1. "True Story, The Jinx and Serving Up Truth With the Imagination." A.O. Scott about that pervasive free-floating anxiety about stories that claim to be true, and when distortion becomes art.

"What is most interesting to me about Ms. [Janet] Malcolm's defense of Mr. [Joseph] Mitchell is that she recasts what is commonly understood as an ethical boundary as an aesthetic distinction. Mr. Mitchell may have regarded himself as a journalist rather than a novelist—in any case The New Yorker classified his work as fact rather than fiction—but in Ms. Malcolm's view his talent was artistic, and therefore beyond the kind of criticism that insists on literal accuracy. To put it another way: His genius resided in the brazenness and extremity of his violation of the rules of journalism. He was, as the review's headline claims, 'The master writer of the city' because he was also, to some degree, a master criminal."

On March 8, 1983, President Ronald Reagan addressed the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida. His remarks ranged widely, touching on the Book of Isaiah and The Screwtape Letters, Alexis de Tocqueville and the Declaration of Independence, but his central subject, as he described it, was the knowledge "that living in this world means dealing with what philosophers would call the phenomenology of evil or, as theologians would put it, the doctrine of sin." Though it was his invocation of the Soviet Union's "evil empire" that made waves, as we see in a nightly news segment at the end of tonight's episode of The Americans, it's Reagan's decision to cast Cold War politics in such stark terms, both secular and religious, that underlines the moral compromises on which the series has focused throughout its brilliant third season. In "March 8, 1983," 48 minutes that come as near to perfection as television can, it turns out that the phenomenology of evil and the doctrine of sin are inadequate hermeneutics for the dark night of the soul.

Compared to the misanthropic roundelays that made his reputation back in the 1990s and early aughts, Dirty Weekend, the latest film from Neil LaBute, finds this generally prickly provocateur in a relatively lighthearted mood. Certainly, neither of the two main characters, Les (Matthew Broderick) and Natalie (Alice Eve), do anything extravagantly nasty to each other in the way Aaron Eckhart's vengefully misogynist business executive in In the Company of Men or Rachel Weisz's exploitive artist in The Shape of Things behave toward ostensible friends and love interests. Which isn't to say this is exactly a departure for LaBute. As ever, he's fascinated with the ways people lie to each other and to themselves, and this time he trains his eye on a prudish man who, we gradually discover, is on a mission to discover what exactly happened one drunken night in Albuquerque, New Mexico, on a business trip months ago.

The mother of the three children at the center of Alexandre Nanău's Toto and His Sisters is in jail for dealing drugs, and early in the documentary, she's read a list of her offenses by a parole board and quickly denied her freedom. The scene is primarily expositional, explaining how the titular siblings have ended up alone in a Bucharest slum, surrounded by constantly swarming heroin addicts, many of whom are the children's relatives. The film details this bleak existence largely through nine-year-old Toto and 15-year-old Andreea, who barely survive it, and their older sister, Ana, who barely functions as a not-exactly-recovering addict. The setup sounds like the worst kind of misery porn, fit more for an international edition of Intervention than a feature film, and though the director does intermittently indulge in a cheap, heavy-handed sort of sentimentalism, he's also fashioned a slyly subversive document of the wrongheadedness of anti-drug legislation, treatment, and governmental responsibility.

Slow, deliberate camera movement has been a fashionable trait in international art cinema for decades, but in the case of Nicolás Pereda's Los Ausentes, the household descriptors won't do. Here, the camera seems to be manned by a slug spreading its oily emissions along the surfaces of an open-air cabin somewhere in coastal Mexico. In many instances, it's unclear if space has been reoriented at all, until suddenly something juts into the foreground after five minutes and it becomes apparent that the camera has been steadily backtracking. Such is the deal in the opening shot, when a still life of a chewing donkey recedes into space to reveal the film's central character silhouetted at a table on the opposite side of a window. For viewers of a certain formalist persuasion, there's great pleasure to this simple technique, a kind of eerie gravitational slide that at least partially fills a hole left by the departure of Béla Tarr from world cinema, but immaculately sluggish side-to-side and front-to-back movement does only so much for a movie. If there's a foundational flaw to the vaporous Los Ausentes, it's that Pereda has put too much stock in the ghostly sensations invoked by his technique at the expense of developing much else.

In Good Kill, filmmaker Andrew Niccol seizes on an unnerving and ever-relevant subject. It's one thing to read of U.S. drone strikes daily in the papers and quite another to watch even simulated images of American pilots cramped in bunkers bombing Afghanistan, via consoles that resemble video games in aesthetic as well as mode of functioning. Real people are killed as casually as pixels in an Xbox game, and that distancing, yet another manifestation of the social media-enabled detachment that characterizes the amorality of modern life, arrives with an obvious, staggering price tag attached. With great ease comes little responsibility or accountability. If bombing 30 people from 10,000 feet above is a risk-free endeavor for the bombers, then it matters less to them, living half a world's away, whether or not those people pose an authentic threat to their domain.

Logically, Niccol has fashioned from this subject matter a chamber drama that reflects the tight confines of the drone pilot's trailer. Thomas Egan (Ethan Hawke) is a major in the U.S. Air Force who's flown six tours in the War on Terror and is now uneasily resigning himself to a job at a console in Las Vegas. Despite the safety of his new occupation, and his newfound proximity to his wife, Molly (January Jones), and children, Thomas is beginning to exhibit signs of PTSD, most explicitly in his drinking, aloofness, and inability to sleep. The guilt spurred from the physical ease of the assignment is wearing Thomas down, as he misses the risk of actual flight, which blurs the political uncertainties of his part in the war through the sheer visceral fight-or-flight sensations of battle. In physical warfare, Thomas is extending his opponents the etiquette of endangering his own life; now, he can't live with what he deems to be the cowardice of long-distance warfare.

The campaign of conscripted labor, systematic rape and murder, death marches, and displacement waged by Turkey against its Armenian citizens at the start of WWI, which resulted in perhaps as many as a million deaths, is marking its 100th anniversary this week. Yet it remains an extremely tender topic for Armenians, not least because the Turkish government has refused to acknowledge the extent of the calamity, sometimes even prosecuting and jailing Turkish citizens for citing the killings or calling them genocide. As a result, The Cut lived up to its title for me, creating two sets of strong, sometimes dueling reactions. The Armenian in me felt grateful to director Fatih Akın, an ethnic Turk who grew up in Germany, and his co-writer, Mardik Martin (Raging Bull), an Armenian-American, for taking on this charged topic and giving these gruesome facts a rare cinematic airing. But the film lover in me sometimes wished that The Cut, which often has the self-consciously art-directed, undead feel of a Natural History Museum diorama, were less encyclopedic and more irreverent, with more of the messy misbehavior and convincingly complicated characters that give Akin's best films, Head On and Edge of Heaven, a jittery sense of life.

1. "Wondering Woman." Mark Harris on why Warner Bros. axed Michelle MacLaren, and what that tells us about the state of female directors in Hollywood.

"To translate all of that into English: Since studio development executives are now asked to be property managers rather than movie developers, not many of them are capable of sitting down and talking about what a story should be. And none of them wants to risk his neck by committing early to the wrong choice. So, like many modern-day blockbusters, Wonder Woman will be developed via the monkeys-at-typewriters approach: Let's have a bunch of different people write different Wonder Woman scripts, pick the parts that we sort of like better than the others, proceed to humiliate the 'winning' writers by asking them to interpolate the stuff from the 'losing' scripts that we also kind of liked, let the WGA work out the credits and mop up the blood and tears, sew everything together, and sell the resulting Frankenmovie to an audience we will have programmed (via an incessant drumbeat of teasers, trailers, and post-credit sequences) to show up for whatever this thing turns out to be. That certainly sounds like every writer and director's dream."

Far from Men is set against the backdrop of the blossoming Algerian War of Independence in 1954, following Daru (Viggo Mortensen), a man of few words who teaches reading to the children of goat-herding Algerian natives, though one look at him reveals that he's obviously haunted by something primal and existential. Daru's one-room school, which sits on a plateau that's in the middle of a rocky, desert Nowheresville, clearly serves as a sort of monastery for the teacher, as it's a place for him to practice a kind of theoretically under-the-radar pacifism. There's no such thing, however, as Daru is frequently bothered by the French military and, suggestively, by the guerrilla Algerian resistance. The teacher's neutrality is dangerous and seen as a threat by both sides, and this issue is further clouded because Daru, like many Algerian settlers, has explicit ties to both the French and Arab communities. These cultural ambiguities reach a potentially explosive head when the French military drops an Arab, Mohamed (Reda Kateb), off at Daru's door, ordering him to deliver the prisoner to a nearby French prison for sentencing and inevitable execution.

Slow West is a photogenic trifle about a Scottish teen traveling through the rugged, dangerous terrain of frontier America in 1870 looking for his runaway love and her father. It begins with a "once upon a time," which instantly gives writer-director John Maclean's western the secret air of a fairy tale. Indeed, as Jay Cavendish (Kodi Smit-McPhee) lies on his back and stares at the stars, which twinkle as he pretends to shoot them with his gun, there's a sense of him as a little prince who's left the safety of some far-off land in search of adventure, or to fulfill some fabulously preordained destiny. Silas Selleck (Michael Fassbender), who narrates Jay's conventional story with the sort of regard that suggests he thinks it will be of value to someone in the future other than himself, meets him deep in Colorado and becomes the young man's protector against the elements and wolves who appear to them in sheep's clothing—literally so in the case of one particularly colorful bounty hunter, Payne (Ben Mendelsohn). It's a fable that makes the unexceptional appear slightly off-kilter through fussy artifice, and programmatically marches toward a bloody climax whose only true, if scarcely resplendent, surprise is its denial of a conventional happily ever after.