In Causeway, Jennifer Lawrence plays Lynsey, an Afghanistan War veteran who sustained severe combat injuries that left her temporarily disabled. She is first shown in a wheelchair, unable to dress herself, get up, use the bathroom, take pills, or bathe without the assistance of her nurse, Sharon (Jayne Houdyshell). Lynsey does not seem to find her predicament devastating; though when Sharon allows that she went into nursing following years as her husband’s caregiver, Lynsey carelessly responds, “What a miserable life.”

Lynsey works with a neuropsychologist on her head injury and memory loss, and with physical therapists to slowly learn to walk again, using parallel bars and a walker. The film’s attention to detail and Lawrence’s performance are particularly impressive, and it comes as no surprise that the names of several physical therapy consultants appear in the end credits. [Martin Tsai]

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Cherry begins with one of those “How did I get here” moments, as an outlaw (Tom Holland, also on leave from Disney) turns to address the audience during a bank robbery. These breaks of the fourth wall will trade off with a running voice-over commentary as the film rewinds several years to its unnamed protagonist’s salad days as an Ohio college kid, whispering sweet nothings to campus girlfriend Emily (Ciara Bravo), the ill-defined romantic center of his world. [A.A. Dowd]

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This is only speculation, but the cast and crew of Emancipation, Antoine Fuqua’s Louisiana bayou chase movie disguised as a Civil War slave drama, probably slogged through the mud and muck under the assumption they were making a prestige picture on the order of 2013’s Oscar-winning 12 Years A Slave. But watching Will Smith, as a real-life escaped slave named Gordon (rechristened here as Peter), wrestle an alligator and stab a slave catcher with a cross necklace, we realize the film is actually Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (a film that Smith famously turned down) had Tarantino played it with humorless historical reverence. [Mark Keizer]

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Having once held audiences’ attention for well over an hour with nothing but a volleyball for company, Tom Hanks was a natural choice to play the title role in Finch, a post-apocalyptic drama in which he’s the only human actor we ever see (save for three people glimpsed at a distance during a flashback). That’s not to say that his character, Finch Weinberg, is alone. As the film begins—some years after a massive solar flare that destroyed the ozone layer, leading to food shortages that apparently wiped out much of humanity in short order (more from violence than starvation)—he’s surveying what remains of St. Louis, accompanied by his beloved terrier and a small, mobile robot that he calls Dewey. [Mike D’Angelo]

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It’s World War II. Captain Ernest Krause, the kind of humble hero who says grace before drinking coffee, has been put in command of the long-range destroyer USS Greyhound as it escorts a convoy of Allied supply ships across the Atlantic. German U-boats are hunting in the cold, choppy waters, appearing as sinister pips on the radar or creepy screw noises on the hydrophone. On the bridge of the USS Greyhound, this occasions clangs, whistles, and a naval staccato of “starboards,” “bearings,” “full rudders,” and “aye aye, sirs,” to which Krause contributes occasional scriptural quotation. To certain ears, this is pure music: “Boatswain, sound general quarters,” “Right handsomely to 096,” and so on.

The truth is that a movie like Greyhound isn’t hard to understand: There are big ships and there are submarines and inside both are men. We take it for granted that Captain Krause is an individual of good moral fiber, because he’s played by Tom Hanks, who also wrote the screenplay, adapting the C.S. Forester novel The Good Shepherd. If there were any grandiose intentions on Hanks’ part, they aren’t evident in the film’s trim running time (barely 80 minutes without credits) or its single-minded commitment to depicting the uncertainties and logistics of naval warfare. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

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In Matchstick Men, Nicolas Cage plays a character who’s overcome a considerable handicap to rise to the top of his field. He’d be a tough fit for a feel-good magazine piece, however, having fought back obsessive-compulsive and phobic tendencies to excel at one dubious task: relieving the gullible of their money. It’s tough work, but as the film opens, Cage has carved out a comfortable existence for himself, if comfortable is the right word for a man who needs daily medication to stop fixating on tiny carpet stains. By day, he works short-con phone frauds with protégé Sam Rockwell, who keeps urging him to go in for a big score. By night, he eats canned tuna, disposes of it in carefully sealed plastic bags, cleans up, and smokes cigarettes while wearing plastic gloves, as a single Frank Sinatra album spins over and over again. It may not be what anyone else would call happiness, but he seems to recognize that it’s the best he’s likely to get, and possibly better than he deserves. Haunted by an alcohol-fueled failed marriage and the child on the way when the relationship crumbled 14 years ago, he keeps a spotless kitchen to contrast with his sullied soul. Cage’s tics and compulsions may keep the demons at bay, but when he begins seeing a new psychiatrist who agrees to help locate his child–who soon turns up in the form of Alison Lohman, an unmanageable, pigtailed teen eager to learn the tricks of Dad’s trade–the system threatens to break down for good. [Keith Phipps]

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The best thing that can be said about Palmer is that it’s innocuous: overlong and sentimental, but rarely annoying. Anyone who’s spent considerable time around young kids knows that they can be both quirky and mean. The world of recess represents something of the pressures of grown-up society, which tend to be gendered in the worst ways. It’s hard to argue with the thesis: People should be allowed to be whoever they are, and men in general could use a lot more of what is usually categorized as a maternal instinct. But when characters are split into good and bad, Goofuses and Gallants, the plea ends up being addressed at nothing in particular. Nothing that feels authentic, anyway. [Ignatiy Vishnevetsky]

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For much of his undervalued filmmaking career, writer-director Rodrigo García has focused on what classical Hollywood studio executives used to call “women’s pictures”: Melodramas centered on the romantic and domestic travails of female characters who have arrived at a point of crisis or uncertainty. Working within the independent film realm, García doesn’t land the cushier studio budgets that Golden Age “women’s picture” practitioners like George Cukor or William Wyler would, but in films like the anthology portrait Nine Lives and the moving adoption drama Mother And Child, he handily compensates with an observant eye for detail and a hushed, lived-in sense of emotional intimacy.

Considering that his last film, the detox downer Four Good Days, found García uncharacteristically indulging in shrill, over-the-top histrionics while still sticking to the female-centered fare blueprint that has worked so well for him before, it makes sense creatively for him to attempt a sea change. And not only is his newest film, Raymond And Ray, a total 180-degree turn in being primarily about two men, the estranged pair of half-brothers referred to in the movie’s title (and played by Ewan McGregor and Ethan Hawke), but it’s also concerned with the psychologically and culturally insidious force of toxic masculinity on a fundamental level. As Raymond (McGregor) and Ray (Hawke) reunite once the abusive father they shared dies, one of the questions they’re forced to confront is how to break the cycle of pain and torment into which he indoctrinated them. [Brett Buckalew]

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A sharper is someone who “lives by their wits,” as the opening onscreen text of Sharper informs us. The term could describe nearly every character in this twisty thriller, as well as director Benjamin Caron and writers Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka, who repeatedly, but fairly, con the audience with deceptive storytelling. This definition appears above an image of a watch being meticulously assembled. While a watch does play a small role in the story, this is primarily a metaphor for the careful clockwork construction of Sharper itself.

Were it not for that opening explanation—as well as advance publicity as to what sort of film this is—you might at first mistake it for a gentle romance. Tom (Justice Smith) is a sweet, withdrawn owner of a New York City bookstore that has, among its treasures, a first edition of Jane Eyre. When Sandra (Briana Middleton), a doctoral student, enters the store and mentions Jane Eyre as the book that changed her life, she obviously stirs something in Tom and romance ensues. [Andy Klein]

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Tetris largely follows the saga of the game’s growth from a Russian programmer’s hobby project to worldwide phenomenon through the eyes of Henk Rogers (Taron Egerton), a game designer and publisher who plays the game at the Consumer Electronics Show in 1988 and immediately sees its potential on the worldwide market. Transfixed by the game and its simple elegance, Henk makes a deal to publish and sell Tetris in Japan, but soon finds that the British media empire that holds the rights is primed to play hardball, particularly when word gets out about a world-changing new handheld device called the Game Boy.

After betting his reputation, his company, and his financial future on the success of Tetris, Henk has no choice but to go to Russia and try to convince the game’s creator, Alexey Pajitnov (Nikita Yefremov), that he’s a capitalist worth trusting. Of course, the Russian government is not necessarily open to this idea, and Henk’s presence in the Soviet Union soon sets off a chain reaction that could put much more than his money in danger. [Matthew Jackson]

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“There was always a standard that was kind of set for how to be elegant and how to be brutal,” says John Cale in Todd Haynes’ documentary The Velvet Underground. He’s referring to his collaboration with Velvet Underground frontman Lou Reed, but it perfectly describes the group’s modus operandi during those influential early years when they were fully immersed in New York’s downtown music scene of the 1960s. Cale’s minimalist background meshed surprisingly well with Reed’s rhythm & blues stylings, and that musical combination provided the necessary foundation for the latter’s unconventional, taboo-inflected songwriting to flourish. Together they laid the groundwork for a band that filtered the avant-garde through rock ’n’ roll and cast a long shadow over 20th-century culture, inspiring countless musicians and artists, even if it took some time for everyone they influenced to catch up.

Cale’s statement also rings true for The Velvet Underground, which chronicles the band’s short-lived run by eschewing many traditional conventions of the music documentary. Instead of a purely band-focused archival approach (an impossibility considering there’s relatively little footage of The Velvet Underground on stage) or a more formulaic Behind The Music-style history lesson, Haynes tries out a collage-like method that tells the Velvets’ story while evoking the warm, unsettling feeling of listening to their music. [Vikram Murthi]

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