In Iranian writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s impeccable A Separation, emotional devastation results from minor misunderstandings, caused largely by class divides and religious differences. The subtle contrivances of that 2011 film became more overt in its follow-up, The Past. Now Farhadi has made a drama that billboards its theatricality, opening on the vacant set for a Tehran production of Death of a Salesman. The parallels with that Arthur Miller play that arise over the course of the film’are one reason Farhadi titled it The Salesman.

Rehearsing to play Willie and Linda Loman are another married couple, Emad and Rana (Shahab Hosseini and Taraneh Alidoosti, both exemplary). Emad teaches literature and film to high school boys, which allows Farhadi to include a bit of The Cow, the 1969 movie considered the first of the Iranian new wave.

As the play’s premiere looms, a certain amount of backstage uproar is to be expected. Censors may trim some of Miller’s text, and an actress complains about having to be fully covered while playing a scene in which her character says she’s half-dressed. But such disorder is insignificant compared to the chaos that rattles the lead actors’ offstage life.

Emad and Rana must suddenly flee their apartment after construction on a neighboring site threatens to collapse the building. Walls crack and windows break in a visceral scene that’s also a metaphor for an upcoming disruption of domestic tranquility.

A theater colleague finds the actors a replacement flat, but with it comes a different sort of discord. One room is full of the previous tenant’s belongings, which she can’t remove until she rents a new place. That’s difficult, for the same reason she was forced from her old one: She’s “a woman with a lot of acquaintances.”

Not all her clients know she’s moved. One regular arrives and while heading to the shower Rana buzzes him in, thinking it’s her husband. What happens next occurs off-camera, but is not insignificant. Rana ends up unconscious, her head bloodied. (From an Iranian filmmaker’s perspective, this is a boon: Rana’s bandage takes the place of the headscarf that film censors require, but that an Iranian woman wouldn’t necessarily wear at home.)

Since the incident could be interpreted as related to sex, Rana doesn’t want to inform the police. Emad understands, but feels compelled to avenge his wife and assuage his pride. (Perhaps playing an American onstage has made the actor see himself as something of a cowboy.) In his haste to escape, the interloper left behind some personal items. Emad finds the clues, and his career as an amateur detective is underway.

As in A Separation, a central motif is miscommunication. Mobile phones and an answering machine play roles, and Rana’s innocent response to an apparently benign (if illicit) visitor snowballs into catastrophe. The apartment’s former tenant, never seen or heard, is not presented as a monster. Neither, ultimately, is the shadowy man Emad pursues.

These nuanced characterizations are worthy of the director of A Separation, which painstakingly demonstrated that everyone has his or her reasons. Although The Salesman‘s plot is unbelievable, most of the movie occurs in a recognizably genuine world: dirty and battered, but bedeviled by compromise and self-interest, not pure evil. The links between Miller’s Pulitzer-winning melodramatics and Farhadi’s more naturalistic style are not overdone.

Until the last act, that is. The Salesman would be a much better movie if it ended a few minutes sooner. Instead, grudging reconciliation yields to sort of retribution, brutal if inadvertent. The curtain falls on everyday life, and the author’s hand becomes manifest.

What is a dog’s purpose?

This existential question haunts a canine as the pup takes several different forms in A Dog’s Purpose, from Golden Retriever to German Shepherd to Corgi and other breeds throughout the years, starting in the 1960s and continuing to the present day. It arrives at an answer eventually, something in line with the sentimental bromides expressed throughout the movie, which showcases its playfulness, courage, and companionship astride many owners.

What it doesn’t answer is how reincarnation figures into it: This same incredible dog not only keeps coming back from the dead, but doesn’t forget its previous incarnations. That means it’s accumulating knowledge and experience from past lives, which would have to make its purpose far greater than merely being a very, very good dog. The implications of decades — centuries, millennia — of a dog continuing to learn, independent of its corporeal shell, is… well, it’s frankly chilling. Or, at a minimum, a premise more suggestive of Cloud Atlas than Lassie.

But these are questions one can only idly consider while A Dog’s Purpose goes through its paces, perhaps alongside questions about the morality of paying money to see a movie trailed by allegations of animal abuse. Nothing in the movie itself is that compelling, since the individual stories mostly don’t have the space to develop beyond clichés about lonely people needing a loyal friend or situations that call for canine derring-do. The one distinguishing feature, baked into the film’s conceit, is that we get to anticipate the dog dying at the end of every segment, and endure the repeated heartbreak of owners who cannot know its spirit is infinite.

In other words, a great time at the movies!

In narrative terms, the dog’s purpose here is to serve as a deus ex machina that links multiple stories together and contrives an improbable arc between the first one and the last. To that end, the largest chunk of the film is given over to his time as a Golden Retriever in an idealized Midwestern town, where he’s adopted by a boy named Ethan (Bryce Gheisar). The dog watches Ethan grow up into a teenager (K.J. Apa), fall in and out of love, witness his parents separate over his father’s alcoholism, and head off to agricultural college, which is around the time the animal starts to slow down a little.

From there, the dog enjoys stints as a German Shepherd for a Chicago K-9 unit, which brings out its heroic side, and as a snuggly Corgi companion for a college student, who indulges its appetite for potato chips and pizza. And the one recognizable star of the film, Dennis Quaid, adopts the dog in the last segment, after it escapes an abusive situation and finds him alone on the family farm, eager for a little company. There’s a heartwarming twist you can see coming from lifetimes away.

Director Lasse Hallström, a Swede with a résumé that includes My Life As a Dog, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, The Cider House Rules, and Chocolat — to say nothing of a treasure trove of ABBA videos — worked with canines before on Hachi: A Dog’s Tale, an English-language adaptation of a Japanese hit about the relationship between man and dog. The best he can do with A Dog’s Purpose (based on a novel by W. Bruce Cameron) is give the film the lacquered sheen of a well-groomed purebred and follow through dutifully on all the expected comic and sentimental beats. There are shenanigans. There are rescues. There are tears.

As the voice of the dog, Josh Gad reproduces the eagerness and fun he brought to the snowman Olaf in Frozen, and his optimism keeps the tone as light as possible and lends the film a sense of continuity. He also sells, as best he can, the idea that even a reincarnated dog lives in the moment, rather than dwelling on the memories (and smells) of the past or the inevitability of passing on to another life. There’s an intended lesson for humans in that thought, but humans and dogs are not the same species: The effect of losing the dog over and over again in A Dog’s Purpose is cumulatively wearying, and we may find ourselves drawing on memories of dog movies that made us laugh more or affected us more deeply. More often than not, we may find ourselves wanting to live in a different moment altogether.

Frank Langella has all manner of elastic gifts, but he’s never been the sort of actor to disappear into the many roles he’s played over a distinguished career. There’s an underlying stern implacability to just about every deplorable villain (and occasional hero) Langella has tackled: intractable obstinates all, who bend others’ wills to their own and give no quarter.

Such a man is Ray, the irascible East Coast patriarch who heads up the patchy but affecting Youth in Oregon. Gravely ill and ready to die, Ray chooses his 80th birthday dinner to announce to his aghast family that he’s off to Oregon, where he can legally kill himself, and heaven help anyone who tries to stop him. The setup suggests an assisted-suicide drama, and that will come later, handled with tact and sensitivity, though it may be unwise to draw conclusions about who goes when or how. Mostly, the mistitled Youth in Oregon is a road movie featuring a bickering clan with next-to-no give in its emotional fabric. Assuming he knows best, Father sets a rotten example.

After much pouting, weeping, throwing of fits or affecting indifference, the loved ones join Ray on a westbound car trip that — department of small mercies — only occasionally borrows from the Little Miss Sunshine black comedy playbook. The weather is grand, the green-and-gold landscapes they pass through tranquil, but it might as well be raining locusts for all the attention nature gets from this fractiously self-involved brood. Along the way they pick up a couple of estranged black sheep — an embittered gay son beautifully played by Josh Lucas, and a college-aged grandson (Alex Shaffer) who springs a nasty surprise of his own on his own father, Ray’s maddeningly reasonable son-in-law (Billy Crudup).

But this is not really about the kids, who are locked in as resentful collateral damage of their elders’ eternal warfare. This is about aging, and the inexorable decay of the body, and about a man who shows more affection to the birds he loves to watch than to his kin. Certainly there’s a touch of Alan Arkin in Ray, who rants and raves and brags about his former sexual prowess at top volume in public. Unlike Little Miss Sunshine, however, the rage and frustration rarely function as set pieces played for light relief. Langella’s tightly controlled stillness makes Ray’s tantrums far less potent than the grim stoicism with which he faces his physical indignities, and his quiet domination of a family that’s barely holding it together.

Director Joel David Moore smoothly orchestrates a terrific ensemble, with Mary Kay Place a standout as Ray’s brittle wife Estelle, a woman whose instinctive kindness has curdled through decades of emotional starvation into pill-popping blankness.

Once the secret Ray has been keeping from his family leaks out, Youth in Oregon ventures briefly into hysteria, led by an able Christina Applegate as Ray’s overly bonded daughter. At its most effective, though, the movie wordlessly observes how this troubled family tries and repeatedly fails to connect. Unable to make eye contact, Ray and Danny trade barbs and blame for their lifelong estrangement, each looking out of his own car window. Soon after, in a marvelously tender sequence, the two men get a taste of what an end-of-life intervention might look like when carried out with love and consent on all sides.

Youth in Oregon begins with one kind of sorrow and ends with another entirely. Moore and writer Andrew Eisen don’t feel the need to sort everyone out or indulge in seen-the-light pyrotechnics. Yet Ray’s last-minute plea to his wife by a serene Oregon lake elicits a small, wordless act of help and understanding that suggests not exactly better days to come, but a necessary shift in perspective. In that moment Youth in Oregon reveals itself less as an inquiry into how and when we die than into how we have lived and dealt with one another. In that moment, husband and wife discover not mercy killing, but mercy living.

James Baldwin is having a posthumous resurgence, but we are so in need of his words at this moment that it’s hard to believe he hasn’t still been writing every day since his death in 1987. In every genre Baldwin dabbled, from novels to political commentary to arts criticism, he found the core of our identity as a nation: a core that feeds off division and prejudice; that celebrates its own history while refusing to learn from it; and that was, and plainly remains, too painful for anyone other than him to talk about honestly.

Today’s media is flush with essayists who trace a direct line to Baldwin, the most prominent being Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose bestselling sensation Between the World and Me is a grim postscript to Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, and dispels even the slim notion of hope for true racial justice Baldwin offered in 1963. But Baldwin refused to see himself as a “race writer”: Instead, he framed arguments for equality as pleas to save the entire American soul from corrosive hatred and isolation. The exceptional new documentary I Am Not Your Negro, which director Raoul Peck began to work on before the Obama presidency, gives us a fresh new view on Baldwin’s words, while also reminding us that the same American soul he struggled so hard to convince us was worth saving remains on life support today.

I Am Not Your Negro is also not your Baldwin CliffsNotes. Instead, Peck gives us a far more urgent, revelatory document: a visual imagining of the writer’s last, unfinished manuscript. Titled Remember This House, it was to be Baldwin’s personal reflection on the lives and assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers, all of whom he was close with. “I want these three lives to bang against and reveal each other,” Baldwin wrote. And as these lives bang, Baldwin’s (and Peck’s) gaze turns: from the Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s to America’s insistence on imagining great social progress where little has occurred.

The film uses only Baldwin’s words, superbly narrated by Samuel L. Jackson. There are no talking heads to put them “into context,” because the context is already there, in our history and all around us. Peck, working from 30 pages of raw text gifted him by Baldwin’s sister Gloria, animates the prose with archival news clips, still photographs, and scenes from popular films of Baldwin’s time. And he also, with dreamlike continuity, grants brief passage into the modern day: young black men shot by police, the Black Lives Matter protests, a montage of superficial apologies from white politicians. Robert Kennedy accurately predicts that America will see a black president 40 years from his time, and then Baldwin takes apart the idea that we had to wait so long in the first place.

Baldwin was also a voracious consumer of pop culture. Some of the film’s most intriguing passages muse on the history of onscreen black identity from Stepin Fetchit to Sidney Poitier, the latter characterized as a kind of panacea to comfort white people. (Poitier’s escaped convict in The Defiant Ones jumps off a train carrying him to freedom in order to save the white escapee he’s been chained to for the entire film. Baldwin’s response: “Get back on the train, you fool!”) These bits are where you realize just how much of a documentary’s strength depends on its editing. Would Baldwin’s memory of finding a black woman who “looked exactly like Joan Crawford” have carried as much symbolic weight were it not overlaid on the perfect clip of the lily-white Crawford boogying in Dance, Fools, Dance?

Peck renders his subject’s prose with brisk pacing, without turning Negro into a soundbite film — a remarkable task, given how much Baldwin structured his sentences with the intention of his audience getting to reread them, picking over their bones for protein. It helps that the film frequently leans on Baldwin’s gift for oratory, as he delivers his own message on college campuses and late-night television, with his wry smile and searching eyes. This approach is dense and yet accessible, and seems to be a direct challenge to Baldwin’s own musings that television “weakens our ability to deal with the world as it is, as we are.” (That Jackson, the reigning king of escapist entertainment, is the one reciting these words adds a delicious layer of irony.)

It is easy, in a time when protest feels urgent and the past seems to have vanished, to get swept up in Baldwin’s essays, and in so doing to forget that he was also a peerless storyteller. One flaw to the film is that, by painting such a convincing portrait of Baldwin-as-polemicist, it neglects that only a great novelist could make those arguments as forthright and necessary as he did. In books like Another Country and Giovanni’s Room, he could take manners of race and sexuality no one was talking about in public and render them with such finely wrought passion as to rip their invisibility cloaks to shreds. Negro wants to anoint Baldwin as the voice of reason in our troubled, divided times, but we need to remember he valued the power of stories and chastised those who did not. Of Uncle Tom’s Cabin author Harriet Beecher Stowe, he once wrote, “She was not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer.”

Though it was just nominated for a Best Documentary Oscar, Negro seems at risk of being overshadowed in the public eye by the two more popular nominees that broadly deal with that discordant, shapeshifting topic we call “race relations”: the sweeping yet granular true-crime saga O.J.: Made in America, and the fiery mass-incarceration lecture 13^th. All are worthy of attention. But to dismiss all three movies as different pages of the same pamphlet — or to declare that Negro is only relevant now because it’s Black History Month — is to continue to misunderstand Baldwin’s message. He wasn’t lecturing to “white America” or passing instructions to “black America”; he truly wanted everyone to confront the same narrative together, to stop hiding behind fictions and make some sense of the country. Did he succeed? Well, when confronted with such pressing, vibrantly cinematic power built entirely from decades-old words, we must ask ourselves exactly why, in 2017, these words may as well have been written for the first time.