with Love often plays like a series of scenes of escalating joyous invention. When it seems like there’s no topping Zellweger’s one-take monologue detailing all the hidden back-and-forth of the plot, along comes the closing musical number.

Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb (Lizzie Gottlieb, 2022). I am decidedly in the presumably select target audience for this documentary about the professional relationship between Robert Caro, author of titanic tomes about Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, and Robert Gottlieb, his longtime editor. In addition to my hours logged turning the pages of Caro’s biographies, I am helplessly smitten with the era of book publishing that was home to earliest stages of the depicted partnership. Director Lizzie Gottlieb is the daughter of one the two men in the film’s title, giving her a familiarity that is both help and hindrance in fairly predictable ways. Still, her filmmaking skills are formidable enough that she’s able to make the hunt for a pencil in a New York City office building more tense and thrilling than anything in a hyperkinetic action movie. No matter how close she is to the subject, she chose it well. Turn Every Page really does comes across as a vital final document of a passage in the history of American letters that is about to fully fade away. Caro and Gottlieb share a serious determination to create valuable work for the sake of it. Those are qualities that are difficult to discern in those who currently drive the culture.

The Daytrippers (Greg Mottola, 1996). After Eliza (Hope Davis) discovers a mysterious love letter among the belongings of her husband (Stanley Tucci), she decides its imperative to journey from their Long Island home to his Manhattan workplace to determine if he’s having an affair. This is no solo mission. She loads into a car with her whole family: mom (Anne Meara), dad (Pat McNamara), sister (Parker Posey). Her sister’s boyfriend (Liev Schreiber) comes along, too. Working from his own script in his feature directorial debut, Greg Mottola keeps the proceedings brisk, light, and defiantly understated. The wry tone and gun-and-run blandness of a lot of the visuals definitely marks this as a product of mid-nineties independent film. The cast is exceptional all around; it’s especially wonderful to revisit Posey at the height of her arthouse reign of tangy comic contempt, and Campbell Scott has a few sharp scenes as an acclaimed author with a casual ease at seductive manipulation, effectively forecasting his career-best work a few years later in Roger Dodger. I think there might be one big relationship betrayal too many for a film that takes place over the course of only twelve hours or so, but most of the jokes and intertwined emotional beats do land.