1982, Australia, 92 min.

Haggard and used up, Mac Sledge (Robert Duvall, in an Oscar-winning performance) awakens from another bender in a motel in an anonymous stretch of Texas. Unable to pay his bill, he arranges with owner Rosa Lee (Tess Harper), a young, widowed, single mother, to work off his debt. He stays on and straightens out. Mac and Rosa Lee get close. They marry. Life is fine until Mac returns to his scorched past in country music, which includes a resentful ex-wife (Betty Buckley) and an estranged daughter (Ellen Barkin). The theme of second chances in late adulthood is a familiar one to moviegoers, but the difference with Tender Mercies is how director Bruce Beresford and screenwriter Horton Foote don’t indulge in weepy Hollywood theatrics. Small, authentic moments—a glance here, a pause there—accumulate until the last scene, when we realize this is an intensely satisfying film about regular people giving themselves permission to embrace happiness.

1993, UK-USA, 134 min.

James Stevens’ (Anthony Hopkins) stoic devotion makes him an exemplary butler. That trait wobbles with the arrival of young, new housekeeper Miss Kenton (Emma Thompson), whose affection for the middle-aged Stevens grows over the years. Director James Ivory’s adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel is unsparing in its lack of romanticism—the scenery is all rigid formality; the camerawork, all shadows—making the pair’s evolving relationship deceptively taboo. Stevens is so driven to follow his code of conduct that he sees Kenton as a threat, instead of a possible salvation from his self-imposed stifling. The film reveals that a lifetime of following orders has an unsettling impact. Stevens’ quiet grace may be an asset at dowdy, Nazi-sympathizing Darlington Hall, but it isolates him from the outside world—and his own happiness. Ivory doesn’t announce all of that, but discerning viewers will recognize the very real benefits of listening to our emotions at any age.