No Way Out (1987)

It's no coincidence that I gave priority this month to a political thriller set largely at a federal government building, namely the Pentagon. You may question my taste in doing so, but I assure you it bears vanishingly little resemblance to recent events.

Tom Farrell (Kevin Costner), a lieutenant commander in the Navy, falls for Susan Atwell (Sean Young) at an inaugural ball and starts an intimate relationship, unaware that she's also sleeping with another new acquaintance of his, Secretary of Defense David Brice (Gene Hackman). Seeing Tom leave her home, albeit without enough light to recognize him, Brice infers Susan's infidelity and beats her -- accidentally to death. He decides to pin it on "Yuri," a rumored double agent from the KGB, because that would let national security handle the case instead of the police. Tom gets a pretty big role in the subsequent hunt for Yuri. All too aware that he's most likely to take the fall after the evidence comes in, he does what he can to delay that until he has enough of a case against Brice.

The Two of Us (1967)

I finally got another disc delivery for the first time since last year. It's rather hard to coordinate the timing with streaming, so this meant yet another foreign-language flick about a Jewish guy. Oh well, still not all that similar.

In occupied Paris, the Langmann family is laying low, tho not quite to an Anne Frank extent. Eight-year-old Claude (Alain Cohen) keeps calling unwelcome attention to himself, so his parents send him to live in the countryside with the parents of a friend of theirs, who will gladly take care of a pseudo-grandchild for however many months. (The French title translates to "The Old Man and the Boy.) That arrangement is safer overall, but Claude has to maintain a charade of being Catholic like them. They -- perhaps especially the outspoken old man (Michel Simon), who asks Claude to call him Pépé -- believe the propaganda about Jews.

Menashe (2017)

I can safely say that this is the first movie I've ever seen where the main language is Yiddish, possibly with a little English mixed in, unless there are more clear cognates than I thought. It's also rare for having English subtitles nearly all the time but being made and set in the U.S., so I wouldn't feel right adding a "foreign" tag.

The title character (real name Menashe Lustig) is an underachieving middle-aged kosher grocery clerk in Brooklyn. His wife died a year ago, and his Hasidic rabbi (Meyer Schwartz) has ruled that preteen son Rieven (Rubin Niborski) must live with Menashe's brother Eizik (Yoel Weisshaus) until Menashe remarries. Menashe likes hanging with Rieven as much as possible but drags his heels about exploring the possibility of remarriage, not because it feels too soon but because his arranged first marriage went poorly.

The Other Side of the Wind (2018)

Don't read too much into the year of release: Most of the work -- the recording, at least -- was done in the '70s, which is part of why I chose it out of my recent-skewing Netflix list. You might call it Orson Welles' most troubled movie of all, and that's saying something.

The title is also of a fictitious unfinished art film within the film. Its director, Jake Hannaford (John Huston), is "celebrating" his 70th birthday by showing snippets of footage to potential funders; answering obnoxious reporter questions or, more often, having protégé Brooks Otterlake (Peter Bogdanovich) answer for him; philandering; passing out party gifts; and expressing contempt for the leading man (aptly named Bob Random), who walked away before they could finish. Little does anyone know, as the up-front narration indicates, that Hannaford will die that night.

Over the Moon (2020)

This Netflix feature hasn't received great reviews, but the aesthetic in the stills drew me in. Besides, while I expect the next Academy Awards ceremony to be a nothingburger, I wanted to know what might be competition for Onward in the animation category, and A Whisker Away didn't seem mainstream enough. (Update: I was right on all counts.)

In modern China, preteen or possibly early teen Fei Fei (Cathy Ang) is an A student, which leads many to wonder why she still believes a tale of Chang'e, the woman who became the moon goddess. Her reason is personal: She learned it from her late mother (Ruthie Ann Miles). When her more science-minded father (John Cho) starts getting serious with widow Mrs. Zhong (Sandra Oh), Fei Fei feels that he must have lost faith in Mom. Mrs. Zhong's hyperactive eight-year-old son, Chin (Robert G. Chiu), doesn't make the prospect of remarriage any more palatable to Fei Fei. She gets the idea that Dad will call it off if she can just prove Mom right...by building a rocket to the moon and bringing back a photo of Chang'e.