Clerks (Kevin Smith, 1994). When I saw this comedy upon its release, I attributed the many stiff performances to the microscopic budget and the abundance of genuine amateurs among the cast. We now have a few decades of corroborating evidence to suggest that Kevin Smith simply doesn’t understand what good acting looks like and he’s equally oblivious to his responsibility as a director to help shape a performance. That complaint registered, Clerks is consistently funny. To my mild surprise, it holds up more than it doesn’t, a remarkable feat given that Smith’s sense of humor leans sophomoric. In relaying a particularly challenging day for Quick Stop Groceries employee Dante Hicks (Brian O’Halloran), Smith effectively captures the rolling frustration of working in retail and dealing with customers all day. The scruffy, lo-fi aesthetic enhances the film’s tone of wry resignation. Jeff Anderson gets the best jokes as the video store clerk Randal, and he makes the most of them.

Louder Than Bombs (Joachim Trier, 2015). Director Joachim Trier’s first English-language film is a complex drama about a family under strain. Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg) returns home to help sort through the archive of his mother (Isabelle Huppert), an acclaimed war photographer who died a few years earlier. A major exhibition of her work is about to take place, and an investigative piece on her death similarly looms. His father (Gabriel Byrne) stews in his own misgivings about his wife’s past, and his teenaged brother (Devin Druid) is distraught and acting out in disturbing ways. Louder Than Bombs packs in a lot of plot, including all sorts of variations on troubled, deceitful romantic relationships. In certain scenes, Trier maintains his formidable capacity for depicting the ways in which people who know each other deeply can wield emotions like a shiv. The film doesn’t add up, though. There’s a discordance to the overlapping plot lines, and whole passages — such as the spiraling bad decisions of Jesse Eisenberg’s character — are thinly conceived. The final resolutions feel pat, too.

Sorry, Baby (Eva Victor, 2025). This is simply an exceptional debut feature. In the plainest reading, Sorry, Baby is a character study of Agnes, played by Eva Victor, who also wrote and directed the film. Agnes is a professor at a small college in Maine living a life of relative solitude that’s only really interrupted by occasional visits by her longtime best friend (Naomi Ackie) or the sweet neighbor (Lucas Hedges) who stirs some romantic interest. Victor uses artful flashbacks to explore the history that brought Agnes to this point, most notably a problematic incident that occurred during grad school. The particulars are familiar enough that there aren’t a lot of surprises to Sorry, Baby, but the film is distinguished by the piercing clarity Victor brings to every scene. In her writing and acting, she goes deep into Agnes’s pain and uncertainty, and she opts for a directing style that is powerful in its patience. Let Victor do whatever they want for a follow-up.