For the broke young couple at the heart of A Day Off, every step feels like the end of the road. They get together every Sunday; on this particularly brisk one, their last decision together is that she’ll get an abortion, and so he runs out to the city to find money to pay for it. In a sad metaphor for their relationship, we see him offer her his coat, then decide to take it with him, then finally take it off and leave it on the ground. During his search, we see her shivering on the park bench while he's out either being denied loans, or losing his nerve.

The Dreileben (three lives) trilogy: three different directors take the same inciting incident and conclusion (madman escapes, hides out in forest, kills again, is finally captured) and emphasize as much or as little of that plot as convenient. Perversely, almost nothing in any of the three films enriches or demands the company of its companions. The results (emerging from a back-and-forth, began in 2006 and published in 2007, about the directors’ differing views on German cinema) don’t really complement each other; they stand alone, for better or worse. Mostly worse.

Carrying her dress in plastic Target bag and sporting chipped, days-old nail polish, Laura Guerrero (Stephanie Sigman) seems an unlikely contestant for the Miss Baja pageant, but the way in which her naïve aspirations are rudely interrupted is unexpected indeed. “Bala,” you see, means “bullet.” Lau is reluctantly joining her friend at a club, where macho drug cops with alleged pull at the pageant hold court in an exclusive back room with cinderblock walls and strings of CDs, when it’s raided by a drug cartel—kingpin Lino (Noe Hernandez) finds her cowering in the bathroom, and lets her leave before they open fire. Trying to find her friend the next day, she approaches a cop in a parked squad car to ask after her friend, and gets in to tell her story—the cop, slightly out of focus in the foreground of the shallow widescreen frame, seems twitchy, and we jump along with Laura when the car starts moving, and aren’t necessarily surprised when, all in the same take, she’s delivered to Lino, who’s taken an interest in her.

The writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation opens in an Iranian courtroom—like the other courtrooms we see in the film, it looks like an old elementary-school classroom, all hard and once-bright tile—with husband Nader (Peyman Moadi) and wife Simin (Leila Hatami) bickering with each other and pleading their cases at hearing for their divorce position. The camera’s static, from the judge’s p.o.v., so that their imploring arguments seem to be directed at us—and so, for the remainder of the movie, we observe everyone’s perfectly rationally justified self-interest, as everything goes to hell.

• In the 2000s, filmmakers would frequently cast the actress Anna Paquin (pictured) as high school students in their films about post-9/11 NYC.

The move itself, though, feels beholden to no one, sometimes gloriously so. Lonergan follows Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin), a smart and sometimes smugly self-aware teenager attending Upper West Side private school. We see her charm her math teacher (Matt Damon) out of a cheating accusation, flirtily sidestep a nervous classmate kinda-sorta asking for a date, and shop for a cowboy hat for her upcoming trip out West to visit her dad. Then she distracts a bus driver (Mark Ruffalo), who runs a red light and hits a pedestrian (Allison Janney), who dies in Lisa's arms.

The first two scenes in Le Havre, Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki’s latest deadpan fable, conjure an air of menace and frustration—but most of the rest of the film is refreshingly good-natured. Wizened shoeshiner Marcel Marx (André Wilms), who plies his trade in the eponymous French port town, is introduced blackening the boots of a customer when sinister figures emerge at the corners of the screen, the director cutting in to their comically expressionless faces. After these men carry off Marx’s customer, they offer him a pittance for his business losses, which is more than he gets in the second scene, when he’s rudely booted from his perch in front of a department store.