One of the most grimly funny poems of the past century is Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse,” with its opening salvo about how our parents invariably mess us up. Larkin used a saltier word for “mess,” but you get the idea. Parents make us who we are, and if we have siblings, our parents’ traits and legacies filter through the whole gang in various combinations. As Larkin wrote, “They fill you with the faults they had/ and add some extra, just for you.”[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]All humans come from parents, people whose genetic stamp we carry whether we like it or not. And, perhaps excluding cases where those same people did not raise us, their faults inform us if not, as Larkin claimed, fill us. In the world of film, there have probably been as many movies about families as there are love stories. We’re obsessed with family stories for good reason, though not all of them need to be loaded with trauma. This fall movie season, you might say we’re exploring the subtler angles of how individual family members connect, or don’t. A documentary in which a now famous son reflects on the lives of his famous parents; a triptych exploring slightly wacky parent-child relationships, from a filmmaker who has specialized in vibrant off-kilter comedies since the 1980s; and, from a leading Danish-Norwegian filmmaker, a delicate but potent picture that looks at the damage an absentee parent can wreak—though reconnection and reconciliation are always possible, even if only in baby steps. Maybe familial ties, in a world that most days seems to have gone horribly wrong, where each whipsaw news cycle brings another story about humans’ inflicting cruelty on one another, are more important than ever. These films explore those bonds without ever resorting to bromides or mawkishness. Every family is flawed, unpredictable, aggravating in its own way—and still, they’re often the thing that gets us through.Going through decades’ worth of family possessions after the death of a parent is always a time for reflection, as well as the dumpster. Stuff tells a story, and actor, director, and producer Ben Stiller took the opportunity to make a documentary about his late parents, the ecstatically brilliant husband-and-wife comedy duo Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, as he was cleaning out the New York City apartment where he and his sister, Amy, were raised. Jerry had a penchant for tape-recording everything, from adorable things his kids said to arguments with Anne. There were also piles of paper and documents, including love letters Jerry had written to Anne when they were struggling young performers, separated for months at a time. (Romance is how families get started, after all.) Ben and Amy Stiller went through it all to make Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost (streaming on Apple TV+), reflecting on how their famous parents, rather than shielding their kids from the limelight, allowed them to step right into it: a clip of young Ben and Amy unskillfully sawing away at a violin duet on The Mike Douglas Show, as their parents watch, beaming, gives you a sense of the unfiltered pride Jerry and Anne took in their kids.But Jerry and Anne also had work that took them away from home for long stretches, and in later life they expressed regret over that. Stiller acknowledges that he now sees how he repeated the pattern with his own kids: like his father, he felt the need to hustle to keep his career and family afloat. Part of growing up is seeing your parents as real people with faults, but that recognition never happens in a flash, and it deepens with time. That’s what Stiller reckons with here: not just that his parents did the best they could, but that who they were shaped him and his sister in granular ways that defy explanation—wobbly violin playing notwithstanding. Read more: Ben Stiller Set Out to Make a Film About His Parents. He Didn’t Realize It Was About Himself, TooTreasured indie filmmaker Jim Jarmusch has also reached an age when he’s ready to examine the warped world of parent-child, as well as sibling, bonds. In Father Mother Sister Brother (opening Dec. 24), he presents vignettes of three not-quite-average families: In one, a twin brother and sister separated only by geography (Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat) connect in Paris to reminisce about their recently deceased parents, who raised them there. (They too need to go through the “stuff,” a part of grieving that involves an often jarring kind of tactile reckoning.) In another, Charlotte Rampling plays a chilly, wound-tight matriarch and successful novelist who welcomes her two daughters—pink-haired free spirit Vicky Krieps, and Cate Blanchett as the prim, dutiful, but seemingly less-favored child—to her tidy Dublin home for a once-a-year Sunday-afternoon tea. Though the girls call their mother “Mummy,” you can hardly imagine her changing a messy diaper or wiping a stray driblet of drool—yet you recognize that the halting decorum with which they communicate is its own kind of affection, a language worked out across decades.But the funniest and sweetest of Jarmusch’s three stories is the one in which siblings Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik pay a rare visit to their father, whom they’ve always found mysterious. They’re not sure what he ever did for a living; they worry that now, as a senior citizen, he’s hanging by a slender financial thread. When they arrive at Dad’s remote shambles of a house, they make note of the scrubby yard and the beat-up truck parked there. But he greets them with crusty bonhomie—it doesn’t hurt that he’s played by the great singer-songwriter and actor Tom Waits.He’s happy to see them; he gratefully accepts the basket of special treats (spaghetti sauce, a bottle of bourbon) his son has brought. The three of them sit through their visit rather awkwardly—Dad has nothing but tea to offer his kids, and they make a joke, one that recurs in the movie, of wondering aloud whether it’s bad luck to toast with it. Finally, the kids slink away, happy to be free of this weird glimpse into their aged father’s life. But Waits’ dad is a man with a secret—a harmless but hilarious one. Jarmusch is getting at something elusive here: we may think we’re the center of our parents’ world, but once we leave the nest, their lives become their own once again. Who knows what they’re really getting up to? Yet the most radiant of these films is Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value (opening on Nov. 7), in which a long-absent father, Stellan Skarsgard’s Gustav, an esteemed but aging filmmaker, returns to his family home in Oslo to reconnect with his two grown daughters, Renate Reinsve’s Nora, a neurotic but respected stage actress, and Inga Ibsdotter Lilleaas’ Agnes, a mother and historian. Nora and Agnes’ mother has just died—another instance in which all the cupboards and closets must be gone through, with the sisters left to decide who will take which glass vase or oft-used dish. Gustav, who left the family abruptly when his children were little, has returned not so much to mourn his estranged wife as to interest Nora in playing a movie role he’s written for her.Nora meets with him in a café; he outlines his request almost plaintively. She listens with guarded indifference before rejecting him outright. Although Agnes, having married and borne a child of her own, appears to have been more successful in moving past Gustav’s abandonment, Nora has never forgiven him. She has mostly hidden her suffering, in often damaging ways. Only Agnes, the younger of the two sisters, knows the extent of it.Gustav finds a replacement actress, an American (she’s played, with winsome gravitas, by Elle Fanning), and moves forward with his project—but not really. This small family trio is temporarily frozen in place: Gustav can’t make peace with the daughter he’s hurt so gravely—worse yet, he can’t even make art about his desire to do so. Agnes, grounded and generous, plays the go-between, but even she finds that role wearying. And Nora simply spirals. Gustav’s reappearance has forced a reckoning she’s not ready for. Reinsve, the star of Trier’s 2021 breakthrough hit The Worst Person in the World, shines here: she’s a firecracker that has lost its pop, left only to sputter and smoke. But Lilleaas, as Agnes, is the movie’s stealth weapon, a performer so serenely poetic that you might find yourself leaning toward the screen to catch every nuance. In a late scene, she comes to the rescue as Nora finds herself in crisis, only to remind her sister that any strength she has is thanks to Nora’s care and affection all through their childhood. When parents drop the ball, siblings often have a way of taking care of one another, carving a path into the future together.“Tenderness is the new punk,” Trier said in May when he premiered Sentimental Value at the Cannes Film Festival, coining what could become the signature phrase of 2025. “I need to believe that we can see the other,” he continued, “that there is a sense of reconciliation. Polarization, anger, and machismo aren’t the way forward.” Sentimental Value is a drama about one family, but it could also be a message in a bottle for the greater world. Larkin, a proto-punk, poked fun at the way humans, just by procreating, pass their worst traits to their children and beyond, through infinity. Trier has much more hope, and his tender punk manifesto echoes something the English clergyman and historian Thomas Fuller said more than three centuries ago: Charity begins at home, but it shouldn’t end there.