Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die (Gore Verbinski, 2026). This is maybe the most Sam Rockwell that Sam Rockwell has ever been, and I’ve seen Sam Rockwell be extremely Sam Rockwell in other films. He plays a man who storms into a diner and rants that he’s from the future. His claim is that he must assemble an ad hoc rebel group from the patrons there in order to prevent a technologically driven doom. He has already attempted this mission in countless other timelines with no success, pushing him to the verge of madness or at least aggressive eccentricity. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is inventive and boasts enough clever, dark satire (led by the sequence that posits a version of U.S. life where parents have become thoroughly desensitized to school shootings) to just barely overcome its messiness. Playing against Rockwell’s zany intensity, the other actors have the option to swing with a little more gusto. Juno Temple and Haley Lu Richardson take best advantage of that opportunity. As he’s prone to do, director Gore Verbinski often opts for excess when some leaner, shrewder storytelling would serve him better.

Peter Hujar’s Day (Ira Sachs, 2025). In the middle of the nineteen-seventies, writer Linda Rosenkrantz mounted a project that entailed people recounting how they spent their days, going into minute detail in response to her prompts and urging. Decades later, one of those interviews, with acclaimed photographer Peter Hujar, was published after the transcript resurfaced. Peter Hujar’s Day is a dramatic rendering of that conversation by writer-director Ira Sachs. The film is minimalist and intimate, like My Dinner with Andre without the trip to the restaurant. This film is not going to be for everyone, but two interesting characters talking at length is so very much my thing that I was only perturbed in the few moments that Sachs uses meta tomfoolery to give the film a little swish of the overtly cinematic. Ben Whishaw plays Peter Hujar, and he is absolutely terrific, emphasizing the ways in which an intelligent, artistic, ruminative soul still moves through the world in much the same mundane fashion as anyone, even as his mind continuously whirs. The other half of the duet, Linda Rosenkrantz, is played by Rebecca Hall. Although she is also in every scene, Hall’s performance is primarily of a feat of exemplary support.

Three Days of the Condor (Sydney Pollack, 1975). This political thriller starts and ends strong. It occasionally loses its way in the middle. Robert Redford plays Joe Turner, a CIA desk jockey working in a New York office that is guised as a drab historical society. Joe steps out for lunch and returns to find all of his colleagues have been murdered by armed intruders. Uncertain about whether he can trust anyone, including the agency bosses he calls for help, Joe goes into hiding and desperately tries to puzzle together a route to safety. Along the way, he basically kidnaps a random woman (Faye Dunaway), primarily so he can hide out in her apartment. Because he looks like Robert Redford and she looks like Faye Dunaway, they of course carve out time for some quick canoodling. Dunaway’s character is so chaotically conceived that her presence at times comes close to the level of nuisance. A uniquely twitchy love scene is part of the problem. Redford, by contrast, is terrific. He gives one of the grounded movie star performances that was as his speciality. Sydney Pollack directs Three Days of the Condor with professional assurance that favor surface pleasures over thematic complexity. That approach suits the potboiler plot well.