‘Lost in Yonkers’

Neil Simon’s play had a melancholy undertow, and Mercedes Ruehl and Irene Worth, who each won Tonys for their performances on Broadway, bring out its full, racking sadness under Martha Coolidge’s 1993 film direction. Ruehl plays a womanly child whose will is stunted by Worth, her ogre of a mother. It’s the summer of 1942, and Ruehl’s recently widowed brother (Jack Laufer) deposits his two sons (Mike Damus, left, and Brad Stoll) with his unaccommodating mother. The atmosphere inside their Yonkers apartment over their candy shop is thick with dreams. A major dreamer is Ruehl’s other brother (Richard Dreyfuss, right), a petty hoodlum hiding out there for a time (Cinemax Thursday at 8 p.m.).