Shane Meadows’s new British miniseries, The Virtues, stars Stephen Graham as Joseph, a painter, decorator, and alcoholic at a crossroads. We first meet Joseph when he is surrendering his child to the boy’s mother, who is bound for Australia with her new husband. “I’ll always be your father,” Joseph says, with the resignation of a decent man who realizes he has demons he must conquer. Joseph makes his way Ireland to confront past traumas that are revealed through a progression of hazy flashbacks. Meadows and co-writer Jack Thorne use the series’s four tidy episodes to craft, through patience and understanding, considerable depth of character. Joseph has numbed himself to the truth of his past through regular bouts with the bottle. On the one hand, he’s a gregarious drunk who will buy drinks for the entire bar until he blacks out, his paycheck spent. Yet he’s no drunken lout; a storm rages in his head.
Graham, best known for playing thugs (he was a particularly vile racist in Meadows’s previous series This Is England) is restrained in this outing. Joseph’s alcoholic binges lead to guilt and blackouts, not acts of violence. Once in Ireland, he moves in with his sister and brother-in law, played by Irish actors Frank Laverty and Helen Behan, who worked powerfully with Meadows on This Is England.
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Director Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow begins with a quotation from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “the bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship.” Those words also serve as the epigraph for the novel from which the film is adapted, The Half Life by Jonathan Raymond. The latter frequently works with Reichardt, who has drawn on his short stories several times. Blake’s sentiment connects the idea of home in the natural world with humanity’s primal need for connection. These are familiar themes for Raymond and Reichardt: Old Joy and Night Moves revolve around man’s respect for nature; the complexities of community are at the core of Wendy and Lucy and Certain Women. Meek’s Cutoff,  set in the 1840s, is rich in period detail. First Cow knits together all of these concerns (friendship, humanity’s bond with the natural world) in a historical fiction about the American spirit of self-invention and free enterprise.
As the film begins, a woman (Alia Shawkat) foraging in the forest comes upon a skull buried in the ground

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Jane Austen’s novels regularly find their way to the big and small screen, though the adaptations are usually earnest, sometimes lifelessly so. Now a more comical version of Austen arrives via Autumn de Wilde’s Emma. (The title includes a period.) In 1996, a young Gwyneth Paltrow played Emma Woodhouse as a likable busybody. It was followed a year later by Kate Beckinsale in Jane Austen’s Emma.  In 2009, a four-episode miniseries produced by BBC and WGBH featured Romola Garai. This year’s Emma is embodied by Anya Taylor-Joy (The Witch, Split) as a not particularly likable heroine who may or may not learn the error of her ways. The actress’s bewitching looks mask the machinations of a pampered busybody and an uncertain young woman. Emma is a devoted matchmaker but, ironically, has much to learn about the vicissitudes of love and of her own heart. The woman’s matchmaking schemes are serious and ludicrous, as are the manners and conventions of Austen’s provincial upper-class families. De Wilde emphasizes the foolishness of it all.
De Wilde, a successful L.A. photographer, has directed some enchanting music videos (Different Names for the Same Thing by Death Cab for Cutie and Rise Up (with Fists) by Jenny Lewis are my favorites). De Wilde has a knack
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Behind every licentious executive there is a probably a woman or two or three, sitting in the shadows, observing, powerless, and appalled. Australian director Kitty Green’s new film, The Assistant, follows a single day in the work life of Jane (Julia Garner), a neophyte secretary to an entertainment mogul. It’s a dreary workaday job: organizing spreadsheets and schedules, ordering and delivering lunch, emptying wastebaskets, photocopying scripts and headshots that spit out of the copy machine like sausages. This is not Tinseltown but an office located in what looks like the SoHo district of Manhattan, a command center where few words are exchanged between Jane and her male cohorts. The young men chatter on their phones about box office receipts and distribution strategies and take meetings with other anonymous men in suits. All work is in service to a boss whom you barely see (he is credited as actor/director Tony Torn, though the voice is not his). Jane, a former art student and intern, has ambitions “to be a producer.” Why else suffer the tedium of such a job? She’s responsible, organized, tidy, and mostly speaks only when spoken to. She makes sure she enters and exits the elevator after those who are above her—which is everybody. She is deferential to a fault. But on this day her acquiescence is challenged.
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In

”Ever since they were kids, Josh and Benny Safdie have shot films guerilla-style, the better to catch the rhythms of the New York streets. They founded Red Bucket Films, where they experimented with real subjects in a blend of “actual” and staged scenarios in order to create a style that went beyond the conventions of commercial filmmaking. In 2009, their second feature (following The Pleasure of Being Robbed) was Daddy Longlegs. Frequent collaborator Ronald Bronstein played a loving but irresponsible single dad, an actor raising two small boys in New York City (Sage and Frey Ranaldo, the sons of Sonic Youth guitarist Lee Ranaldo). Their next two films pushed the streetwise aesthetic even further. Heaven Knows What (Arts Fuse review) starred Arielle Holmes in a distressing story based on her own experience as a homeless addict. That commitment to reality drew the attention of Robert Pattinson, who starred in 2017’s Good Time.
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Crawl is a thrill-a-minute alligator home invasion story from director Alexandre Aja, producer Sam Raimi (The Evil Dead), and local screenwriters Shawn and Michael Rasmussen. Aja, whose films High Tension and Piranha 3-D demonstrated his efficiency for horror and gore, directs the film with twice the kicks (and on one tenth of the budget) of the recent scaly monstrosity Godzilla. One principle location and two actors not only cut down on the budget — it also ups the claustrophobia. Criticism that this is implausible schlock filled with waterlogged clichés may be true, but the observation ignores that the movie serves up the satisfactions of a good summer thriller. As a kid, we used to wait endlessly for the monsters in movies to appear. Lucky for us – and unlucky for the inhabitants of this Florida town – the critters in Crawl attack quickly, mercilessly, and often. This is a perfect guilty pleasure, an old fashioned B-movie without a franchise, explosions, overly recognizable actors, or exhausting mano a mano violence.
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Director Jim Jarmusch attacks the zombie genre with gusto in his latest film, The Dead Don’t Die. Throughout popular culture, zombies have been done to death — so to speak. So why would Jarmusch bother to try his hand at the genre? For starters, he has tailored the material  for his favorite actors, Bill Murray, Adam Driver, Tilda Swinton, Tom Waits, and Iggy Pop. There’s also a hodgepodge of celebrity cameos, including Steve Buscemi, Chloë Sevigny, Danny Glover, Selena Gomez, Caleb Landry Jones, Rosie Perez, Carol Kane, and cult director/actor Larry Fessenden.  Jarmusch’s vampire film, Only Lovers Left Alive (2103), reflected serious directorial engagement, mixing decadent intellectuals and punk rockers. Zombies receive a more back-of-the-hand treatment, with environmental disaster and consumerism (with a tip of the hat to George Romero) the nebulous political targets. Essentially, The Dead Don’t Die is a gag fest filled with horror tropes performed by a dream cast. The set-up and jokes generally lampoon the banality and the ordinariness of small-town life. The effort is a trifle, but a cleverly amusing one.
Murray and Driver play sheriffs Cliff Robertson and Ron Peterson in the one-diner town of Middletown. 
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