Entertainment

Though gently restrained and delicately crafted, “The Quiet Girl” has managed to make plenty of noise. Colm Bairead’s modestly scaled drama, his narrative directorial debut, is the highest-grossing Irish-language film of all time. It bested “Belfast” at the Irish Film & Television Awards. And it’s nominated for best international film at the Academy Awards, a first for Ireland.

The richly hard-boiled terrain of detective Philip Marlowe has always been, to quote Raymond Chandler, “a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.”

In a funnier world, Zoë Chao and Tig Notaro are starring in their own romantic comedy together. Meantime, in the real world, they’re ringers in support of Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher, the ones running what we’ll charitably call “the show” in “Your Place or Mine.” No question mark on that title. None needed. It’s a flat business proposition, like the movie now streaming on Netflix.

The Cannes award-winner “Close” from Belgian writer-director Lukas Dhont (“Girl”) is a sad tale of innocence and loss. The protagonists are 13-year-old boys who are inseparable. At school, they are teased, sometimes in an ugly manner, about being gay. This causes one of the boys, Leo (a revelatory Eden Dambrine), to push the other, Remi (the sensitive Gustav De Waele) away, resulting in tragedy.

Already there’s a huge range of reactions to “You People,” which debuted on Netflix Friday after a week in a few theaters for appearance’s sake. Hilarious? Riotous? Hackneyed? Annoying? Are comic sensibilities really so various that nobody can agree whether the laughs and the heart are there with this thing, or not?

LIMA — Something straight out of fantasy will make its way to Lima Sunday afternoon. “Dragons and Mythical Beasts,” a show featuring spectacular puppets,...

It should come as no shock that the great novelist Kazuo Ishiguro (“The Remains of the Day,” “Never Let Me Go,” “Klara and the Sun”) has a beautifully delicate hand as a screenwriter — but nonetheless “Living,” directed by Oliver Hermanus and based on Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film “Ikiru,” arrives as a happy surprise. Not that it’s a happy movie, precisely, but this quiet tale of an ordinary 1950s London man (Bill Nighy) facing the end of his life is a joy: elegantly written, movingly performed, evocatively filmed. Like the best of novels — one of Ishiguro’s, for example — it creates a tiny world to get lost in, one whose faces and shadows and sunlight linger with you, even after you’ve returned to your own.

A pleasantly nutty thriller about a crafty, high-end toy, “M3GAN” exploits a child’s grief for the greater good of the killer-doll genre. That may be enough for 100 minutes of your early January.

The “Grumpy Old Men” era seems to come for all of our lovable movie stars, including Tom Hanks, who easily slides into this new phase with “The Man Called Otto,” a remake of the Oscar-nominated Swedish film, “A Man Called Ove.” It’s not easy to translate the famously dry and somewhat bleak Scandinavian humor to a sunnier, more optimistic American worldview, but writer David Magee and director Marc Forster manage to maintain the melancholy of the original film, which is based on the book by Swedish author Fredrik Backman.

An overacted, badly written, murder mystery dud, “The Pale Blue Eye” takes its title from a quote from Edgar Allan Poe’s 1843 Boston-set story “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Poe himself is also a character in the film, an adaptation of the 2006 novel by Louis Bayard adapted by writer-director Scott Cooper (“Antlers,” “Black Mass”). The film’s action is set beneath an iron winter sky in 1830 at the United States Military Academy, West Point, where Poe is a cadet, in a snow-covered, densely-wooded Hudson Valley, New York. After an apparent suicide of a cadet, academy leaders Colonel Thayer (Timothy Spall) and Captain Hitchcock (Simon McBurney) hire celebrated, detective Augustus Landor (a bearded Christian Bale) to get the bottom of the dark, blood-spattered mystery.