About 15 minutes in I decided I wanted some popcorn, and upon looking at my phone, it appeared that an hour and a half had passed. From what I understand, that hasn’t been the standard reaction across the Internet, but for me at least, Django was incredibly easy to watch, and not for a moment did I want it to end.

The structure is right in tune with many Spaghetti Westerns (itself being one more in a long series of unofficial sequels to Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 film Django): the compacted serial with each episode lasting a half hour or so. There’s an overarching plot, but just as much does it like to get sidetracked in subplots.

The main story centers around Django (Jamie Foxx), a runaway slave many times over who only wants to be reunited with his wife. He has the good fortune of meeting up with Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a German dentist turned bounty hunter, hot on the trail of the notorious Brittle Brothers. Django, a former acquaintance of the Brittles, is the only man alive who knows what they look like, and Schultz, gleefully operating within the laws and well versed in all the loopholes, buys Django to help him hunt down the bounty.

Morning. Here’s another new trailer for Quentin Tarantino‘s Django Unchained. The movie stars Jamie Foxx, Leonardo DiCaprio, Christoph Waltz and Kerry Washington. It opens Christmas Day.

Our opinion? This just keeps looking better and better. Check out the new trailer and tell us what you think.

Night Catches Us takes place during the mid-‘70s in Philadelphia. The protagonist, Marcus (Anthony Mackie), is an ex-Black Panther, who comes back to town for his father’s funeral and is targeted by other ex-Panthers because he ratted out the cop-killing husband of Patricia (Kerry Washington), the only woman in the neighborhood who apparently likes him.

Marcus strikes up a rapport with Patricia’s daughter, filling in the role of the father he may or may not have had killed, and it’s not too long before we learn that the reason for Marcus’s stay is his deep passion for Patricia.

Patricia also plays surrogate mother to Jimmy (Amari Cheatom), a sort of street tough who’s had several run-ins with the police, some of them his fault, but mostly because the white police have a habit of harassing the neighborhood and Jimmy never knows when to keep his mouth shut. Jimmy idolizes Marcus’s former life as a Panther and is quickly heading down that same road that Marcus now regrets taking.

But Night’s ultimately not as much about the Panthers as it is about Marcus choosing not to repeat his past mistakes and find a better life through forging relationships instead of severing them. Jimmy’s the counterpoint, and his character works well at explaining why the life of militantism in the late ‘60s and ‘70s was so seductive—the police were brutes, and for a lot of angry young men, fighting back seemed like the only response.

Rodrigo Garcia’s new film is entitled Mother and Child, but it might more accurately have been called Mother and Daughter, as variations of that freighted relationship play out in the interconnected lives of three women in Los Angeles, depicted with stellar ensemble work by Annette Bening, Naomi Watts and Kerry Washington.

Annette Bening’s role is the most attention-getting, as Karen, a woman so angry and closed that she becomes apoplectic when a co-worker (the wonderful Jimmy Smits) attempts to give her a bag of home-grown tomatoes. Karen lives with a mother possibly even grimmer than herself, but her true wound is the loss of the baby she was forced to give up for adoption when she was fifteen years old.

It soon becomes apparent, at least to the viewer, that this baby is now the adult Elizabeth, played by Watts, a corporate lawyer who protects herself with clinical detachment and a sexually sadistic streak. Meanwhile, Washington plays Lucy, a young wife desperate to adopt and become a mother.

Far apart at first, these lives overlap in that hyperlink way popularized by movies such as Babel and Syriana, but in this case the collisions are not so much a matter of chance or fate as it is of deep connections having to do with motherhood, and all revolving around the character of a social-working nun (“Mother Superior,” representing Mary, the Holy Mother?) played by Cherry Jones with appealing compassion. If such nuns were the rule rather than the far-apart exception, we might all be tempted to convert to Catholicism.