When R. J. Cutler’s experiential new documentary opens, his subject, Billie Eilish is sixteen years old, crafting songs from illustrated diary entries and engineered beats in her brother Finneas’s bedroom in their family’s modest Los Angeles bungalow. It closes, a little over two years later, when having just celebrated her nineteenth birthday, she cleaned up at the Grammy Awards as the youngest person to win the Big Four (Best New Artist, Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Album of the Year), leaving the ceremony with multiple armloads of shiny gramophones (those, plus Pop Solo Performance, Pop Vocal Album and Producer of the Year for Finneas) and — more importantly — a congratulatory FaceTime call from her tweenage crush, Justin Bieber.

Billie Holiday was an incredible artist and a courageous person whose impact echoed long beyond her lifetime. Holiday’s music has deeply resonated despite her talents not receiving proper recognition until after her death. That death came at a tragically young age and stemmed from struggles with addiction. She was targeted by the U.S. government for that addiction and for singing the still mighty song “Strange Fruit” as it protested the lynchings of Black people.

Despite being about such a historic figure with a committed central performance by singer Andra Day, The United States vs. Billie Holiday creates a middling-at-best biopic that is only barely salvageable.

I Care A Lot (2021 | USA | 118 minutes | J Blakeson)

Netflix has its share of great (or aspiring to be great) cinema — e.g., Roma, The Irishman, maybe even Mank — but as nice as it is that they indulge the occasional auteur with commercially questionable projects, their great gift to the world may be the Good Enough Netflix Movie. Light yet engaging, well-paced, an amount of star power, maybe a bit of an edge, and a grab bag of genres that shift every half hour to comfortably disappear two hours of quality time on your couch. J. Blakeson’s I Care A Lot falls into the latter category: it opens as a dark comedy about swindling old people, morphs a few times into a mystery, a heist, and a violent revenge thriller, before coming full circle. But throughout the ever-shifting tone, it remains a constant showcase for Rosamund Pike.

There is much to reflect on with the film Nomadland. It is perhaps the most critically praised film of the year, the Seattle Film Critics Society named it their best film of the year this week, and for good reason. It is a beautifully constructed work by writer and director Chloé Zhao who adapted it from the 2017 book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by journalist Jessica Bruder. After Zhao’s last film, 2017’s The Rider, it was hard to imagine her creating another film on par with that one.

Yet Zhao has done just that and more.