Some people experience maturity at an early age when they are thrust by circumstances into a position of responsibility before they are ready. Some do not experience it until their twenties, thirties, or even forties. Others never do. In a society where maturity is defined by what you do for a living, who you are with, and whether or not you are emotionally and/or financially independent, lacking these attributes can lead to serious doubts of self worth. Brilliantly performed by Renate Reinsve (“Welcome to Norway”), winner of the Best Actress Award at the Cannes Film Festival, Joachim Trier’s (“Oslo, August 31st”) masterful The Worst Person in the World tells the story of four years in the life of Julie, a young woman feeling adrift without concrete goals or relationships who, like Frances Ha in Noah Baumbach’s comedy of the same name, must confront the idea that she is floundering and lacking direction in life.

Written by Eskil Vogt (“The Innocents”) and nominated for Academy awards for Best Original Screenplay and Best International Film, the film is divided into 12 chapters with a prologue and epilogue thrown in. The Worst Person in the World does not contain any very, very bad people. The title, according to the director, derives from the idea that many young people in Norway conclude that if they fail at one thing or another, they are then “the worst person in the world.” Trier says, “It’s a Norwegian term.” It’s also self-deprecating. “Oh. I failed. I’m the worst person in the world.” It’s that feeling of misery and personal failure — in love, for example.” “When was life supposed to start?” asks the narrator on Julie’s behalf.

Drifting between a desire to become a medical doctor, a psychologist, a photographer, and a writer, on turning 30, Julie is certain about one thing. She does not want children until she is ready, especially to her way of thinking, not when she has so much unfilled potential. She is holding out for an undefined, perhaps illusory time when suddenly everything will come together. The issue crystallizes when she meets and falls in love with Aksel (Anders Danielsen Lie, “Bergman Island”), a graphic novelist whose cartoon creature “Bobcat” is modeled after a big Nordic cat. He is a man ten years her senior who feels that time for him is fleeting and he wants to raise a family but feels blocked by Julie’s refusal.

After crashing a party, Julie meets Eivind (Herbert Nordrum, “Amundsen”), a young, modern thinking, and relatively unambitious counter man at a coffee shop. He is a man of simple pleasures, very much unlike Aksel who does not make too many demands on her. Both married, in a chapter, ironically labeled “Cheating,” they decide not to cheat on each other’s partners, but it takes a more subtle, tongue-in-cheek turn. Julie asks him, “I don’t want to be unfaithful; we both have partners, but are we allowed to do something, on the edge, that’s considered not unfaithful?” We can figure out the answer.

After being together for a few years, Julie tells Aksel in a powerful sequence that she wants to separate, expressing her desire to move beyond needing acceptance to find a degree of self-realization. In one of the best scenes, the world freezes in space and time as Julie runs through the city looking to find Eivind after she leaves Aksel pouring her a cup of coffee. Filled with animated sequences, a psychedelic mushroom trip, and a peeing contest, the film does not fit our pictures about what a romantic comedy should look like. Trier said, “For a long time I have wanted to make a film about love. One that goes a bit deeper than normal onscreen love stories, where everything is so simple, the stories so clear-cut, the feelings so admirably unambiguous.”

“The film,” he continues, “doesn’t dwell on hackneyed debates over the perils of living online, but it does ache for simple, tangible pleasures: The heat of touch and spontaneous human connection, and the luxury of stillness.” Backed by a wide-ranging eclectic soundtrack that runs the gamut from Cobra Man, the Ahmad Jamal Trio, and Caribou to Billie Holiday, Harry Nilsson, and Art Garfunkel, The Worst Person in the World may be the worst film title in the world, but it is a work of warmth and freshness that thwarts our expectations at every turn, recreating the best of the genre, yet is also a film that has space for the pain of loss and regret. In its engaging way, the film tells us that who we really are is not about what we do or what we have but about our spiritual nature, the richness of character, and the ability to give and receive love.

As Art Garfunkel sings Jobim’s “Waters of March” during the final credits, Julie discovers that who you are is: “A flower that blooms, A fox in the brush, A knot in the wood, The song of a thrush, The mystery of life, The steps in the hall, The sound of the wind, And the waterfall, It’s the moon floating free, It’s the curve of the slope, It’s an ant, it’s a be, It’s a reason for hope, and the riverbank sings, Of the waters of march, It’s the promise of spring, It’s the joy in your heart.”

The disease slowly attacks the details in one’s memories, blurring out the sharp edges of people and events from the past and present. Emma is a veterinary tech working in a dog shelter, where the local animal control officer forgets her name again and where she’s forced to monitor the number of days a pet has stayed in their care. Sadly, the owners often don’t respond to her calls to pick up their pets, and Emma is forced to make room for more dogs who show up each day. Emma narrates all of these moments and details seemingly for us, but as the film goes on, we realize, she’s narrating these stories for Jude, because he’s begun to show symptoms of NIA, and she’s terrified of losing him. She wonders one sleepless night, “When your disaster is everyone’s disaster, how do you grieve?”

Based on the short story by Aja Gabel and written for the screen by Mattson Tomlin, Little Fish chronicles the heartbreakingly lovely story of a wife who’s slowly losing her husband to a debilitating Alzheimer’s-like disease, and the strength she employs to keep going, day by day, trying to help hold them together. They support their friend Samantha (Soko, “A Good Man”), whose love Ben (Raúl Castillo, “ We the Animals”) asks for his songs to be recorded before he forgets them completely, and who threatens her one evening — he doesn’t remember where he is, or the identity of the strange woman in the house where he finds himself. She wonders “how to build a future if [her husband] keeps having to rebuild the past? How does one cope with the slow loss of identity, of memories, of loved ones? What decisions can she make, does she make to help save him?

Director Chad Hartigan’s film brings to bittersweet life the story of one couple facing an uncertain future, one foreshadowed in their friends’ lives and one Emma struggles to accept. Jude’s walls always showcased his photography, and they still do now, but the photos are affixed with labels. His days are peppered with brain-teaser questions a medical trial doctor gave him and walks around a city he’s re-discovering, each and every day. Josh Crockett’s editing and Sean McElwee’s cinematography take center stage in Little Fish, as Jude’s and Emma’s memories blend and blur together and as the story unfolds to viewers in small bursts of anecdotal memory. Emma and Jude share close personal moments, but we still see the blurred backgrounds of their world, focusing us on two people loving together in the smallest, yet most impactful ways. You begin this film knowing how sad the scenario will be, but there’s a melancholy beauty in this story, in no small part due to the wonderful strength shown by Cooke in her performance as Emma. Her anchoring gaze and her steadfast narration of their story as she guides Jude through their lives, reminds us of how important it is to cherish the moments we have now with our loved ones, and never to take them for granted. Gabel’s story and Tomlin’s screenplay bring this love to life on-screen, telling a sad tale, but one that is still uplifting in its fragility.

The story is about Victor Martin (Shatner, “Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous”), a 70-something, former NASA test pilot, who tools around Palm Springs in his vintage Porsche, trying to flirt with comely young women. Often accompanied by his buddy Sal (Christopher Lloyd, “Going in Style”), the two senior citizens live in a co-dependent relationship in which they attempt to create a bubble to fool Father Time, but pathetically fail at it. Victor ends up losing his license after challenging a young Latino to a drag race. This leads to the first major plot point, which shows Martin determined to gain back his beloved wheels while adjusting to life as a pedestrian — dolefully walking back from the supermarket with bags of groceries in tow as he watches life whiz by in sunny Palm Springs. But even with Lloyd’s companionship, which could had had the potential to liven up the screen as Shatner’s oddball trusty sidekick, the relationship doesn’t go very far because both actors are hampered by a tired premise and underdeveloped characters. Senior Moment is billed as a romantic comedy, but it is too anemic to break out of its paint-by-number script.

Sometimes the over-the-hill, fish out of water scenario works. But it’s most successful as farce, as in Rodney Dangerfield’s “Back to School,” but the story here — what there is of it — takes predictable turns without the requisite wide-eyed humor. The saving grace among the acting leads is veteran TV and film actor Jean Smart (“The Accountant”), who plays Caroline Summers, a level-headed, good-natured café owner. Smart succeeds at exuding a warmth that is lacking in the rest of the portrayals. But even her presence can’t save the ill-begotten film. The rest of the plot involves a mysterious cuckoo clock that’s affixed to the café wall, broken for decades, but brought back to life by Lloyd’s mechanical skills with Shatner standing by to take credit.

Now, with Victor, the erstwhile playboy, proving his worth as a “can-do” senior citizen, he embarks on acting his age to win over Summers the old-fashioned way: By being the reserved, sincere gentleman who has finally grown up. Another part of the story involves empathic Caroline’s efforts to save engendered sea tortoises (not “turtles” as Victor calls them), but this subplot doesn’t do the film any favors in bringing coherence to the budding romantic relationship between Victor and Caroline even though it’s used to demonstrate the former’s reformation as a past-his-prime narcissist.

Unfortunately, Senior Moment stays muddled because of a screenplay that walks a tightrope between the genres of broad comedy and sentimental romance. The film falls off the obstacle course way before reaching the other side. You might get some satisfaction in watching a pre-covid Southern California, where the sunshine is still unsullied by social distancing and universal mask wearing. If the film had bright spots besides the weather, it might have been a funny diversion — watching several veteran actors plying their craft. Unfortunately, there simply aren’t any to redeem the film or exploit the talents of its leads.

As the popular classical French love song “Plaisir d’Amour” says: “The joys of love are but a moment long. The pain of love endures the whole life long.” In that regard, one might ask how much joy there would be if love lasted less than a moment, perhaps only a fleeting glance? For Marta Vizy (Natasa Stork, “Jupiter’s Moon”), a Hungarian-born neurosurgeon in Lili Horvát’s (“The Wednesday Child”) enigmatic Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time, the joys of love are so evanescent that they cannot even be measured in time. Hungary’s submission for Best International Film at the 2021 Oscars, the film is a meditation on loneliness, the role of projection in a love relationship, and the problems we have in communicating the truth to each other.

Complete with a femme fatale, loads of atmosphere enhanced by Gábor Keresztes’ (“Comrade Drakulich”) score, and bits of opera and chamber piano music, and a captivating mystery that refuses to relinquish its hold on the viewer, all that is missing is Humphrey Bogart. Approaching the age of 40, as she tells her therapist (Péter Tóth), she has nothing to show for it other than, “One ex-boyfriend, two close friends, no children, one house.” According to Horvát, the film “shows the inner journey of a strong, determined, and yet fragile woman: A neurosurgeon who has achieved everything in her career, yet something fundamental is deeply missing from her life.”

Convinced that she has met the man she has been searching for her whole life at a convention in New Jersey, Marta makes an agreement with János Drexler (Viktor Bodó, “The Bridgeman”), a Hungarian doctor, to meet her in Budapest at the Liberty Bridge one month later. Willing and even eager to take risks at this point in her life, Marta takes the agreement seriously and flies back to Hungary after 20 years of living and working in the U.S. When János fails to show up at the specified time and location, however, she searches for him at the local hospital but, after seeing him at the hospital parking lot, she is shocked to learn that he does not recognize her and claims not to even know her, telling her there is a case of mistaken identity.

Unprepared emotionally for this revelation, she promptly faints ,but is revived not by the man of her dreams, but by Alex (Benett Vilmányi, “Guerilla”), a 20-something medical student who will play a major role later in the film. At first questioning her memory, then her sanity, Marta tells her therapist that it is possible she may have fabricated the relationship and it almost appears that she would rather be diagnosed with a mental or personality disorder than to accept the fact that she has been rejected by her would-be lover. Not ready to give up and return to the U.S., Marta takes a job as a surgeon at the hospital where he works, a position beneath her pay grade, but giving her hope that it will bring her closer to finding out the truth.

She takes a run-down apartment close to their proposed bridge meeting spot, constantly checks the photos from their New Jersey meeting to make sure she wasn’t dreaming and follows János in a taxi to watch his movements from a distance. Róbert Maly’s (“The Wednesday Child”) impeccable cinematography also adds a touch of magic realism in an iconic scene in which Marta and János walk on opposite sides of the street and imitate each other’s movements. As the two circle around each other, Marta is pursued by Alex, the young med student who revived her from her fainting spell, now revealed as the son of one of her patients, a man from whom she removed a brain tumor, an operation unfortunately shown in graphic detail.

The well-meaning, but in-over-his-head Alex takes Marta to dinner and claims that she loves him and should be grateful for his admiration, but she refuses to become involved. Natasa Stork’s performance is mesmerizing and one wonders why it has taken her so long to get her first real screen opportunity. She is cool and detached, but never cold or less than self-assured, though close-ups often provide a hint of her tenuous relationship with reality. Returning to acting after many years as a director, Viktor Bodó adds his own touch of charisma, adding another dimension to a fascinating puzzle. Preparations to Be Together for an Unknown Period of Time is an absorbing viewing experience that keeps us riveted to the screen, attempting to find out if there are any answers at the bottom of all the questions.

Though it does not detract from the excellence of the film, to me, why we love another person is not a science that can be analyzed either as one person’s projection or as a result of the jumping of chemicals between neurons in the brain. It is not a thing at all, but an emotion that can be rediscovered and embraced in all its mysteries and its holiness. As the poet Rilke wrote, “Do not seek the answers, which cannot be given to you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now . . . resolve to be always beginning, to be a beginner. There is only one journey. Going inside yourself. Here something blooms; from out of a silent crevice, an unknowing weed emerges singing into existence.”

In his first feature film, 1982, winner of the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema (NETPAC) award at the Toronto Film Festival, Lebanese director Oualid Mouaness looks at the Israeli-Lebanese War through the eyes of pre-adolescent children in Cedar High School, a private elementary school near Beirut. Based on his own experience as a ten-year old student on the last day of school in Lebanon in 1982, Mouaness’ film explores the children’s attempt to make sense of an incomprehensible situation, one that they can sense is fraught with danger for themselves and their families.

The camera, under the direction of cinematographer Brian Rigby Hubbard (“Ambition”), opens the film with shots of the beautiful and peaceful surrounding countryside but the landscape is soon punctured by the sound of telephone lines being blown up, tanks driving on the nearby streets, warships dotting the sea, and dueling fighter jets, like an out-of-sync video game, closing any space between the silences. On the last school day of the year, 11-year-old Wissam’s (Mohamad Dalli) focus is not on what is going on outside the school, however, but on summoning enough courage to tell a girl in his class, Joana (Gia Madi), that he loves her.

Part of his reluctance is that his parents have told him that he should wait until he is older before expressing his love to someone. Watching Joana after final exams, however, he follows her trying to get up enough courage to tell her what he rehearses in front of the bathroom mirror “Joana, I love you. Joana, I love you.” Though his best friend Majid (Ghassan Maalouf) tells him that we are not in America and this is not a movie, he insists on leaving her a note in her locker with a picture he drew of a superhero named Tigron who resembles a Japanese Super Robot from the anime television series “UFO Robot Grendizer.”

As the children look out the window to find the source of the increasing noise, Mouaness juxtaposes an adult relationship that is more complex but also filled with fear and avoidance. As plans are underway for the student’s graduation, Yasmine (Nadine Labaki, “Capernaum”), homeroom teacher and exam administrator, is in a relationship with fellow teacher Joseph (Rodrigue Sleiman, “Good Morning”). Straining to avoid discussing their political differences over the war in order to create a safe environment for the children, Yasmine struggles to have her students focus on their exams, telling them “it is nothing. It is far away,” and that what happens outside does not concern them.

As the children wait for their parents to pick them up and the tension increases, Wissam resorts to fantasies about how the robot Tigron can save them from harm. “What’s going on?” Joana asks, looking away. “I don’t know,” Wissam replies. While his full understanding of events taking place is spotty, he reaches out to protect Joana in a way that signals the beginning of his maturity. Making sure that she gets on the bus seated next to him, he seems to recognize perhaps for the first time that the truth of one’s relationship to another human being is not only the physical attraction but the commitment to love and protect.

In this lovely film which was eight years in the making, Mouannes explores, “the idea that children have a world that’s complete for them. They sort of understand what’s going on in the adult world but they have peace with how complete their own world is in and of itself.” He shows, in the phrase of Israeli author Aharon Applefeld (“To the Edge of Sorrow”) that in “the darkest places of human behavior generosity and love can survive; that humanity and love can overcome cruelty and brutality.” “I see the world,” he says, “in a very positive light and try to hold the darkness.” That is his gift to us in 1982.

For most parents, the process of letting go of grown children is difficult under normal circumstances, but for children with special needs, it can be a daunting challenge. In his fifth feature film, Here We Are (Hine Anachnu), Israeli director Nir Bergman (“Saving Neta”) focuses on the co-dependent relationship between Aharon (Shai Avivi, “Losing Alice” TV series), a separated father in his fifties, and his autistic son Uri (Noam Imber, “Beyond the Mountains and Hills”), a young man who is unable to care for himself. Written by Dana Idisis (“On the Spectrum” TV series), the film received eight Ophir (Israeli Oscars) nominations including Best Film and would have been Bergman’s first film to be shown at the 2020 Cannes Film Festival, but, unfortunately, it was canceled due to the pandemic.

More than 6-feet tall, Uri looks like a typical college freshman but his interests are limited to taking care of his fish, eating pasta stars, and obsessively watching Charlie Chaplin’s “The Kid.” His typical response to questions from his father is to repeat the question, substituting “I” for “you.” Retreating from the outside world, Aharon has given up his career as an artist to devote his life to the care of his son, but must deal with his wife Tamara’s (Smadi Wolfman, “Head Above Water”) wishes that Uri should be in a boarding school for special needs students where he can socialize and learn to be independent.

Aharon is convinced, however, that the boy needs more time to adjust to the idea of leaving and that he is the only one that can provide the loving care his son needs. There is no discussion of other options such as in-home care by a trained professional. While arrangements have been made for Uri to move to an institutional setting, he clings to his dad and refuses to leave. Ultimately, however, Aharon gives in to his wife’s desires and the wishes of a single-minded social worker, but Uri’s temper tantrums and an outburst at the facility ends up with a broken window in the spirit of Charlie Chaplin “The Kid.”

Feeling the need to get away, Aharon and Uri embark on a road trip across Israel, visiting Haifa, Bee’r Sheva, Eilat, Tel Aviv and other small cities along the way and the film becomes an insightful coming-of-age experience for both father and son, even though Aharon is more than fifty years old. Though a proposed trip to a farm in Pennsylvania comes up as empty as Aharon’s wallet, Bergman declared, “I love the characters, the relationships, the way Aharon has reduced his needs to accommodate his son’s, and the transformation they experience throughout their journey.” One of the most engaging scenes takes place in a club where Uri wanders off by himself.

When his father finds him on the dance floor rocking to the sounds of “Gloria”, the old Laura Branigan song from the 1980s, he lets go and begins dancing with Uri. Things get out of hand, however, when Uri steals a Popsicle and Aharon, unable to pay the vendor, gets into a fight which lands him in jail until he is bailed out by his brother. Here We Are is a poignant and moving story of a father’s love for his son and his unwillingness to face the fact of his son’s growing need for some independence and his own aging process.

Noam Imber is thoroughly convincing in the role of Uri and his performance is so real that it often feels like a documentary while Avivi handles the role of his father with grace and sensitivity. Though the story may not sound uplifting, in Bergman’s skillful hands, its sadness is balanced with humor and buoyed by the strength and dignity of its characters. As reported in “The Jewish Independent,” Bergman said “If I’m able to convey these characters as they are, from the written page to the screen, together with the bittersweet and humorous tone of the script, the audience will also fall in love with them.” He has succeeded in his wish.