Why do the best American directors take so long to release new movies these days? Has auteur theory just gone too mainstream? Take a look at the steady, magnificent output of Americans like Wilder, Ford, and Hawks in the pre-auteurist 30s, 40s, and 50s, and ask yourself if a guy like Alexander Payne really needs to take seven years in between high-quality entertainments.

Céline Sciamma had already shown great talent with her 2007 directorial debut, Water Lilies, and after four years, Tomboy delves into similar terrain: the coming of age and blooming sexuality of young women. Whereas Water Lilies focused on the lives of teenage girls, this time around she introduces us to the 10-year-old Laure, who, with her crop haircut and grey sleeveless shirt, could easily pass as a boy in most contexts. Along with her parents and six-year-old sister, Laure (Zoé Héran) moves into a new apartment.

The Green is the sort of well-intentioned drama you keep hoping will get better, even though you know it’s doomed from the start. The film engenders pervasive discomfort, not from its serious, troubling subject matter, but from its almost total failure to achieve the sense of truth it seeks.

England feels like a miserable place. The air looks stale and grim, the people are obnoxious, the beer is warm, and the houses seem more like sterile articles of manufacturing than places occupied by warmth or love. At least it’s hard to walk away from Tyrannosaur, Paddy Considine’s feature debut, thinking otherwise.

With Rid of Me, writer/director James Westby gives us a lightweight dark comedy about an insecure young woman named Meris (Katie O’Grady) in a mismatched marriage to a cheeseball perfectly named Mitch (John Keyser). Both Meris and the marriage rapidly unravel when the couple moves to Mitch’s hometown in Oregon. Meris doesn’t quite mesh (to put it mildly) with Mitch’s group of high school cheeseball friends; from the moment they walk into a surprise welcome home party thrown by the friends, it’s clear Meris is experiencing a military ambush rather than a supposedly fun gathering.

In 1991, West Virginia’s Public Television network debuted Jacob Young’s Dancing Outlaw, a short documentary about Jesco White, a habitually incarcerated, drug-addled “mountain tap-dancer” with an Elvis persona who knew he could be famous if he just stopped sniffing glue and lighter fluid for a long enough stretch. The doc became a cult favorite, mainly due to the baffling and hilarious things Jesco would say off the cuff and with absolutely no guile.

We’ve heard it trumpeted countless times from the self-appointed tastemakers, the hidden hand offering up distressed jeans and cell phone minutes: young men want to be rock ‘n’ roll stars. One by one, they march to the killing floor, bright-eyed and naïve, flailing about for the elusive gold star, eking out a living on meager wages and flagging hope, or else never really getting started at all, resting the Squier on the barely-used practice amp and moving on to a future in public administration.