Lake George (Jeffrey Reiner, 2024). Much as it strives for the Blood Simple–inspired lean-and-mean model, this thriller could stand to be far more taut than it is. Don (Shea Whigham) is recently sprung for jail and quickly flustered by the dearth of opportunities for someone toting a criminal record. Even his former cohorts on the other side of the law are no help, sending Don to his last resort, an especially thuggish crime boss named Armen (Glenn Fleshler). The only offer Armen puts on the table is a job to murder his troublesome girlfriend, Phyllis (Carrie Coon). More sad sack than Mad Max, Don hardly seems like the right man for the job. That impression proves sound when he can’t bring himself to finish off Phyllis, and the two instead become coconspirators. Writer-director Jeffrey Reiner seems to just like hanging out with these characters he’s created, taking amusement from the hapless execution of their schemes. Whigham is solid in a rare lead role, but it’s Coon who gives Lake George a blast of energy with line deliveries that are the acting equivalent of wicked sliders hurled off the mound.

Italian for Beginners (Lone Scherfig, 2000). I now know the kind of movie Hal Hartley would have made had he been Danish. Written and directed by Lone Scherfig (the story has enough parallels to the Maeve Binchy novel Master Class that the author was later given an apologetic payout). Several different individuals, all of them a little lost and questing, convene in a humdrum suburban town and start moving in and out of each other’s orbits. One of the central hubs of their interactions is an introductory class in speaking Italian at a center for adult education. As written by Scherfig and played by a talented cast, the characters are distinctive and just a touch offbeat without ever pushing over into risky quirk. Like the best of Hartley’s work, no matter how much the story threads seems to fray, the filmmakers manage to weave them all together in the end. If it arguably seems a little too tidy, Scherfig does the emotional work needed to make the lack of cynicism or mess feel wholly satsifying. Italian for Beginners is funny, warm, and winning.

The Wedding Banquet (Andrew Ahn, 2025). This remake of the 1993 film The Wedding Banquet, director Ang Lee’s second feature, is cute and endearing. Working on the screenplay with James Schamus, who was a co-writer and co-producer on the original, Andrew Ahn mostly manages to make the comedy around hiding gay identity feel reasonable in a far more enlightened time. Min (Han Gi-chan) is a Korean student studying art in Seattle, doing his best to forestall the moment when he needs to give up his student visa and return home to run the family business. He’s in a longterm relation with Chris (Bowen Yang) and decides to propose marriage, partially to force his family into allowing him to stay in the U.S. Chris’s commitment issues get in the way, and Min instead makes a deal with their mutual friends and landlords, the lesbian couple Angela (Kelly Marie Tran) and Lee (Lily Gladstone). Angela will marry Min, a paperwork-only deal, and Min will finance their ongoing attempts to get pregnant through IVF. All the performances are engaging, with Youn Yuh-jung further ratifying the worthiness of her Minari Oscar with strong work as Min’s judgmental grandmother who journeys across the ocean to attend the wedding. Ahn keeps most of the proceedings fairly brisk until the last act, which turns into a slog, mostly because the narrative’s conclusion is so obvious that building in dramatic uncertainty feels like wasting time.