Feel-good movies come in two kinds. One kind simply offers fun escapism. It features car chases, characters with superpowers, and declarations of love in the rain. The purpose is to let you forget your problems for a couple of hours. 

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood is the other kind of feel-good movie. 

Seventy-five years ago, bombs weren’t dropped from drones flown by operators sitting behind joysticks in a high-tech war room thousands of miles away. No, you delivered them in person. You throttled your plane into a screaming nosedive straight down at the enemy ship floating below, released the payload at the last possible moment, then pulled back hard on the stick for a steep, blood-draining ascent away from the anti-aircraft guns blap!-blap!-blapping holes in your wings and fuselage.

Whew!

In his autobiography, Charlie Chaplin said if he had known the horrors of the concentration camps, he could not have made his 1940 satirical film The Great Dictator. Director Taika Waititi has no such reservations. In his new film Jojo Rabbit, marketed as an “anti-hate satire,” Waititi depicts the barbarians of the Holocaust as little more than buffoons. 

One night in 2016, New York resident Joel Darling accompanied some friends to the Tribeca Film Festival and watched a film he knew little about. El Clásico, from Kurdish director Halkawt Mustafa, tells the story of two bickering, soccer-obsessed brothers in Iraq. Both of the brothers are little people (dwarfs) who travel to Madrid on a mission to meet a famous soccer player. 

Darling loved it.

Among the many genres that have suffered in our age of superhero domination, perhaps none has been harder hit than the romantic comedy.

If anyone can bring holiday romance back to the big screen in a big way, however, it’s screenwriter/actress Emma Thompson. In her latest, Last Christmas (rated PG-13 for language), Thompson steals every scene she’s in as the domineering, immigrant mother of the lovely but self-destructive Kate (Emilia Clarke).

A single-propeller Spitfire loops and soars over the green British countryside, its pilot reveling in the craft’s liveliness. Spitfire, a documentary available on Netflix, tells the tale of the last of the fighter planes without a jet engine, a plane that became a symbol of British courage during the Second World War.

In Waves, writer-director Trey Edward Shults’ latest feature, characters suffer tragedy caused by little sins that compound. The film shows a family overcoming darkness through forgiveness, but objectionable material—and a negative portrayal of the pro-life cause—makes this Oscar contender difficult to recommend.