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Looking back on the career of Burt Reynolds, who for five consecutive years (1978 – 1982) was the world’s number one box office attraction, it’s hard not to remember Peter O’Toole’s famous line from My Favorite Year: “I’m not an actor, I’m a movie star!”

About 20 minutes into The Take Out Move, I started fantasizing about an appearance from The Colonel, the Monty Python character played by Graham Chapman who would burst into the middle of sketches and demand that they be stopped because they were getting “far too silly.”

It’s not that I wasn’t warned. What else would you expect from a movie that opens with the onscreen announcement “Based on the real facts of a fictional true story”?

If there is a through line to the career of director Martha Coolidge (Rambling Rose, Real Genius, Valley Girl), it is her consistent ability to make films that are better than they had any right to be given scripts that were not of the top tier. One of numerous independent directors of the 1980s who moved to television and cable in the 1990s when the tide turned away from low-key comedy-dramas, Coolidge is back with I’ll Find You, her first feature in over a decade.

An unusual event that brings out the foibles of the members of a small community has been an irresistable comic premise for movies from Whisky Galore up through Local Hero and Doc Hollywood. Writer-director Daniel Keith shows that it’s far from exhausted with Love in Kilnerry, an independently made and distributed comedy that has been building audiences through word of mouth.

In the upstate New York town of Suffern, a young woman named River (Joelle Montoya) spends her days wondering what direction her life will take. Her time is spent with friends and acquaintances who are equally unmoored, including a financially desperate co-worker (Laura Desmond), a petulant bartender (Rivera Reese), a petty thief (Nick Carlascio), and an old woman (Ellen Boscov) whose once good life has passed her by.

Every community should be so lucky as to have a restaurant like Belle Vie. Community building, in fact, was the stated goal of third-generation restauranteur Vincent Samarco when he moved to Los Angeles from France. With minimal resources, he rented a run-down building on a generic commercial block of Wilshire Boulevard in West Los Angeles, between a MacDonalds and a KFC. He built and decorated as much of the interior as he could, including making his own tables, and opened his Parisian-style bistro in 2016.

Theater people are almost proudly superstitious, and about no play more so than Macbeth. That’s what makes a summer stock production of “the Scottish play” (for those who dare not say its name) the perfect vehicle for this satire of show folk.

In this hour-long documentary, American filmmakers Eladio Arvelo and Shareef Haq visit Vietnam to explore how that once tortured country was able to turn itself around within one generation to become one of the fastest-growing economies in the world.

There are reasons why the horror anthology—a feature compiled from a handful of short films—is an economical and efficient choice for independent filmmakers. It can be made piecemeal with little need for continuity among the segments. And as long as the segments have a clever premise, audiences will overlook a lot of technical deficiencies for the short period of time it takes for the story to unspool.