The story kicks off with a mysterious clock being shipped to the Diehl residence. Without much pause, it’s thrown into the basement to rot away. Taylor (Easton Rocket Sweda), a mute boy who speaks through various AI voices on his iPad, fixes the clock and discovers he can turn back time just by changing the hour hand. At the same time, his parents (Greg Kinnear, “Phil” and Isla Fisher, “Blithe Spirit”) have warned the kids of an important meeting that will be happening later that night, everyone knows it’s a talk about a trial separation for the two of them. Taylor, alongside his two other siblings (Shay Rudolph, “I Wish You All the Best” and Mason Shea Joyce, “Hotel Artemis”), devises a plan to bring their family back together.

The familiar “Groundhog Day” trope is far from new, but it works best when it’s combined with new genres — movies like “Timecrimes,” or “Palm Springs” are great examples. The Present does a good job of combining comedy and romance into this looping day — we not only see the same day from many different angles, but also from many different perspectives in the family.

The problems with this film arise when the focus is placed on the adult relationships, specifically the core relationship with Greg Kinnear and Isla Fisher’s characters. Their emotions and motives are so volatile towards one another that it is amazing that the relationship has even lasted as long as it has. It feels like one slight misstep and the marriage is over, no matter the interjections. While there are some definite sweet moments between the couple, I can recall one where Kinnear’s character reluctantly gets a makeover and shows up to therapy looking as dashing as ever, it never breaks into the level of maturity we should expect from these role types. Despite commanding around the kids, the adults often act just as childlike as their younger counterparts, creating eye-rolls for much of the 86-minute runtime.

It’s a good thing then that a majority of the screen time is given to the kids in the family who abuse their time travel powers in many fun and exciting ways. Many scenes are shown multiple times from multiple angles giving the audiences that “Ah-ha!” moment time and time again as we watch the kids scheme up a master plan to bring their parents back together. There is an excellent montage sequence late in the film that I wish all time-shift movies had. The kids try everything under the sun to get the parents together whether it’s manipulating the stock market to one of them even faking their own death. Great stuff.

For a majority of The Present, the kids are tweaking and mastering this single grand plan until nothing could possibly go wrong, oddly though this plan is abandoned late in the third act and rather we get a generic and head-scratching ending to it all. Despite the lackluster conclusion, the movie features enough quaint jokes and silly time travel hi-jinks that it will definitely be fun for a whole family viewing.

The film is based on director and writer William Nicholson’s own experiences concerning the failing of his parents’ marriage. We follow Grace (Annette Bening, “Captain Marvel”) and Edward (Bill Nighy, “Pokémon Detective Pikachu”), and from the very beginning we get the sense that things aren’t right between the two. They live in the same house but with lives that don’t overlap, consumed in their own activities and hobbies. It becomes quite clear that the marriage has become toxic, where Edward feels trapped while Grace wants to bait him into fixing things yet does it in a way that’s counter-productive.

The scenes with Bening and Nighy are appropriately paced, with Nicholson smartly choosing to just focus the action on the two, reminding me a bit of Noah Baumbach’s “Marriage Story,” fleshing out a marriage that is a little farther down the road, with the poignancy hitting even more because we realize that Edward doesn’t love Grace anymore. There is a whole discourse here about love, and how, according to Edward, it shouldn’t feel like work. With Grace it always felt like work, and as he looks back on their life together, he feels that he went in the wrong direction, and leaving her now feels like a step in the right direction. Should love be effortless in the way Edward describes? Maybe. But if Grace wants to work at it and he doesn’t, then the math doesn’t really add up.

Nicholson doesn’t take the easy way out, showing us the flaws and acute truths of these characters. Grace has been cheated on and abandoned by her husband, but at the same time, she is pretty insufferable. We feel sorry for Edward that he had to tolerate years of being with someone he didn’t love anymore, yet we wonder if he could have communicated better instead of taking the “easy” way out.

Grace’s son Jamie (Josh O’Connor, “Florence Foster Jenkins”) starts to fill the void left by Edward in her life, though he also feels the frustrations of being around his mother. He loves her, but she isn’t the easiest person to get along with, and it is even worse now that she’s drowning in the despair of losing Edward. She starts to question her purpose in life; who is she now without her husband? The idea of isolation also starts to peck at her, since it feels like the road ahead is just her walking alone.

Hope Gap isn’t afraid to go into darker topics either — that of death and suicide, which are means we contemplate in the darkest, bleakest moments of our lives — and offers a lifeline I never truly thought about. As Jamie eloquently phrased it, his mom is ahead of him in the journey of life, and seeing how far she has gone gives him the hope to carry on with his journey despite the bumps in the road. She needs to live so that he has the courage to as well, her life is not lived in isolation even if she may not be with her husband anymore.

So despite the film being about the breaking of a marriage and the healing that comes afterwards, it also feels quite universal, a reminder that these hopeless moments in our lives are experiences others have lived through, so we should feel less alone trudging through the pain.

Noah Baumbach’s (“The Meyerowitz Stories”) Marriage Story is a penetrating look at the spiraling effect of divorce American style on those involved, one that radiates compassion for its beleaguered characters Nicole (Scarlett Johansson, “Avengers: Endgame”) and Charlie (Adam Driver, “BlacKkKlansman”) as they struggle to maintain their dignity through a dehumanizing process. If love means never having to say you’re sorry, you are probably not living on planet Earth, though I’m sure other places may have their compensations. For Nicole and Charlie, however, just saying “I’m sorry” will not even reach the tip of the iceberg.

Nicole is a native of Los Angeles who left a budding movie career on the West Coast to move to New York with their young son Henry (Azhy Robertson, “After the Wedding”) to star in the productions of her husband Charlie, an acclaimed theater director. In his role as Charlie, Driver is consistently brilliant in his portrayal of a man on the brink of despair, desperately trying to hold his life together in the face of fast changing circumstances, while Johansson has that uncommon quality that makes you care deeply about her. We first meet the two through film montages in which they discuss each other’s virtues and idiosyncrasies, love letters asserting the qualities that they find endearing.

Nicole loves that Charlie is organized and dresses without embarrassing her. Charlie loves the way Nicole cuts his hair and makes tea and leaves it around the house. Charlie talks about his wife’s devotion to playing with their son and how patient she is. To Nicole (who refuses to read hers out loud), Charlie never gets upset about the little things and is really a talented director. Unfortunately, we soon find out that the tributes were only written at the request of a marriage mediator as part of the couple’s plans for divorce. Nicole refuses the request to read it aloud, however, and leaves the room in a fit of temper. This becomes more understandable when we learn that she has decided to take Henry with her to L.A. to shoot a TV pilot and pursue her movie ambitions.

Complicating the situation is the fact that Charlie has just received a MacArthur Fellowship and has agreed to live in New York. Further muddying the water is Charlie’s affair with a woman at his theater company. Although Charlie believes Nicole plans to move back to New York after the shoot, she has other ideas and the thought of having to travel back and forth on a 3,000 mile trip to see his son does not sit well with Charlie. It seems to be resolved, however, when during his visit to California, he ends up being served divorce papers by Nicole’s sister Cassie (Merritt Wever, “Greenberg”) in one of the funniest scenes in a film in which humor is sparse but always welcome.

What starts out as an amicable separation between two people who treat each other with respect turns into a circus, however, when high-priced, aggressive, and uncaring lawyers, Laura Dern (“Star Wars: The Last Jedi”), Ray Liotta (“The Son of No One”) and Alan Alda (“Bridge of Spies”) come into the picture and the weather forecast becomes cloudy with a likelihood of rain. Fighting a custody battle for Henry, Dern is exceptional as Nicole’s lawyer Nora Fanshaw, an outwardly warm and caring person, but underneath a saber-toothed cat who delivers a crusading speech about the different expectations for a woman. Charlie’s second lawyer after the amiable, but too laid back, Bert Spitz (Alda) is Jay (Liotta in his best role since 2012’s “The Place Beyond the Pines”).

Jay is up front about the financial cost ($950 an hour) as well as the emotional cost in turning resolvable differences into attack weapons to corner and belittle his adversary. With some personal experience in the matter, Baumbach does his best not to show preference for either aggrieved party, but depicts the divorce process to be one that is filled with gladiator-like combat that only serves to draw the contesting parties further apart. While it is obvious that the charming, self-absorbed Charlie should have shown more awareness of Nicole’s needs for a career of her own, it is equally the case that his wife’s ability to communicate her needs was inadequate.

If “love is a function of communication,” Nicole and Charlie forgot it somewhere along the way. The film’s emotional high point is the animated, accusatory conversation between husband and wife, perhaps better described as a shouting match. Though well-written, the verbal sparring becomes overwrought, though it mercifully ignores excessive use of the “F” and “S” words, so lazily prevalent in today’s culture as a substitute for thoughtful dialogue and wit. While Marriage Story covers a lot of ground and is open to many interpretations, it all but stays away from any deep examination of the larger issues in a relationship such as commitment, responsibility, and communication, the cornerstones of any successful marriage.

Asked what the film is about, Baumbach says, “It’s many things; it’s about how love is not always enough.” As author Werner Erhard put it, however, “The truth is that that’s all there is. And if you take the barriers out of the way, if you take the pretenses out of the way, if you take those things that you didn’t take responsibility for in your life out of the way, what you have left is love,” and adds, “You don’t have to be looking for love when it is where you come from.”

Strickland (“The Duke of Burgundy”) is an unconventionally adventurous auteur, demonstrating a distinct artistic absurdity in the telling of a story about a cursed dress with a devious mind of its own. Haunting and hysterically atmospheric, In Fabric is an off-the-cuff horror story that is playfully perverse in its whispery commentary on the lonely who are not just facing isolation within the walls of a shadowy department store, but also in an indifferent world of high-strung happenstance. The Gothic-accentuated vibes, sumptuous and striking set designs, and a thunderous soundtrack all give surrealistic adrenaline to Strickland’s killer clothing narrative.

The target is now divorced and employed as a bank clerk, single mother Sheila (Marianne Jean-Baptiste, Oscar-nominated for her terrific turn in 1996’s “Secrets & Lies”) who wants to put some much-needed spark in her love life since her marriage ended. So the scene at Dentley & Soper’s Trusted Department Store affords her the golden opportunity to splurge on a piece of wardrobe that hopefully will make her stand out to a potential lover. Sheila, however, is unaware of the extremely malevolent forces that hover over the store and its oddball employees that give a new literal meaning to being “dressed to kill.”

Sheila is carrying a full plate of concerns that a fancy dress cannot rescue her from despite what the desired fabric represents. In addition to tackling the unpredictable dating game, Sheila must contend with a stubborn-minded son named Vince (Jaygann Ayeh) who is involved with a vicious vixen of a girlfriend named Gwen (Gwendoline Christie, “The Darkest Minds”). Furthermore, Sheila’s stuffy bosses Stash (Julian Barratt, “Mindhorn”) and Clive (Steve Oram, “Sightseers”) are insufferable as they give her a hard time on her work-related endeavors.

Mixing atmospheric, seductive madness with deadpan humor, Strickland ensures that the darkened insanity of his film crackles with wily, concocted craziness. Interestingly — and more unexpectedly — the disturbing dress at the heart of the story is a memorable piece of evil that belongs among the ranks of cinema’s most iconic horror objects such as the razor-fingered glove worn by Freddy Krueger in “A Nightmare on Elm Street,” Jason’s hockey mask from “Friday the 13th,” and even the murderous doll Chuckie from “Child’s Play.”

Strickland’s sharp eye for the outrageousness of the consumerist culture (both morbid and merry) is additionally dressed to the nines by the eccentric and macabre personalities dwelling within. Jean-Baptiste is marvelous as the unaware Sheila spiraling into the realm of department store deviance, loveless malaise, and ever increasing shifty encounters. The supporting cast is wickedly unbalanced in their shadiness as well. Fatma Mohamed (“Self-Portrait of a Dutiful Daughter”) is inviting as the intoxicating, but ghoulish, sales assistant Miss Luckmoore, a gorgeous specimen mechanically distributing her icy spiel on merchandise. Hayley Squires (“I, Daniel Blake”) as Babs is winning as she and Jean-Baptiste’s Sheila venture through the hot-and-cold moodiness of Strickland’s ethereal haze of topsy-turvy, hypnotic hedonism. And the dueling cringe-worthy antics of the Barratt and Oram pairing as Sheila’s bothersome managers is British comic relief at its irreverent finest.

In Fabric is an off-the-wall, acid-tongued horror comedy saturated in strangeness. But just like the hexed garment at its core, its calculated lunacy — though not a fit for everyone — is one certainly worth trying on.

Shortly after the instructive sound bite, Stefan is found dead in his apartment from an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound. His wife, Katherine (Katherine Waterston, “Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald”), from whom he was currently separated (the result of tabloids publishing photographs of him with another woman), discovers his body in their formerly shared apartment. The sleek, stark spaces are littered with papers, cigarette butts, empty bottles of alcohol, and drug paraphernalia — detritus of his methods for escaping a life lived in the public eye.

Such a statement was given and meant to be taken as musings about the nature of art in a purely professional context, although the substance can just as easily be applied to the self-preservation tendencies of all the film’s characters, who must tell themselves and each other certain stories in order to go on living and explain away the circumstances of Stefan’s untimely death and their own potential involvement in it.

About a year has passed when Katherine — back at her gig as a fashion photographer — receives a phone call that her mother (a well cast Mary Kay Place, “Diane,” bearing a striking resemblance to Waterston) is in hospital in Brussels. Katherine rushes to her bedside and, while her declining health appears real, the event is also a contrived plot to bring Katherine back to Belgium where she must clear out her and Stefan’s apartment prior to it being sold.

In addition to her own, Katherine must also deal with Stefan’s controlling mother, who blames Katherine for leaving her son and, therefore, his suicide. She’s not alone in this sentiment as Katherine seems to place the blame on herself, as well. It’s been about a year since Stefan died and she still can’t make sense of it. Her reentry into their apartment and life together prompts her to begin investigating the details of the affair, who could have leaked the incriminating photos to the press, and whether or not there was any foul play surrounding Stefan’s death. As is often the case with those in states like grief, Katherine is simply going through the motions — tracking down leads, following the trail wherever it takes her, and ultimately constructing a more palatable, but less likely story out of pieces that do not necessarily fit.

State Like Sleep rejects traditional ghost story tropes and shows there are many ways to be haunted by one’s pasts. Katherine is haunted by guilt. Her rather passive investigation is more a means of exculpating herself rather than finding the truth. She is haunted by memories of Stefan, which play out as expositional flickers and flashbacks. We seem them together in bed, happy. We see them dining with his mother, where they celebrate his new role before breaking the news of their intention to move to New York. “I’ll follow you all over the world. I’ll never let you go,” he devotedly teases. And she is haunted by his secrets, mysteries big and small that he kept from her. An accomplished actor, poised for super-stardom in a new blockbuster franchise, Stefan became accustomed to playing many parts, most of which are only revealed in death.

As with most films in which he appears, Michael Shannon (“The Shape of Water”) is the standout here as Edward, a lonely traveler staying in the hotel room next door to Katherine. For both, their trendy Brussels accommodations represent a place apart from the real world. Here, they can dissociate from their real lives and portray completely different people. His seemingly random encounters with Katherine provide the film’s only attempts at humor and real human connection. His character is a well-dressed and, dare I say, sexy potential love interest — a welcomed change from the self-flagellating lawmen he usually plays. Here, Katherine gets to do all the self-harming as well as the investigating. At first, he seems out of place in this dreary world, and then becomes a welcomed visitor. After a few chance mildly flirtatious encounters, Katherine knocks at Edward’s door and propositions a chance sexual encounter. “Doesn’t have to mean anything” she clarifies. To which he responds, “Who decides that?” The film posits that each of us is entitled to meaning, though such assignations are not always universally acknowledged as true. The truth is too random.

In music, fugue is defined as a contrapuntal composition in which a short melody is introduced by one part and successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts. The same application applies here with Stefan introducing the idea of storytelling as a defense against chaos, which is successively taken up by Katherine, Edward, his mother and hers, and then interwoven among them. But sometimes the details don’t add up.

In the end, the characters are empty, vacant ciphers. The frames have blurry edges and backgrounds, like the way faces and places in dreams appear fuzzy to make it clear that what is happening is not real. Without Stefan and their life together, plagued by grief, Katherine has lost her sense of self. And while the characters’ loss of identity and lack of dimensionality is presumably an intended feature and not a bug, it still left me wanting more. Unlike Stefan and his secrets, State Like Sleep fails to haunt or stay with you in any meaningful way, and maybe, just maybe, there is meaning in that. For the one thing it shares is its characters’ emptiness, and just like a dream, it left my mind as soon as it was over.

Isabelle (Juliette Binoche, “Ghost in the Shell”), a divorced fiftyish artist, is attractive, urbane, and highly intelligent but her relationships seem to have a built-in mechanism for self destruction. The men in Isabelle’s life offer her little except temporary physical pleasure and are pretty much ciphers (and not very nice ones at that). Loosely based on Roland Barthes’ book “A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments” with a screenplay by Christine Angot, Claire Denis’ (“Bastards”) sophisticated comedy/drama Let the Sunshine In (Un beau soleil intérieur) is lighter fare than normal for Denis, but it has its probing, self-reflective moments as well and Juliet Binoche, as usual, is an appealing screen presence.

Isabelle wants to find someone who fits her pictures but, as most of us discover sooner or later, life often does not fit our pictures. All of her relationships start out to be very promising, but eventually the decisions she makes about her partners seem to get in the way of her satisfaction. Whatever she thinks that she is looking for, she does not find it with either banker Vincent (Xavier Beauvois, “Farewell, My Queen”), actor (Nicolas Duvauchelle, “Wedding Unplanned”), ex-husband François (Laurent Grévill, “A Perfect Man”), or any other potential beau for that matter. The film begins with Isabelle in bed with the married, pretentious Vincent. Things are looking a-okay until she decides that he is taking too long to climax, a fact she decides reflects badly on her.

Vincent asks her whether she has had more success with other lovers, but her response is a convincing slap in the face. She is with him when he bullies a bartender, but she does not react. The next time he visits her in her apartment, however, she calls him an unrepeatable name, then tells him to leave and not come back. Instead, she hooks up with a young actor (Nicolas Duvauchelle, “The Well-Digger’s Daughter”) who is also married, (though with a better disposition). When she invites him in for a drink, they play endless games about whether he should stay or leave. When he decides to stay, they go through the motions together, but by the next morning he concludes that things were better before they had sex and wishes that it had not happened.

The next one up is François (Grévill), who is concerned about their ten-year-old daughter after she tells him that her mother cries every night. This is not good news for Isabelle to hear and she uses it as a reason to end any chance for reconciliation. There are several more suitors that follow, but Isabelle always finds something about them that she dislikes. She meets Sylvain (Paul Blain, “All is Forgiven”) at a club and he literally sweeps her away with pleasure as they dance to Etta James’ beautiful “At Last.” Unfortunately, Fabrice (Bruno Podalydès, “Chocolat”), an art gallery owner, convinces her that Sylvain is wrong for her because he is not a good fit for her circle. This provides cover for her to end yet another relationship, one that had barely even begun.

There is not much left for her of course but to go to a clairvoyant (Gérard Depardieu, “My Afternoons with Margueritte”), but his banter provides little certainty that she will find “the one.” There are times in Let the Sunshine In when Isabelle has moments of happiness and optimism, but she can also come across as needy and, at times, almost desperate. Nonetheless, through the magic of Binoche’s performance, she is a sympathetic figure and one that we root for. Her quest, however, has a touch of game playing to it and it seems that, for Isabelle, it may not be whether you win or lose but how you play the game.