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"  I&amp;#039;m all for good, glossy romantic comedies like The Proposal and It&amp;#039;s Complicated. Still, it&amp;#039;s great to see indie filmmakers shaking up what is too often a lazy, not to say lousy, genre. The difference between mainstream and offbeat romantic comedies, such as Away We Go or Ghost Town, is simple: The directors who make the offbeat ones aren&amp;#039;t required to keep us comfortable, so they put in stuff that hurts or alarms, sometimes to the degree that they barely seem like rom-coms. Enter the Duplass brothers, who, with The Puffy Chair five years ago and Baghead in 2008, are the best-known filmmakers yet to emerge from the young, talky, figuring-life-out, microbudget miniwave known as mumblecore, itself a twenty-first-century descendant of the laid-back slacker cinema pioneered in the early &amp;#039;90s by Richard Linklater (Slacker, Dazed and Confused). But just as Linklater moved on (Fast Food Nation, Me &amp;amp;amp; Orson Welles), so have Jay and Mark Duplass. Among its other charms, Baghead was a spot-on sendup of superindie cinema with a promisingly sharp edge. Their new film, Cyrus, is bankrolled by Fox Searchlight, one of the few studio boutique divisions left standing in the wake of the recession, but its humor is still serrated.  Jay Duplass has called Cyrus an &amp;quot;obtuse love triangle.&amp;quot; That would be a triangle occupied at one point by Marisa Tomei&amp;#039;s single mom, Molly; at another by John C. Reilly&amp;#039;s lonely divorc\u00E9, John; and, perched at the apex of this very wide angle, Molly&amp;#039;s 21-yearold son, Cyrus, wickedly well played by Jonah Hill as a tyrannical mama&amp;#039;s boy prepared to do whatever it takes to keep the would-be lovers far apart. A prime value of good indies is their capacity for surprise, and here the eye-popper is Hill. Gone are the frowsy clown hair and baggy fat-boy duds that, along with his foul-mouthed rants, were the trademarks of his teen roles in Judd Apatow&amp;#039;s comedies. Neatly turned out and articulate, Cyrus seems sophisticated and in charge. And that&amp;#039;s the movie&amp;#039;s best joke as well as its dark center, because Cyrus is infantile, manipulative, and so possessive of Molly that it borders on pathological. Although he surprises John\u2014and us\u2014with his talent as a composer and performer of electronica, he&amp;#039;s scared to leave home and test himself in the big world. Cyrus is certainly funny\u2014one of the movie&amp;#039;s best laugh lines is the coolly deadpan &amp;quot;Nice penis.&amp;quot; But as Cyrus sets about thwarting his rival, Hill makes him so focused and creepy that it&amp;#039;s impossible to feel safe.  Romantic comedies guarantee a happy ending, but before this movie is through, the Duplasses have detonated enough anxiety bombs\u2014is Cyrus&amp;#039; grip on his mom sexual?\u2014that we can well believe there isn&amp;#039;t going to be one. That we care is a tribute to Tomei and Reilly, who conjure up a lonely-hearts chemistry that feels touchingly real. As they gradually begin to click, John and Molly seem quietly amazed at their ability to make each other happy. Tomei is beautiful, so it&amp;#039;s curious that she&amp;#039;s often paired with homely men. But it makes sense here, because Reilly gives John a boyish uncertainty that should push Molly&amp;#039;s buttons nicely. (He keeps calling his ex-wife\u2014played by Catherine Keener\u2014at all hours for romance advice.) Still, monsters are made, not born, and the mother-son relationship in Cyrus is a two-way street no sane person would want to drive down. Wisely, the Duplasses don&amp;#039;t explain it, trusting Tomei&amp;#039;s delicate skill as an actress to allow us to imagine a too solitary young mom who, with the best of intentions, allowed the bond with the child she dotes on to become a yoke for them both. Some of the movie&amp;#039;s most hilarious\u2014and hair-raising\u2014scenes feature Reilly and Hill&amp;#039;s secret battles over the woman they love. But for all their comic ruckus, it&amp;#039;s the Duplasses&amp;#039; smartest move that they put the movie&amp;#039;s ending into Molly&amp;#039;s hands.  There&amp;#039;s a romantic triangle at the heart of Get Low too, buried in the past but retaining its power to wound and destroy. Based on an actual Depressionera incident and starring Robert Duvall, Bill Murray, Sissy Spacek, and Lucas Black, Get Low is the captivating story of a tough but aging Southern recluse (Duvall) who lives in a cloud of rumors about his violent past and hires the local mortician (Murray) to throw him not a funeral but what he calls a funeral party, where he can spill his secrets and ask forgiveness before he dies. To get the town to turn out, he includes a raffle, the winner of which will inherit his valuable woodland property. Inflected with humor yet deeply moving, Get Low is the kind of exquisitely wrought spellbinder (think The Shawshank Redemption) that doesn&amp;#039;t come along very often, because it&amp;#039;s so hard to pull off. The feature-length directing debut of the cinematographer Aaron Schneider, who won a shortfilm Oscar in 2003, the movie looks great from its start: a shockingly beautiful scene of a house on fire with people trying to escape. The performances are A-list all the way, from Spacek&amp;#039;s subtly sexual older woman to Murray&amp;#039;s comically oily, money-grubbing funeral director. But it&amp;#039;s Duvall who, at 79, blows you away with a fierce and witty Oscar-caliber turn as a man so distressed by his long-ago actions that he put himself into solitary confinement for 40 years. Click here to see more film picks from Karen Durbin           Mommies Dearest  The teenage sperm-donor kids of a seriously granola lesbian couple (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore) search out their dad (a roguish Mark Ruffalo) in The Kids Are All Right. Much entertaining uproar ensues, some of it sexual, and any movie by Lisa Cholodenko (High Art, Laurel Canyon) is worth seeing. But as marriages go, gay or straight, this one seems too joyless to save.             Running Mates  Love fares no better in the wincingly funny Let It Rain, actor and director Agn\u00E8 s Jaoui&amp;#039;s (Look at Me) comedy of dysfunction. Here she&amp;#039;s a gloomy feminist running for offi ce while her man runs for cover, and her sister deceives her own sweet mate with a witless clod who&amp;#039;s fi lming a campaign stop (a deadpan Jean-Pierre Bacri, Jaoui&amp;#039;s ex and great cinematic foil).             Director&amp;#039;s Cut  Ten filmmakers, including Stephen Frears, Todd Haynes, Agn\u00E8 s Varda, and France&amp;#039;s favorite bad girl, Catherine Breillat, open up in Angela Ismailos&amp;#039; riveting documentary debut, Great Directors. There&amp;#039;s not a bore in the bunch, and as intimate and revealing as the subjects&amp;#039; conversations are, the captivating clips from their movies should trigger a Netfl ix stampede.  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/reviews/a11253/reel-picks-july-movies-450562/>