The Big Sick – 7.8

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Every summer needs a fun and innocent rom-com, and The Big Sick is it for 2017, with the crazily adorable Zoe Kazan filling the Julia Roberts/Meg Ryan role. The more recognizable Ray Romano and Holly Hunter are idiosyncratically good as Emily’s parents, while the Pakistani family of Kumail (who plays himself!) is just as enjoyable in their cultural dissonance. There are no big laughs – in fact, the stand-up comics are surprisingly unfunny – and no big drama: we all know Emily will live and love will find a way. The movie’s strength is its consistent tone, pleasant company throughout – and Zoe Kazan.

Water & Power – 6.5

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This documentary tackled a fascinating subject – water rights in California – but left me with more questions than answers. It approached the topic from several different angles but never tied them together. The people of East Porterville had no running water for three years. Something called the Monterey Amendments set water allocations behind closed doors, favoring Kern County or corporate interests, or maybe they were the same. Then there were the Resnicks, big LACMA donors and producers of POM and Fiji Water, who somehow gamed the system to get all the water they need for massive almond and pistachio groves. Other big companies are buying vineyards for access to the aquifers below. Clips of Jack Nicholson in Chinatown showed that this, whatever it is, has been going on for decades. The talking heads – lawyers and journalists mostly on one side of the issue – carried the football for the filmmaker’s anti-almond point of view, but the film’s vignettes pointed in various directions. One interviewee suggested that water should be a public resource, not a private commodity, which would have been an interesting thesis that might have connected some of these dots. But as Water & Power left it, I had no idea how the Resnicks’ use of water contributed to the paucity in Porterville, or why in the last scene they were bulldozing their almond trees.

Their Finest – 7.8

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A movie about a plucky woman in wartime Britain making a movie about a plucky woman in wartime Britain, graced with the ever-pleasant figures of Bill Nighy and Gemma Arterton. The period details seemed just right, as was the mixture of wartime horror and cinema fantasy.

Baby Driver – 5.5

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This seems to be the buzz-generator of early summer, but that speaks more to the paucity of good movies than BD’s merits. Anson Elgort’s moves and cool are appealing, and Jamie Foxx and Jon Hamm are wonderfully scary bad guys, but that’s about it. The soundtrack is loud and unrelenting but doesn’t make much sense, the car chases are repetitive and hardly intellectual, the Atlanta setting is devoid of visual interest, the romance is cliched and predictable, and the plot is slightly less realistic than Wonder Woman.

Beatriz at Dinner – 7.5

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Fine acting by Salma Hayek and John Lithgow overcame a shaky plot premise to let us enjoy a roundelay of cleverly caricatured dinner guests. It is easy to read the movie as a parable of Democratic versus Republican values with an unfortunate ending, but the pleasures along the way were smaller, like hearing what cocktails were ordered.

Wonder Woman 6

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Silly fun, marred for me by a climactic battle that was befuddling, overlong and beyond absurd. Until then I could enjoy the comic-book characters, especially Chris Pine, and the cinematically familiar settings of World War I trenches, British cabinet meetings and German evil. Gal Gadot got better-looking as the movie progressed, which was good because we saw a lot of her.

Beguiled – 7.5

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A feminine thriller in full Southern Gothic mode, Sofia Coppola turns the cinematic tables with an almost all-female cast lusting in their separate ways for the hunky Union soldier dropped into their laps. Calling it a period piece is an understatement, as Coppola pulls out the beautiful dresses, the dripping Spanish moss, the candlelit chandeliers and the etiquette and French lessons of Miss Farnsworth’s Academy to full effect. Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst and Elle Fanning have convincing, and contrasting, Southern personalities, and Colin Farrell is best when lying supine. The story is at best an excuse for the acting and the scenery. I can see why this won a Cannes award for Best Director, not Best Picture.

Norman – 7.7

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In the end, Norman the fixer’s dealmaking pays off for all his friends through his ultimate self-sacrifice, and he ironically achieves the goal of his nemesis, the Israeli Justice Department official, by doing something that makes the world a better place. Or, more likely, all the good things shown on screen are happening in Norman’s imagination, as he says goodbye to the world. Whatever, we have come to identify with this lovable loser, skillfully portrayed by Richard Gere: he’s not exactly admirable, living, as he does, in a land of hopes and half-truths, but he’s not a bad guy, either. The Jewishness of the movie and its Israeli politics made me uncomfortable at first, but they were deftly handled and I came around. Maybe Steve Buscemi’s Italian rabbi was the needed balance.

Long Strange Trip – 7

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Totally satisfactory as a tribute to the Grateful Dead, four hours of archival footage and talking heads from the band and fans. Of course, the soundtrack was one happy thrill after another. Seeing it in a full house of Deadheads in Greenwich Village, with director Amir Bar-Lev present, made it more a pilgrimage than a mere movie experience. There was an underlying story, too, beyond the Dead’s musical innovation and excellence: their communal spirit informed and epitomized the ’60s flower-power era but couldn’t deal with the success that turned their concerts into near riots and perversely locked Jerry Garcia into an isolation that produced his drug-induced death. Oh, and Phil Lesh looks a lot better now than he did in the ’60s.

The Lovers – 7.5

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Seen amid a slew of Broadway productions, it was refreshing to enter a world of real people, real situations and real emotions. Not that the affairs seemed terribly real – it was hard to see what the respective individuals saw in each other – but the characters portrayed by Debra Winger and Tracy Letts were so well acted, and dressed so frumpily, that you scarcely thought of them as movie stars. There were no big stakes here, just people coping with their everyday lives, and you didn’t even particularly care how things worked out, or didn’t. The trick ending produced a smile and a deep thought or two as you left the theater, but it was probably the least real moment of the film.