August is typically a slow month for new releases, and this year was no exception. But if you look a little closer at the indies and international films that made their way to audiences this month, there are still some gems to be found. Here are the three best movies to catch in theaters now and, likely in short order, on a streaming service near you.
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Between the Temples
Over the past 15 years or so, independent filmmaker Nathan Silver has made a number of odd but interesting little films, pictures that might be lacking in polish but bear a distinctive personal stamp. In his delightfully off-kilter sort-of romantic comedy Between the Temples, Jason Schwartzman plays Ben Gottlieb, a depressed cantor who has lost both the will and the ability to sing. He serendipitously reconnects with the grade-school music teacher who’d always believed in him, Carla Kessler, played by Carol Kane, who has decided that at long last, even though she’s senior-citizen age, she wants the bat mitzvah she never had. She persuades Ben to tutor her, but he’s the one who ends up reconnecting with the essence of his faith—and he also gets his voice back. Kane—adored by just about anyone who’s ever seen Hester Street, The Princess Bride, Scrooged, or an episode of Taxi—is one of those performers we don’t get to see often enough. With her helium cackle and day-at-the-beach smile, she’s both dazzling and disarming—she can make you feel deliriously, marvelously dizzy, the way you get when you’ve looked at a sparkler too long. She and Schwartzman are wonderful together; their rhythms click into a single heartbeat. We have Silver to thank for getting them together.
Read more: Between the Temples and the New Jewish Cinema
Good One
Writer-director India Donaldson’s debut Good One feels like a bracing discovery: it’s a delicate picture, but one that sticks with you long after the lights come up. Relative newcomer Lily Collias is superb as 17-year-old Sam, who’s headed for a weekend camping trip with her father Chris (James Le Gros) and his oldest friend, Matt (Danny McCarthy). Chris is divorced from Sam’s mother and has a new baby with his second wife; Matt is an underemployed actor who’s still reeling from a recent divorce. Sam has no reason to care about these guys’ man problems. But she listens sympathetically as they spin out their songs of late-middle-age woe around the campfire. And then, in a flash of time that can’t be reversed, everything changes. Good One shows how having the gift of empathy can sometimes feel like a punishment. Yet what choice do we have? Especially if, as women, we’ve been raised to feel that it’s our job to nurture? Still, Sam is on the winning side: her generosity isn’t a mistake but a luminous quality, worth hanging onto. Collias captures something gossamer here, a quiet shift into adult womanhood that happens, literally, overnight. [Read the full review.]
Close Your Eyes
Spanish master Víctor Erice has made only four feature-length films; his best known may be 1973’s Spirit of the Beehive. So when a new one arrives, run, don’t walk. His latest, Close Your Eyes, is an enveloping, tender film about the nature of memory and memories—they may conjoin at points, but they’re not the same thing. A famous actor, Julio Arenas (José Coronado), disappears mysteriously during the making of a film, sometime in the early 1990s. He never resurfaces and is presumed dead. Some 20 years later, the director of that film, Miguel Garay (Manolo Solo), now lives in a cozy beachside shack. He’s still writing, but the making of films is a whole other world, one that’s left him behind. He learns that Julio—who also happened to be his oldest and closest friend—may still be alive. What follows is partly a meditation on the nature of friendship: what we think we know of a person never tells the full story. But mostly, it’s a poetic reflection on the way cinema feeds into the very essence of memory. Movies touch everything we know; there’s no hiding from them.