Suburbicon; Novitiate

Suburbicon is a black comedy that's not only unfunny but deeply dislikable. It's the result of exhuming an old unproduced Coen Brothers script about murder and perversity, then combining it with a facile denunciation of white racism in 1950s suburbia.

Novitiate is a debut feature, written and directed by Maggie Betts and set mostly in the early 1960s, in a cloistered convent in rural Tennessee. In a time of reflexive irony and glib sophistication, Betts has made a lovely film about love of God — about marriage to God — and given it a political dimension as well.