The best William Duell’s drama movies

While serving time for insanity at a state mental hospital, implacable rabble-rouser, Randle Patrick McMurphy, inspires his fellow patients to rebel against the authoritarian rule of head nurse, Mildred Ratched.

Albany, New York, Halloween, 1938. Francis Phelan and Helen Archer are bums, back in their birth city. She was a singer on the radio, he a major league pitcher. Death surrounds them: she's sick, a pal has cancer, he digs graves at the cemetery and visits the grave of his infant son whom he dropped; visions of his past haunt him, including ghosts of two men he killed. That night, out drinking, Helen tries to sing at a bar. Next day, Fran visits his wife and children and meets a grandson. He could stay, but decides it's not for him. Helen gets their things out of storage and finds a hotel. Amidst their mistakes and dereliction, the film explores their code of fairness and loyalty.

A true story of politics and art in the 1930s USA, centered around a leftist musical drama and attempts to stop its production.

Based on the case of young New Yorker Etan Patz, who disappeared in the early 1980s, this film casts Kate Nelligan as the distraught mother who lashes out at the police (in the person of a relentless detective played by Judd Hirsch), who make her and her husband suspects, even as she hounds them to find her child and drives away her husband (David Dukes) and friends (including Stockard Channing) with her intensity and single-mindedness. Squandered on a Hollywood ending that doesn't square with the real case: Etan Patz was never found.

On Christmas Eve, a relentlessly cheerful woman escapes from the killers hired by her husband, and embarks on a series of strange encounters.