A thriller recounting the exploits of…a Swiss private banker, who is eager, if not desperate, not to lose his accounts. The most interesting character is his predecessor, who is mentioned by everyone but does not appear in the film. Cigarette smoking is the closest things come to action. As a portrait of the Buenos Aires aristocracy in 1980, under the military takeover, this film is probably spot-on, but we wonder why we are there.

Three short films consisting entirely of extended conversations, a Japanese My Dinner with Andre or, more exactly, Drive My Car without action. I have never seen a movie that would translate so seamlessly to the stage yet felt authentically cinematic. The actors fully inhabited their roles, although as they were Japanese it’s hard for me to judge. Apparently made before Drive My Car, although released later in Japan, Wheel reads like a warm-up to the longer film, or a feminine counterpart.

A totally engaging if fanciful account of events surrounding the Munich conference of 1938 which hews to known historical facts and lends itself to a revisionist assessment of the agreement’s merits. The armature of the Chamberlain-Hitler negotiations supports an engaging fictional intrigue involving recent Oxford grads with minor positions in England’s and Germany’s ministries. This good, old-fashioned movie storytelling was needed relief from the more idiosyncratic films that have been filling our evenings. A bonus was recognizing so many European actors we were familiar with from, inter alia, 1917, Babylon Berlin , Toni Erdmann, The Crown and, of course, Brideshead Revisited.

A dreamy travelogue through Ingmar Bergman’s island, Faro, and a screenwriter’s mind. Fortunately, she is played by Vicky Krieps (how the movie’s blurb could call her an “American” beats me) and in the movie-within-a-movie by Mia Wasikowska, both of whom lay out the uncertainties and difficulties of human relationships in full view. When you try to make sense of what’s happening you realize you can’t. If you need a movie that makes sense, this isn’t for you. But if you believe a dreamy travelogue with stilted acting and a nonsensical ending can qualify as art, then this is a worthy topic of discussion.

Powerful and sleek, this compressed Macbeth begins in intensity and never lets up. Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand are good, not great, as the title couple (and closed captioning was an aid in following the dialogue). The black-and-white cinematography, modernist architecture and insistent score create an atmosphere of constant foreboding. Kathryn Hunter’s “Sisters” helps, too. The fault, if there be one, was in the play: we never understood why Macbeth turned on the king–a rather crucial point.