Movies Now

Be honest: Before last week, what did you know about Dunkirk?

Beyond the fact that it’s the title of a new wartime epic by “that director who made those really good Batman movies,” you probably didn’t know too much about the historical event.

“Brigsby Bear” opens with well-worn VHS footage from a long-running but curiously little-seen children’s show called “Brigsby Bear Adventures,” about a talking ursine hero whose magical quests yield tidy if not always intuitive moral lessons (i.e., “Curiosity is an unnatural emotion!”).

Holly Hunter gives one of the best performances of her career in writer-director Katherine Dieckmann’s indie drama “Strange Weather,” playing a Southerner reckoning with her son’s suicide. Watching an actress of Hunter’s caliber in a meaty leading role partly compensates for the creaky plot and overearnest tone.

Hunter stars as Darcy Baylor, who works as an administrative assistant at a small university.

For his sophomore feature, writer-director Dustin Guy Defa sets three stories on one day in modern-day New York, but “Person to Person” is a ’70s throwback. Director of photography Ashley Connor shot it on 16mm, but its vintage look goes beyond the film choice.

There’s a big, fat romantic wartime drama desperate to bust through the bloodshed, anguish and proselytizing that overwhelm director Sean Penn’s grimly earnest, wannabe epic “The Last Face.” But its capable, charismatic stars, Charlize Theron and Javier Bardem, can do only so much to keep us invested.

In the wrong-headed drama “A Family Man,” Gerard Butler plays Dane Jensen, a slimy, hard-charging team leader at a Chicago corporate placement firm who’s competing with his female counterpart (Alison Brie) to replace their semiretiring boss (Willem Dafoe, in a rare bad performance).