It’s memoir day, from overcoming disability to family life in Minnesota.

(Courtesy of the University of Minnesota Press)

“Ghosts of Fourth Street”: by Laurie Hertzel (University of Minnesota Press, $24.95)

Laurie Hertzel (Courtesy of the author)

If you are thinking about writing memoir or creative nonfiction, consider Laurie Hertzel’s memoir your textbook. Subtitled “My Family, a Death, and the Hills of Duluth,” it’s not surprising that this involving story is both tender and amusing since the author is former books editor for the Star Tribune, winner of a Minnesota Book Award, and distinguished professor at the University of Georgia low-residency MFA program in narrative nonfiction.

Hers is a colorful story about being the shy, quiet, often lonely seventh of 10 children growing up in the 1960s in a house in Duluth that was usually chaotic with kids everywhere, all of them readers. Her mother, Trish, was always busy with a new baby, and her father, known as Guv, had two moods — good or bad.

“I spent most of my time alone, wandering and spying,” she writes. “I crawled under the dining room table and sat cross-legged on the braided oval rug, hidden by the long white tablecloth, and kept an eye on whoever was in my line of vision. I riffled through my big sister’s desk drawers and jacket pockets, opening their letters, reading their diaries, scooping up their spare change, looking for clues.”

At the beginning of the book, Hertzel hints of the death of her brother, the oldest child who often clashed with their father. But it isn’t until near the end we learn the sad news that changed the family on June 11, 1966, when Bobby drowned while water skiing.

But before the family splintered with Bobby’s death and the older children moving out, Hertzel gives readers a detail-filled picture of growing up in a family where siblings hoped for brief times alone with their parents. She recalls how one of her older sisters “ironed” the curly hair of another sister on the ironing board. (Anyone who knows Hertzel or has seen her at readings can understand the curly hair anecdote.)

One fascinating character is Guv, who insisted on dinner being served at 7:30 p.m., with soft music playing and candles lit. Hertzel recalls how “Every night, the call to dinner came in stages…” and the menu was made up of food her father asked her mother to prepare, which she did, making everything from scratch. Guv also snatched a child or two before dinner for a drink of V-8 juice or apple juice because a pre-dinner drink was “civilized.”

Some of the happiest parts of the book are Hertzel’s memories of Christmas rituals, beginning after Thanksgiving with holiday songs, and birthdays that gave young Laurie a day in the spotlight when she was usually ignored by her siblings.

About those ghosts? The author’s grandfather made friends with the ghost of a man who walked through the house nightly and seemed to live behind the furnace.

After Bobby drowned, the family was never the same. Laurie recalls her mother’s screams when she heard the news, and how her brother’s body looked like a wax figure in his coffin. She lived, then, in a house “haunted with sorrow” and Bobby’s ghost.

Read “Ghosts of Fourth Street” for Hertzel’s way with storytelling and for getting to know her colorful family.

Hertzel will read Tuesday in the Readings by Writers series. (See today’s Literary Events calendar).

(Courtesy of University of Minnesota Press)

“An Eye For an I: Growing Up With Blindness, Bigotry, and Family Mental Illness”: by James Francisco Bonilla (University of Minnesota Press, $18.95)

James Bonilla explores the intersection of race and disability in this involving memoir in which he writes: “Growing up I sometimes felt like an imposter, too sighted to be seen as blind, too light-skinned to be seen as Puerto Rican. This often left me feeling isolated and apart, not really belonging to either group.”

Bonilla, a New York-born Puerto Rican writer, is a retired Hamline University professor who has written and presented nationally and internationally on diversity, cultural competence and leadership.

Born with congenital cataracts, Bonilla had limited vision in his right eye and none in his left. After he was accidentally hit in his “good” eye by a horseshoe, he was legally blind for 10 years until he underwent surgery at 19, made possible by new medical technology.

Bonilla’s sightless years taught him a lot about how our society responds to people with disabilities, including being harassed by bullies at school. As an adult, he was once waiting for a friend at an intersection when a large man picked him up off the ground and hauled him across the street, where he didn’t want to go. As Bonilla puts it, he was “nearly killed by kindness.”

Besides his sight problems, Bonilla was dealing with childhood trauma of having a sometimes-violent mother suffering from severe mental illness. In later years he tried to understand that life couldn’t have been easy for his mother, a single Puerto Rican woman trying to raise a son.

Bonilla finally found his way to healing and peace through the outdoors, becoming a camp counselor and guide. From the giant redwood trees of California to a vision quest in New York’s Adirondack Mountains, nature became a home to him.

(Courtesy)

“My Journey My Way”: by Donna Lagorio Montgomery (independently published, $17)

First published in 2018, this friendly paperback details growing up “old school,” as the author puts it. Montgomery is the mother of eight children, and she’s a grandmother. Her previous books include one on kids modeling, based on her family’s experiences, as well as the spiritual “Bread & Wine,” and “Coffee Talk,” made up of short thoughts and reflections. In “My Journey…” Montgomery writes of having her own “Auntie Mame” and memories of her first job. She reminds us of a past that is nearly lost in our current tech-driven world.

(Courtesy of the author)

“Blooming Hollyhocks: Tales of Joy During Hard Times”: by Naomi Helen Yaeger (Beaver’s Pond Press, $16.95)

Duluth-based Yaeger, a writer, reporter and Earthkeeper, returns us to the past in this memoir of her mother Janette’s childhood in the 1930s and ’40s, based on stories the author heard as a child. The title comes from the pink, white and red hollyhocks that grew alongside Grandmother’s house from which an aunt fashioned flower dolls.

Set mostly in Avoca, a small town in southwest Minnesota, Janette’s childhood included out-of-work men fed by her mother, Winifred, during the Great Depression. Her father, Russell, a railroad telegrapher, was lucky to have a good salary. Some of Janette’s happiest days were at the extended family’s farm, where the feral kittens spit and bit at everyone and fruit of the mulberry tree was always available for snacking in season. They were the first family in the town to buy a Norge refrigerator, replacing the rubber-aproned ice man.

Janette went on to a nursing school with connections to Hamline University. While she was in training, the hardware store her parents owned in Avoca was destroyed in a fire that wiped out most of a block of buildings. In the end, Janette is married to Earl and dreams of earning a public health degree from the University of Minnesota. There are lots of photos of family weddings concluding the book.

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As usual, the annual British Arrows Awards offer up a series of eye-popping commercials that either warm or break your heart, delight your senses and baffle your brain. And this year, a face familiar to Timberwolves fans is in the mix.

Founded in 1976, the British Arrows selects the previous year’s most compelling advertisements and public service announcements and compiles an evening of the best of the best. For decades, Walker Art Center has screened that compilation throughout the month of December. It’s an annual tradition that typically draws more than 30,000 people each season.

This year’s 73-minute program features, for the first time, assigned seating. The program is also available for virtual viewing.

Here’s a look at five memorable spots in this year’s show:

Adidas’ “AE 1 — No Lie”

Timberwolves shooting guard Anthony Edwards describes himself as “your favorite hooper’s favorite hooper” in one of three ads for the AE1, his signature shoe for Adidas. First released in 2023, it quickly became a best seller and led to a reported $50 million multi-year contract extension. Edwards is shown taking a lie detector test in the clip, which boasts a terrific twist at the end.

Volkswagen’s “YourWagen”

In May 2024, Volkswagen launched a new campaign dubbed “YourWagen,” featuring true stories of Volkswagen owners and their history with the vehicle. In the Arrows selection, a man named Erum talks about his family’s 1971 Volkswagen camper, which he said his father bought to pick up his mother from the hospital with her newborn daughter, Erum’s younger sister. It was stolen from his driveway in 2017, but this tale ends up having a happy ending.

Waitrose’s “Sweet Suspicion”

British supermarket chain Waitrose hired “Succession” star Matthew Macfadyen to play a would-be detective determined to track down the family member responsible for the disappearance of the company’s No.1 Red Velvet Bauble Dessert from the fridge. The two-part ad, released weeks apart, was a huge hit in England and now stands as Waitrose’s most successful Christmas campaign to date.

Alzheimer’s Society’s “The Long Goodbye”

Somewhat like the aforementioned Volkswagen campaign, the Alzheimer’s Society talked to real families affected by dementia to create this compelling clip. The script was written by someone drawing on her own experience, having lost her father to the disease, and incorporates the insights from hundreds of people in similar situations. A somber man recounts the final years of his mother’s life, a woman he describes as “the style icon of the Covington Estate,” in a manner that may well leave you sobbing.

Loewe’s “Decades of Confusion”

There’s a darker than usual feel to this year’s Arrows, which makes the bright spots that much brighter. Spanish luxury fashion house Loewe pokes fun at its difficult to pronounce name in a spot starring Aubrey Plaza and Dan Levy, who also wrote the script. The pair wear iconic looks (and some memorable wigs) from the Loewe archive, from 1971 to present day, and trade barbs in an adorable manner. These two should get their own sitcom.

 

2025 British Arrows Awards

When: Through Jan. 6
Where: Walker Art Center, 725 Vineland Place, Mpls.
Tickets: $18 ($15 Walker members, students and seniors). Each ticket includes free gallery admission. Online viewing is $25 ($20 for members, students and seniors) and is available on-demand.
More info: 612-375-7600 or walkerart.org

Edward Lotterman

Ho-hum! The Federal Reserve’s policy-setting Open Market Committee met for its eighth and final time this year. It decided to lower its target for extremely short-term interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point, from 3.75% to 3.5%. That minimal change is a cautious compromise that might mollify critics who have been calling for lower rates for months.

Don’t count on it, however. Chief among such critics is Donald Trump. Trump appointed Jerome Powell as Fed chair in 2018, but started lambasting him within weeks of his inauguration. This week’s minimal drop may enrage the president more than please him.

The Fed genuinely faces hard choices. It has a statutory mandate to maintain stable prices. At both the household level and more broadly across many economic sectors, there are indications of prices rising rather than falling. With a two-month gap because of the shutdown, indicator data is thin while the administration is decreeing policies never before attempted.

A pitfall in all of this is that most people don’t understand what exactly a central bank like our Federal Reserve can and cannot accomplish. That includes the president.

What he and, apparently, most journalists, don’t understand is that interest rates for both savers and borrowers largely are set by market forces. Moreover, for both savers and borrowers, there are different amounts of money, lengths of time and degrees of risk involved in financial markets. So there is not just one savings and credit market, but many.

Of course, markets for money do differ from those for beets or pickup-trucks. There is no agency that can create tons of beets out of nothing nor one that sucks thousands of pickups off the market. So while supply and demand are major factors in determining interest rates, the Fed’s money creation and destruction and U.S. Treasury deficits or surpluses also have huge effects. One has to understand both the market-forces and policy-action sides of the equation.

Such actions — the Fed increasing or decreasing the money supply and the U.S. Treasury borrowing smaller or larger amounts — don’t affect all categories of loans equally. If the Fed increases the amount of money available for very short-term borrowing, as it did this past week, that does not necessarily affect availability of money for five-year car loans, 30-year mortgages or even farm operating loans for fuel, seed and fertilizer from April to November. Ditto for the effects of Treasury borrowing via 30-year bonds or 13-week T-bills.

On the monetary side, ballooning the supply of short-term money may increase long-term interest rates if it makes mortgage lenders or others offering long-term money fear inflation. That is precisely the danger today, something Fed policy makers know well even if Trump and many in the media do not.

Decades ago, when Milton Friedman, Nobel laureate, University of Chicago professor and founder of American libertarianism, was still alive, the term “money supply” appeared in most media discussions of Fed policies. Now it almost never does and public understanding of what is going on suffers. Why the change?

The creation and destruction of money involve arcane processes that college students grapple with for weeks. Over the last 20 years, this has become even more arcane. So it may seem easier to just discuss the superficial “the Fed raised – or lowered – interest rates” and ignore the underlying dynamics.

If, however, one wants to understand money creation and destruction, one has to start with actions of the Federal Reserve and other central banks.

The Fed began operating in 1914, about when my grandparents moved to a farm near Chandler, Minn., and opened an account at the state-chartered bank there, where I still hold one also  If in the spring Grandpa needed supplies, seed and another horse, he might borrow $400, promising to pay in the fall. So did many other farmers. In spring, the bank might loan out all the fraction of deposits allowed by law.

Then in summer, the local lumber yard might be offered two boxcars of lumber at a good price. People were building barns and houses in 1914. But the lumber wholesaler demanded payment up front and the lumber would be sold only over months. The bank was “loaned up” with no extra cash to lend. What to do?

Well, the Chandler bank now could take promissory notes from my grandpa and others to the new Minneapolis Fed and ask for a loan, presenting these IOUs as collateral. If the small-town bank did not repay the Fed, that new lender could itself collect principal and interest on these retail loans. And, to be safe, the Fed would not loan amounts equal to the collateral presented. Grandpa’s $400 IOU might be “discounted” to $350 actually loaned from the Fed to the small-town bank.

The Fed’s office for such small bank “discount loan” borrowing was the “discount window.” Interest was charged at the “discount rate.” That rate still exists even though such particular lending is largely obsolete.

The key foundation of all of this is that 12 new Federal Reserve District Banks could just create money out of nothing for such loans. Most commercial banks had joined the Fed system and had “reserve accounts” at their Fed. When they borrowed at the discount window, a clerk took a pen and entered “+ $350” in that bank’s account. That’s all.

Nothing came from the U.S. Treasury or anywhere else. “Shazam,” and there it was. But when the Chandler Bank paid off that loan, the money just went “poof” at the Fed and disappeared. The system had provided cash for the economy to operate smoothly over varying seasons, but no one got rich. As another benefit, the Fed could lend money to any small bank when suddenly fearful depositors unexpectedly demanded cash. The bank would not go broke, leaving depositors penniless.

Over the next decade, times when the economy was slowing because of a lack of available loans became apparent, and yet no bank came to the Fed’s discount window. Just as horses may refuse to drink water when led to it and as you cannot push on a string, so banks with borrowing capacity at Fed district banks didn’t always use it to make more loans to customers.

The New York Fed, led by Benjamin Strong, a brilliant and tragic man, discovered another way to increase overall liquidity. It could simply create money, as for a discount-window loan, but instead go to brokers and use the new money to buy U.S. Treasury bonds. The Fed was in an open market with insurance companies, endowment or retirement funds and other private entities buying and selling bonds. By buying bonds, the Fed increased loanable funds in the entire financial system.

When there was too much liquidity, the New York Fed could just sell bonds back to brokers and destroy the money received. This method of increasing and decreasing the money supply thus became known as “open market operations.” It remains the key policy tool a century later.

The FOMC announcing that it is cutting its target for overnight money means that the New York Fed’s “open-market desk” will buy securities with money just created out of nothing. The securities are more complex than they were in 1926. But that must wait for a future column.

St. Paul economist and writer Edward Lotterman can be reached at stpaul@edlotterman.com.

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LOS ANGELES — A funny thing about this year’s best films: Half of them are adaptations. As a movie lover who’s always hunting for new talent, new ideas and new stimuli, I used to view that as creative inertia. But 2025 has changed my mind.

Now I see artists drawing inspiration from the past to show that Hollywood should trust the sturdy bones that have kept it running for over a century: good yarns, bold casting, films that don’t feel made by focus groups or doomsaying bean-counters (or, God help us, AI), but by blood and sweat.

From original tales to radical reworkings of classics both high-falutin’ and raucously lowbrow, these 10 filmmakers all know that the most vital part of the storytelling business has stayed exactly the same. They have to wow an audience. And they did.

1. ‘Sinners’

A period-piece-vampire-musical mashup could have been discordant, but writer-director Ryan Coogler confidently makes all three genres harmonize. In “Sinners,” Coogler double-casts his longtime collaborator Michael B. Jordan as twin bootleggers Smoke and Stack, then pits them against a pack of banjo-picking bloodsuckers helmed by a roguish Jack O’Connell. We’re expecting a big, bloody brouhaha and we get it. Underneath the playful carnage, however, the question at stake is: Why suffer the daily indignities of the Jim Crow-era South when you could outlive — and eat — your oppressors? “Sinners” is the most exciting film of 2025, both for what it is and for what it proves: that fresh blockbusters still exist and people are eager to gobble them up.

(“Sinners” is available on multiple platforms.)

2. ‘Hedda’

Tessa Thompson stars in director Nia DaCosta’s “Hedda.” (Prime Video/TNS)

The stage’s iconic mean girl glides from 1890s Norway to 1950s England in this vibrant and venomous adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler.” Tessa Thompson stars as the restless housewife who needs to secure her milquetoast husband (Tom Bateman) a promotion and has a nasty habit of playing with guns. Keeping pace with her manipulative anti-heroine, writer-director Nia DaCosta (“Candyman”) makes a few calculated moves of her own, including gender-swapping Hedda’s ex into a curvaceous career woman (a haughty Nina Hoss) whose drab and geeky new girlfriend (Imogen Poots) irritates their hostess’ insecurities. As a capper, “Hedda” stages its brutal showdown at an all-night vodka-and-cocaine-fueled mansion shebang with a live jazz band, a lake for skinny-dippers and a hedge maze where former lovers are tempted to canoodle. The original play is over a century old, but every scene feels screamingly alive.

(“Hedda” is available on Prime Video.)

3. ‘Eddington’

Joaquin Phoenix, left, and Pedro Pascal in “Eddington.” (A24/TNS)

No film was more polarizing than Ari Aster’s COVID-set satire about a mask-hating sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix), a sanctimonious mayor (Pedro Pascal) and the high-tech cabal that benefits when these two modern cowboys come to blows. “Eddington” immortalizes the bleak humor and lingo of May 2020 (think murder hornets, antifa and toilet paper hoarders). More stingingly, it captures the mental delirium of a small town — make that an entire planet — that hasn’t yet realized that there’s a second sickness seeping in through their smartphones. Everyone’s got a device in their hand pretty much all the time, aiming their cameras at each other like pistols in a Wild West standoff. Yet no character grasps what’s really going on. (I have a theory, but when I explain the larger conspiracy, I sound cuckoo too.) This is the movie that will explain pandemic brain to future generations. With distance, I’m pretty sure the haters will come around.

(“Eddington” is available on multiple platforms.)

4. ‘One Battle After Another’

Every shot in Paul Thomas Anderson’s invigorating nail-biter is a banger: sentinels skateboarding over rooftops, caged kids playing catch with a crumpled foil blanket, Teyana Taylor’s militant Perfidia Beverly Hills blasting an automatic rifle while nine months pregnant. It’s the rare film that instantly imprints itself on the viewer. On my second watch, I was shocked by how much of “One Battle After Another” already felt tattooed on my brain, down to the shudder I got from Sean Penn’s loathsome Col. Lockjaw licking his comb to tidy his bangs. Riffing from Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland,” the central drama follows flunky anarchist Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio) fumblingly attempting to rescue his daughter (Chase Infiniti) from Lockjaw’s clutches. But he’s not much help to her, and as the title implies, this is merely one skirmish in humanity’s sprawling struggle for freedom that has, and will, drag on forever. Anderson’s knack for ensemble work stretches back as far as “Boogie Nights,” yet here, even his unnamed characters have crucial roles to play. His world-building has never before felt this holistic and inspirational.

(“One Battle After Another” is now playing in theaters.)

5. ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’

The backstory behind this stunner couldn’t be more baroque: Director Bill Condon (“Dreamgirls”) boldly revamped a Broadway musical of an Oscar-winning drama (itself taken from an experimental novel) about two inmates in an Argentinean cell who mentally escape into the movies. Each incarnation has doubled down on the sensorial overload of what came before. If you know “Kiss of the Spider Woman’s” lineage, you’ll be impressed by how Condon ups the fantasy and stokes the revolutionary glamour with more Technicolor dance showcases for Jennifer Lopez. (She’s doing her best Cyd Charisse, which turns out to be darned good.) If this is your first taste of the tale, give yourself over to the prickly but tender relationship between prisoners Luis and Valentin, played by feisty new talent Tonatiuh and a red-blooded Diego Luna. This is go-for-broke filmmaking with a wallop. As Luis says of his own version of “Kiss of the Spider Woman” playing in his head, “Call it kitsch, call it camp — I don’t care, I love it.”

(“Kiss of the Spider Woman” is available on multiple platforms.)

6. ‘A Useful Ghost’

Thai director Ratchapoom Boonbunchachoke’s Cannes Grand Prix winner opens with a haunted vacuum cleaner. From there, it gets even more surprising. Ghosts have infested a wealthy widow’s factory and are possessing appliances, seducing her son and cozying up to the prime minister for favors. Some of these people have died by accident, some by corporate neglect or worse. This droll spook show bleeds into romance and politics and, to our shock, becomes genuinely emotional. (It helps to remember that the military killed over 80 Bangkok protesters in 2010.) But why vacuum cleaners, you ask? The conceit is more than a sticky idea. Ordinary people can get crushed but the anger they leave behind lingers like fine dust.

(“A Useful Ghost” opens Jan. 16, 2026, in theaters.)

7. ‘The Roses’

Benedict Cumberbatch, left, and Olivia Colman in “The Roses.” (Jaap Buitendijk/Searchlight Pictures/TNS)

Technically, “The Roses” is rooted in the 1980s hit novel and subsequent blockbuster “The War of the Roses,” which starred Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner as an estranged couple who attack each other with lawyers, poison and chandeliers. In spirit, however, this redo is pure 1930s screwball comedy. Leads Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman are skilled verbal ninjas who hurl razor-sharp insults at each other’s egos, and although their characters’ divorce happens in California, director Jay Roach lets the actors keep their snippy British accents. The script by two-time Oscar nominee Tony McNamara (“The Favourite,” “Poor Things”) adds a cruel twist to the original: This time around, the marrieds truly do try their damnedest to love and support each other. And still, their walls come tumbling down.

(“The Roses” is available on multiple platforms.)

8. ‘In Whose Name?’

Nico Ballesteros was a high schooler with an iPhone when he entered Kanye West’s orbit in 2018. Over the next six years, the Orange County kid shot over 3,000 hours of footage as Ye (as the artist legally became known in 2021) jetted from Paris to Uganda, Calabasas to the White House, meeting everyone from Kenny G to Elon Musk on a quest to fulfill his creative and spiritual goals while incinerating his personal life and public reputation. Ye gave the documentarian full access with no editorial oversight, besides one moment in which he tells the camera that he wants the film to be about mental health. This riveting tragedy definitely is. We see an egomaniac whose fear of being beholden to anything motivates him to go off his meds, a billionaire provocateur who believes he can afford the consequences of his bigotry and, above all, a deeply flawed man who nukes his entire world to insist he’s right.

(“In Whose Name?” is available on multiple platforms.)

9. ‘Sirāt’

The techno soundtrack of Oliver Laxe’s desolate road thriller has rattled my house for months. Lately, I’ve spent just as much time contemplating the movie’s silence — those hushed stretches in which this caravan of bohemians speeds across the Moroccan desert looking like the only free people left on Earth. A father, Luis (“Pan’s Labyrinth’s” Sergi López), and his 12-year-old son team up with this band of tattooed burnouts in the hope of finding the boy’s runaway sister. Before long, Luis is just hoping to make it to safety, assuming anywhere safe still exists. Static on the radio warns that World War III might be underway. These outsiders click off the news and crank up the music. The paradox of “Sirāt” is that I’m dying to talk about it more but I’ve got to keep my mouth shut until people experience its dramatic twists for themselves.

(“Sirāt” returns to theaters on Feb. 6, 2026.)

10. ‘The Naked Gun’

Liam Neeson needed this pummeling pun-fest. So did everyone else in 2025. Director Akiva Schaffer’s continuation of the “Police Squad!” franchise let the 73-year-old “Taken” star poke fun at his own bruising gravitas. Playing the son of Leslie Nielsen’s Lt. Frank Drebin, Neeson kept us in hysterics with a stupid-brilliant barrage of surreal wordplay and daffy slapstick. The casting was as odd — and perfect — as rumors that he and his co-star Pamela Anderson started dating on set. This fourth sequel didn’t try to outsmart the classic Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker template. It simply told the same old story: Cop meets babe, cop and babe canoodle with a magical snowman, cop drops his trousers on live TV, this time minus the blimp. Goodyear? No, the worst — which made Neeson our hero.

(“The Naked Gun” is available on multiple platforms.)

Since I’m all jazzed-up about great movies, here are 10 honorable mentions very much worth a watch.

“The Ballad of Wallis Island”

A kooky millionaire strong-arms his favorite mid-aughts folk duo into playing a reunion show on his Welsh island. Sounds cutesy, but it’s the movie I recommended most — to everyone from my mailman to my mother. They all loved it. Join the fan club.

“Bunny”

This East Village indie by debut director Ben Jacobson is a scummy gem. A gigolo’s birthday goes very wrong. But all the characters racing up and down the stairs of his uber-New York walk-up hovel are a howl.

“If I Had Legs I’d Kick You”

Rose Byrne excels equally at comedy and drama. This audit of a breakdown smashes both together and cranks the tension up to eleven. Playing a high-stress working mom of an ill child, her try-hard heroine leans in so harrowingly far, she goes kamikaze.

“Lurker”

Today’s celebrity might be viral on Instagram and unknown everywhere else. Alex Russell’s stomach-churning psychodrama stars Archie Madekwe as an L.A.-based singer on the brink of genuine fame and Théodore Pellerin as the hanger-on who endures — and exploits — the fledgling star’s power moves and hazy boundaries.

“Magic Farm”

Filmmaker Amalia Ulman’s rascally farce stars Chloë Sevigny and Alex Wolff as clickbait journalists who fly to Argentina to shoot a viral video about a singer in a bunny costume and wind up looking twice as ridiculous.

“One of Them Days”

Keke Palmer and SZA play broke Baldwin Hills roommates who have nine hours to make rent. I’d happily watch their stoner high jinks in real time.

“The Perfect Neighbor”

Pieced together primarily from police body-camera footage, Geeta Gandbhir’s documentary unfurls in a Florida cul-de-sac where a community — adults, kids and cops — agrees that one woman is an entitled pill. The problem is she thinks they’re the problem. And she has a gun.

“Sisu: Road to Revenge”

If Buster Keaton were alive, he’d hail this grisly, mostly mute Finnish action flick as a worthy successor to “The General.” It even boasts a thrilling sequence on a train, although director Jalmari Helander also brazenly poaches from “Die Hard” and “Mad Max: Fury Road.”

“Train Dreams”

Trees fall in the woods and a 20th-century logger (Joel Edgerton) plays an unheard, unthanked but beautiful role in the building of America.

“Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery”

Detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) teams up with a soul-searching priest (Josh O’Connor) to solve a perplexing church stabbing. From deft plot twists to provocative Catholic theology, Rian Johnson’s crowd-pleasing murder mystery is marvelously executed.

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