Writer-director Ben Younger, who perflectly nailed the high-testosterone world of pump-and-dump stock scams in Boiler Room, is a bit more uneven with a switch over to the estrogen side of things with “Prime.” It is the story of an unusual love triangle: Rafi, a vulnerable recent divorcee (Uma Thurman), David, her passionate, much-younger lover (Bryan Greenberg), and Lisa (Meryl Streep), who is both Rafi’s therapist and David’s mother.

This is the story of all three of those relationships — Rafi and David, Rafi and Lisa, and and Lisa and David. But Younger is better at creating characters and situations than he is at resolving them. It does have lovely performances, some hilarious moments and some surprisingly touching ones, and the best pie-in-the-face gag since Mack Sennett.

With Rafi, Lisa is the ideal therapist-as-mother, warm, endlessly devoted, gently insightful, always supportive. But with David she is just like any other mother, struggling to hold on and let go at the same time. If a patient wants to enjoy some casual sex with someone who would be inappropriate as a long-term partner, that’s one thing. But if her son has a girlfriend who is both older and not Jewish, that’s another.

The who-will-find-out-what-when part of the movie and the how-will-his-friends-feel-about-her and how-will-her-friends-feel-about-him sections of the movie unroll in all-but-alphabetical order, but the conviction all three players bring to their scenes together make them work — and make us care as we laugh, and the struggles the three of them have to try to make it all work are genuinely affecting.

Parents should know that the movie is very explicit for a PG-13, with very frank sexual references and situations. Characters use strong language.

Families who see this movie should talk about why Lisa had a different view of what was right for Rafi before she knew Ben was involved than after she learned it was him. They should also talk about their own feelings about religious inter-marriage.

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy Keeping the Faith.

A hyper-verbal, deeply wounded man who is almost as clever (but not nearly as brilliant) as he thinks he is has an ego that has been triply hit. His unfaithful wife wants a divorce, his writing career, once called promising, now feels like the promise was broken, and the onset of middle age has left him feeling soft and old and uncertain.

So, Bernard Berkman (Jeff Daniels) makes things worse, with casually but unmistakably condescending and contemptuous assessments of just about everything. He keeps putting it out there, calling what he approves of the “filet,” whether it’s a neighborhood or a novel, pretending that everyone cares what he thinks and is guided by it.

But only two people are. One is his teenaged son, Walt (Jesse Eisenberg), who is — briefly — at just that moment when his father’s combination of arrogance and certainty feels comforting to him, something to hold fast to in a world where everything is changing too quickly.

The other is a student in Bernard’s writing class, Lili (the exquisite Anna Paquin in a performance of great shrewdness). She is, briefly, at at stage where the great advantage of Bernard’s arrogance and certainty is testing the power of her youth and promise by seeing if she can make him topple. Which she can.

Writer/director Noah Baumbach based this story on his own life and he gets the details right — the shabby but dignified gentility of 1970’s Brooklyn, the acid exchanges and inconvenient longings of a dissolving marriage, the exquisite agony of those first flutterings of love and those first earthquakes of lust. The title refers to a massive display at the museum that once terrified Walt. Now, it seems less scary than the battles he lives with. Or maybe it helps him understand them.

Baumbach guides his talented cast to performances that are both sensitive and fearless. Daniels and Laura Linney as his wife are sympathetic but willing to show us the narcissism under their characters’ reactions. Eisenberg and Owen Kline as his younger brother who sides with the mother in the divorce are open and natural. The lovely Halley Feiffer as Walt’s love interest is marvelously expressive and vulnerable.

Bambach understands how everyone in the family responds to the seismic shifts by trying to hold on to what they can, by marking their territory (literally, in the case of the younger son, who wipes school lockers and library books with his ejaculate). Baumbach himself holds on to his story by telling it to us with clarity and understanding.

Parents should know that this movie includes very mature material, including very strong and crude language and inappropriate conversations between parents and children. There are explicit sexual references and situations, including adultery, references to teen sex, and masturbation. Characters drink and smoke. There are tense and emotional scenes and it appears one character is seriously ill.

Families who see this movie should talk about its autobiographical origins. How can you tell that it is from the point of view of Walt, and not one of the other characters? How does the screenwriter feel about his father now, compared to the way Walt feels in the film? How can you tell?

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy Rich in Love and Shoot the Moon.

I’ve always suspected that a failed Cameron Crowe movie would be more entertaining than a successful movie by most Hollywood screenwriters, and this shows I was right.

Okay, Vanilla Sky was not exactly entertaining, but it wasn’t exactly a CC movie, either. In this movie, Crowe returns to what he does best, quirky, hyper-verbal characters stumbling through life passages to a killer soundtrack. Even though the movie itself does a lot of stumbling, it is still worth seeing, to enjoy the parts that work and figure out what is wrong with the parts that don’t.

Orlando Bloom plays Drew, who is experiencing in real life one of those situations that frequently crop up in anxiety dreams. He is a shoe designer. He designed a shoe that failed so spectacularly that his employer has lost almost a billion dollars. As he returns to the office and is escorted to the inner sanctum of the CEO (another brilliant performance by Alec Baldwin, happily enjoying himself as the character actor he was meant to be), we see the pitying “last looks” he gets from people so simultaneously horrified and mesmerized by the monumental proportions of his failure (and so relieved to think that the depths of his fall are so far beyond anything they could do wrong that at least for now, they are a little bit safer).

Drew has lost his job. He has lost his girlfriend. And then things really get bad. His sister calls. Their father has died. His mother needs Drew to go to Elizabethtown, Kentucky, where his father was visiting relatives, to make the arrangements.

And on the airplane, there is a flight attendant named Claire (Kirsten Dunst), who is every bit the unquenchable life force we feel entitled to look forward to in a Cameron Crowe movie.

And then things really get bad. All right, they’re still worse for Drew than they are for us, but then the movie begins to get muddled and Crowe completely loses control of the way his characters come across, particularly and most horrifyingly an awkward and clumsy memorial service that concludes with a scene even Susan Sarandon can’t make work. One reason Claire (note the name) is the only appealing character in the movie is that she is the only one who has no reason to be in mourning, so she is the only one who does not come across as oddly, ultimately chillingly, well, chilly. These people are not numb or in denial. They are just so frantically trying to show us how darned quirky and cute they are that they don’t seem to have noticed that there has been a loss.

Reportedly, a longer “unfinished” version of this film was derided by critics at the Toronto Film Festival and the movie was hurriedly recut before release. That might explain the disjointedness and inconsistency and the sense that the laws of time and space are suspended but only for some of the characters — while we and some of the characters were living through a couple of days, others seemed to have somehow gone through weeks worth of activity.

This contributes to the movie’s biggest stumbling block — the sense that the characters are not experiencing any of the emotions we associate with a devastating loss. They all seem much too chipper and self-consciously (and cloyingly) quirky and adorable, but they just come across as distant and self-involved. And the movie takes un-Crowe-ish cheap shots at its own characters, especially a too-cute bridal couple having a wedding blow-out at Drew’s hotel.

There’s a movie in there someplace worth seeing. In the meantime, there are parts of this one, especially Dunst and the soundtrack, that make the rest of it worth sitting through.

Parents should know that the movie has some tense and emotional moments, including an attempted suicide and an open-casket. There is some strong language and characters drink and smoke. The movie includes sexual references and a non-explicit sexual situation.

Families who see this movie should talk about why Drew’s mother was uncomfortable with her husband’s family and what Drew learned from his time with his father’s relatives. Why was it important to the story that Drew experience professional failure before experiencing personal tragedy? Why was it hard for him to mourn? Why did Crowe include the wedding party as a part of the story? If you were going to create a journey (complete with soundtrack) for someone you cared about, where would it be and what would you include?

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy Crowe’s Almost Famous and Say Anything.

Julianne Moore’s radiant performance as Evelyn Ryan does for this movie what the real-life Ryan’s “contest-ing” did for her family in the 1950’s — it holds it together with such mesmerizing grace that it makes the rough patches seem endearing.

The book that inspired this movie is the memoir by one of Ryan’s 10 children about the way that their stay-at-home mother supported the family by winning contests from companies offering money and prizes for the best jingle or limerick or recipe.

We didn’t call them stay-at-home mothers back then. They were just mothers, or maybe housewives. And Ryan looks like one of the moms from a 1950’s television program, always wearing a dress and an apron, always either diapering a baby, ironing a shirt, or making sloppy joes for everyone. And always smiling. Until most of her children were grown up, Ryan never ate a meal she didn’t cook or slept in a bed she didn’t make. If she wanted to go somewhere, she needed to ask for a ride because she did not know how to drive. She almost went to New York once, when she won a trip in a contest. But the family needed her, so she stayed home. She heard from another “contest-er” who invited her to visit the “Alpha-Daisies,” a whole group of contest-enterers, including one in a cheerfully decorated iron lung, and it became her dream to have a chance to meet those women.

Writer/director Jane Anderson (the biting The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom and the sensitive transgender drama Normal) uses stylized narrative techniques to invoke the perkiness and optimism of the 1950’s. At first it seems like a cutesy device to recall and gently tease the perky pastel harmonized style of the 1950’s. But it becomes clear that it is emblematic of Evelyn’s own imperishable open-heartedness. Like its heroine, the movie has its limits and obstacles, but it is very winning.

Parents should know that a theme of the movie is Kelly’s alcoholism and the impact on his family. He uses some strong language, including the f-word, and there are brief depictions of domestic abuse and some graphic injuries following accidents.

Families who see this movie should talk about Evelyn’s optimism and patience. Her comment to Tuff is reminiscient of the famous Zen parable.

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy seeing Moore as a 1950’s housewife coping with a difficult marital situation in Far From Heaven (some mature material).

There’s only one possible reason that Brandon Lang (Matthew McConaughey), a one-time quarterback with a busted knee turned 900-number sportsline win-predictor sticks around after he finds out what is really going on in the big-money sports betting advice, and it’s the same reason we stick around, too. We can’t take our eyes off of Al Pacino as Walter Abrams.

Brandon’s entire life has been sports for as long as he can remember. First it was because he thought if he was really, really good at sports, his father wouldn’t leave. Then, after his father left, it was because of the purity of sports, because it was a place where everything could be made right with just one play, just one score.

But Brandon’s hopes for a professional career ended with the knee injury. He worked the 900-number job in Las Vegas for a while and then one day got a call and an airplane ticket from Walter, offering him a chance at the big time.

Walter and his wife Toni (Rene Russo) introduce Brandon to the finer things in life — $12 bottles of water, thousand dollar suits, four-figure-a-night female companionship, use of the f-word, and a roomy apartment in a brownstone that also houses Walter, Toni, and their 6-year-old daughter and his company’s offices. It’s like a sort of “Real World: High Stakes Gambling” edition.

It’s a Faustian hubris story, with aw-shucks Brandon being transformed by Walter. Brandon gets a new look and even a new name. Betting is illegal in 49 states, but giving people advice on betting is not, and Walter has made a thriving business out of a cable show (Call 1-800-Bet-it!) that, like a drug dealer, gives away the first hit for free, and then pushes the high fliers to go for more.

Walter knows that the agression, testosterone, competitiveness, and impulse control problems of gamblers makes them very susceptible to sales pressure, and he has no qualms about applying pressure to his employees to get them to squeeze the suckers even harder. He even trolls Gamblers Anonymous meetings for those who might be ready to fall off the wagon. “You’re selling the world’s rarest commodity,” he tells Brandon, “certainty in an uncertain world.”

And Walter knows uncertainty. He insists he can beat anyone else’s rotten childhood story with his own. As Toni explains, he belongs to any group with an “Anonymous” at the end of it. The fun of this movie is seeing Pacino dive into the part and hang on for dear life.

That almost makes it possible to ignore the storyline, which zigzags from predictable to inconsistent with a slight detour into makes-no-sense-ville.

Parents should know that the movie has constant use of the f-word and other bad language. The movie includes sexual references (including prostitution and abuse) and an explicit sexual situation with brief nudity. Characters drink and smoke. A character is pushed around and threatened with a gun.

Families who see this movie should talk about what drew Brandon and Walter to each other and what made it hard for them to keep working together.

Families who enjoy this movie will also enjoy Boiler Room and On Any Sunday.