The scruffy looking, bearded Johnny travels to Los Angeles to take care of Jesse when the boy’s mother Viv (Gaby Hoffmann, “Wild”) is called away to care for her ex-husband Paul (Scott McNairy, “Frank”), being treated for mental health issues. Jesse is chosen to accompany Johnny on his travels around the country interviewing high school students about their view of the future and the film focuses on the opportunity for Johnny to appreciate and reach out to others, a trait in which he appears to be out of practice. As a single man unfamiliar with the minefield of parenthood, it is a relationship that will require more than a spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down.

Shot in black and white to give it that documentary feel, the photography often creates a drab and spiritless atmosphere that seems at odds with the volatile events taking place in the film. Talking into a microphone in his hotel room in the opening scene in Detroit, Johnny rehearses the questions he will ask the students — how they feel about the cities where they live, their relationship with their families, and what makes them happy. He and Jesse will soon find out, however, that the young people they interview live in different worlds than them. They come from different backgrounds and offer a wide variety of messages, but their hopes for the future are limited by their circumstances and their daily struggle for life’s necessities.

While the student’s responses are forthright and sincere, unfortunately, Mills uses them as props for the main characters and the interviews do not probe as much as they might have. As Johnny approaches his brand new parenting responsibilities with good intentions (but also a bit of naïveté), past incidents with sister Viv come to the surface in their many phone calls and text messages. Viv offers some good advice to her brother about how to deal with the quirky Jesse when he becomes demanding. In one “game,” Johnny is put in a position where he has to support Jesse’s nightly game of pretending to be an orphan. This ritual demands that the adult he is with play the role of a foster parent answering questions about his dead relatives, a game that exceeds our normal understanding of odd behavior.

Jesse can be quite charming at times and abrasive and annoying at other times but his acting out with shows of temper and getting lost twice seems like overkill to stir our dormant emotions. The boy, who seems to be much older than his age, is very direct in his questions to Johnny, asking him “Why aren’t you married?” and often acts as if he is mentoring his uncle rather than the other way around. Though the film feels contrived, Phoenix delivers his usual solid performance and Norman is a young actor with a bright future.

Sister Viv is a welcome long distance companion who helps Johnny navigate his relationship with Jesse and, in Gaby Hoffman’s outstanding performance, is an easy character to identify with and care about. While the main characters show growth in the film, their interactions seem less like a bonding exercise than a therapeutic counseling session, an effect that robs C’mon C’mon of much of its authenticity.

British Poet Percy Bysse Shelley said, “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” This sense of seeing the world newly permeates Georgian director Aleksandre Koberidze’s (“Let the Summer Never Come Again”) What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (Ras vkhedavt, rodesac cas vukurebt?), a lovely cinematic tone poem that bounces between playful fantasy and documentary-like realism. Winner of the FIPRESCI prize at the recent Berlinale, in its two and a half-hour run time, Koberidze celebrates the country of Georgia and the city of Kutaisi including extended montages showing joy on the faces of small children, slow-motion choreographed rhythm of a soccer game, and the eternal power of two human beings to find magic in each other’s presence.

In a seemingly chance encounter, a young man, Giorgi (Giorgi Ambroladze), a local football star, and a young woman, Lisa (Oliko Barbakadze), a pharmacist, while walking in opposite directions, meet awkwardly when she drops her book and he bends to pick it up for her. The sequence is shot only from the knees down so their faces and its expressions are left to our imagination. Constantly retracing their steps and repeatedly bumping into each other, they discover they have chemistry together and agree to meet the next day for lunch at a café (though thoughtlessly neglecting to find out the other person’s name). On Lisa’s walk home, however, the force is with her, changing the trajectory of her life as well as that of her new friend.

Ordinary objects such as a traffic light, a drainpipe, and the wind, become transmitters of the force, what the narrator (voiced by the director) describes as the “evil eye.” Only the loud motor of a passing car prevents her from hearing the most important detail. Not only will their physical appearance drastically change by the next morning, they will also lose the skills they had worked their whole lives to attain. Lisa, now played by another first-time actress Ani Karseladze, is no longer able to remember her medical school education and Giorgi (Giorgi Bochorishvili, “Adam & Eve”) is unable to even kick a soccer ball over a short fence.

Koberidze calls our attention to their transformation not by employing technological wizardry, but by inviting the viewer to become a participant, beginning with the command “Attention!” prominently displayed on the screen. This is followed by the instruction to look away on the first sound and look back only on the second, engaging the viewer in the mystery of how the real nature of our world is always invisible. Koberidze said that he was “looking to mess with the viewer’s perception,” and that “sometimes you are required to be active and sometimes you can relax — almost like a child hearing a bedtime story.”

The main focus of the film is the effect that sudden change has on Lisa and Giorgi. Author and essayist Rebecca Solnit said, “To be lost is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to be capable of being in uncertainty and mystery,” and that is where Lisa and Giorgi find themselves. Sadly, when they meet at the café at the agreed-upon time, neither recognizes the other. As she takes a job at the café and he directs a strongman challenge on the bridge opposite the café, the Soccer World Cup begins and we find out the different viewing points in the city where locals (including the dogs with their intriguingly provided names) gather to watch the matches.

While What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? moves slowly, it does not drag but, like mindfulness meditation, allows us to be present to the things of beauty we see each day but never recognize. Koberidze has said that “I think one of the purposes of cinema is to help bring us closer to a hidden rhythm, to the flow of time. One — but not the only — way to achieve this is to observe your surroundings while hearing music.” The director’s brother (also Giorgi) score brings us closer to this rhythm, adding even more playfulness and enchantment to each scene: The faces of children coming home from school, celebrating the start of the World Cup by painting the name of Argentine soccer star Messi on their backs in yellow, and the sight of a soccer ball bouncing merrily, merrily down a swiftly flowing river telling us that life is but a dream.

Mundane events call our attention to the things in our life we usually take for granted. Thoreau said, “Not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.” Lisa visits the music school looking for one of the teachers that can lift her curse; they go to the house in the countryside where she and Giorgi pick up a birthday cake. There is an entrancing slow motion montage of children practicing the game of soccer to the sounds of the 1990 World Cup song, “Notti Magiche,” a magical interlude that tells us all we need to know about the natural state of being without the layers that have been added to it, things that Rilke declared “have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the senses with which we could have grasped them are atrophied.”

What Do We See When We Look at the Sky can be classified (by those determined to classify everything) as fantasy or magic realism, in its essence, it defies categorization. While some of the depictions in the film flirt with the pretentious or even nonsensical, in Koberidze’s world, everything becomes real and truly alive. While most of us see ourselves as an identity defined by what we look like, what we may do for a living, and our relations with each other, it is only when Lisa and Giorgi wake up the next morning without their football uniform and laboratory coat and with completely changed physical features do they begin to understand that identity is more a function of a deeper sense of who we really are beyond our present physical form. As Koberidze asserts, “Then happened, what had to happen.” If we open our eyes, this is what we will see when we look at the sky.

Starring the always talented James McAvoy (“It: Chapter Two”) and Sharon Horgan (“Game Night”), the duo play an unnamed pair (credited as “He” and “She”) who evoke the picturesque millennial couple. Their house is quirky but refined, their fashion choices are professional but casual, and their kitchen is one part HGTV, another a tornado — all of which is perfectly brought to life by production designer Karen Wakefield and the rest of the talented art department. Yet like most relationships brought to life on the silver screen, not everything is as perfect as it appears between the leads — for though they try to keep things going for their son, Artie (Samuel Logan), this pandemic will be the ultimate test of their will to see this marriage through.

Shot in only ten days, Together feels equally as scrappy as it is skillfully made. And that sort of Gorilla-style production adds a specific kind of charm to it, from its first frame onward. Yet as the camera enters the home of our nameless couple, cinematographer Iain Struthers beautiful weaves viewers through the various conversations, fights, rooms, and mushroom-specific monologues, like the greatest of Broadway choreographers. In fact, much of Together feels like a play brought to life — in both the excellent rhythm of the acting at hand, along with the way in which Daldry and Martin cinematically orchestrate their cast.

From extreme amounts of fourth wall breaking to incredibly calculated sequences that seem like they are accomplished in one take, Daldry and Martin both seem like masters of their craft when it comes to making the must mundane and predictable elements of life an exciting aspect to watch. They similarly have just as fantastic of an understanding of the talent in front of their camera — for both McAvoy and Horgan are equally prolific in their performances here. Coming across like two tennis players attempting the greatest acting match of their careers.

For McAvoy, audiences have come to love him for some of his work, including of course his turn as Professor X in the “X-Men” prequel films, along with other projects like “Trance,” “Split,” and “The Last King of Scotland.” Yet in Together, audiences get to see an interesting side to McAvoy. One in which he plays a character that is a hilarious jerk, who speaks his mind in ways that are just as frustrating as they are for “She.” This particularly becomes apparent during a length story, in which McAvoy’s “He” describes an early pandemic trip to the grocery store. Maybe it is the hindsight of someone who has been experiencing a post-COVID-19 world, but moments like this (no matter how cute McAvoy may be) will likely make you want to pull your hair out by the end.

When it comes Horgan, her take on “She” is just as fascinating. From tender bits of warmth, to genuinely laugh-out-loud bits of insanity, Horgan perfectly portrays what so many women feel like in these kind of relationships. They examine over every detail of how they got to this point, question what they loved about that person, while also dreaming up ways to get revenge all at the same time. And Horgan brings to life every single one of those beats of her character like a true pro.

Though the true acting magic on display is when these two dynamite performers are together — allowing their characters to put their guard down for both the audience and for each other. And while its best not to dive too deep into their emotional evolution on screen, since its better to keep it a surprise, the end result is one that feels ultimately earned through-out the roller-coaster that is this cinematic marriage. Which is all due in large part to the chemistry of these two utterly believable performances.

But the true star of the entire film is the masterful screenplay from Dennis Kelly (“Black Sea”). From some of the most memorable spats in recent years (including one in which “She” compares her husband to “a pint glass of diarrhea”) to exchanges that feel so lifted from even my own life, it’s damn near hard not to appreciate both the creativity and believability within Kelly’s work. Yet it is the moments where Kelly allows for his pair to take a breath and examine the vulnerable nature at the core of their relationship that is something to be treasured — making the film go to places that other romantic dramas often dance around.

Sure, this is a movie that will always have its roots in one of the worst moments in human history. Yet despite such a sad fact, Together is one of the few COVID-centric films that works from almost beginning to end. It’s sharp wit, quirky sensibilities, and annoyingly real elements make for a memorable cinematic journey. One that is a stirring study of how relationships thrive during the hardest of times, especially when they’re already a mess to begin with. And while that might not be the movie most are looking for during these dark days, down the line, it might be one to revisit to see how far we (hopefully) come in our own personal, metaphorical, bubbles.

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.

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.”

Freudenthal uses special effects when required such as showing the contents of a room swirling around as if caught in a tornado and Adam’s vision of an office being consumed by fire. Though a few scenes indulge in familiar clichés of the genre, for the most part the film exhibits restraint, showing compassion for Adam’s struggles and using humor to lighten the mood. Adam loves to cook and dreams about owning his own restaurant. At first, he dismisses his love for cooking, telling us it’s a distraction but ultimately acknowledges that when he is cooking, “Everything disappears and I get to be exactly who I want to be.”

Unfortunately, a meltdown at a high school chemistry lab that causes injury to another student leads to his expulsion and the decision to enroll him in a strict Catholic school. His acceptance, however, comes with the condition that he maintains an A- average and continues to take his medications which he claims makes him feel worse. When Adam is being interviewed by the nun who heads up his new school (Beth Grant, “Jackie”), we hear him passively give the answers he thinks she wants to hear but his doubts about whether he can meet the imposed conditions are written on his face.

Meeting Maya (Taylor Russell, “Escape Room”), a young student at the new school slated to be the school valedictorian, however, brings a renewed sense of optimism for Adam and his mom (Molly Parker, “Madeline’s Madeline”) and stepdad (Walton Goggins, “Three Christs”). Seeking additional support, Adam finds a shoulder to lean on in Father Patrick (Andy Garcia, “Book Club”). Though he tells the priest that he does not believe in God, Father Patrick’s calming manner and gentle humor allows Adam to feel safe enough to talk about his struggles without fear of reprisal. The relationship between Maya and Adam, both with their own vulnerabilities and secrets to protect, elevates Words on Bathroom Walls to a new level of authenticity, but the truth of their circumstances cannot be hidden forever and is sadly revealed during the school prom.

Both Plummer and Russell deliver magnetic performances, and their chemistry gives their characters depth and believability. The characters of Parker and Goggins, however, are not well drawn and barely come alive as real human beings but it does not detract from the film’s impact. As Adam attempts to come to terms with schizophrenia, Freudenthal wants to show that he deserves as much sympathy and caring as anyone else struggling with a debilitating illness. In a key moment, Adam says that teens with cancer are shown more compassion and patience. But for those with schizophrenia, “people can’t wait to make you someone else’s problem, no one wants to grant our wishes.”

Do love, support, and self-acceptance cure schizophrenia? No, and the film never suggests that it does, but only that it can help. Freudenthal says he hopes his film can be a “generator of empathy.” The next time, he says that “we encounter someone with the illness, [I hope] we encounter them as a human first . . . seeing everyone as equal and seeing people as sort of suffering from an illness other than being the illness.” Words on Bathroom Walls is a film for those who know what it feels like to exist in a world at odds with your deepest longings for connection and belonging. It is a film that can make you feel that you have found a kindred spirit.