Pitch-perfect needle drops courtesy of Elton John and The Rolling Stones can only get you so far when wading into nostalgic waters, and somewhere soon after the midpoint of Sundance 2021 flick “One for the Road,” it finds itself suddenly submerged.

“Son of Monarchs” is a film as invested in its scientific arcs as the emotional ones of its reserved protagonist, and it’s a contradictory work—rigid and improvisational, didactic and artistic, fully aware of itself and stylistically unmoored. And it’s entirely embracing of those contradictions.

Jackson Greer is both a fish out of water and a man out of time in Conor Allyn’s contemporary Western “No Man’s Land,” although you wouldn’t know it by the way Jake Allyn’s handsome Texas rancher reckons with having killed a migrant boy in the heat of confrontation by cheerily swigging beers at a Mexico bar. This is a movie of inelegant craft, five-cent metaphors and stilted convictions, though its most self-defeating attribute is how it cheats itself into having a short memory.

As if responding to the pair of notable December releases with surrogate father-daughter storylines – Paul Greengrass’s “News of the World” and George Clooney’s “Midnight Sky” – Mexican filmmaker Fernanda Valadez’s feature directorial debut “Identifying Features” briefly unites a woman and a young man on parallel searches for long-lost relatives. She is Magdalena (Mercedes Hernández), who is beginning to believe her son may be dead. He is Miguel (David Illescas), who is hoping against hope that his own mother is not. And while they’re together for only a few heartbreaking scenes in Valadez’s striking drama about searchers who become wanderers (called "Sin Señas Particulares" in Spanish) , the bond is emotionally informed to a sharper pitch than either of those two aforementioned Hollywood projects.

Thomas Vinterberg’s “Another Round” opens with a scene that splits the difference between ethereal and anarchic, and over the following two hours this Danish drinking dramedy tasks us with determining what exactly that difference consists of. The primary tool in that endeavor? Shots. Lots and lots and lots of shots, along with some swigs of wine, beer and vodka for good measure.

Dance can be a most liberating (and cinematic) form of self-expression, as a large swath of 2020’s better films have attested to. In Steve McQueen’s evocative “Lovers Rock,” young Black people groove and jive to the sultry step of their souls. In Levan Akin’s devastating “And Then We Danced,” an aspiring Georgian dancer’s dream of joining the national troupe gives him purpose. In Fernandro Frías’s melancholy “I’m No Longer Here,” a Mexican teenager relies on cumbia to sustain his identity after he’s forced to flee across the U.S.-Mexico border. Dance is vital to Ekwa Msangi’s “Farewell Amor” as well.

Jazzy melodies underscore a montage of characters embarking the regal ocean liner Queen Mary 2 early in Steven Soderbergh’s newest movie, “Let Them All Talk,” and you can owe it to the presence of acting royalty Meryl Streep confidently striding through the ship’s spacious confines if you find yourself thinking back to images of a suave George Clooney surveying the Bellagio ahead of an ambitious heist in “Ocean’s 11.” “Let Them All Talk” is also a heist movie of sorts, although one in which the thing to be heisted isn’t gold bricks or poker chips but the minutiae of ambiguous agendas.

Comedy may be the best lens through which to experience Fincher’s newest movie, “Mank”—a phantasmal and fantastically entertaining work of deep irony, deeper relevance and ever-deepening contradiction that suggests he’s not only embraced his reputation as a storyteller who strives to meet no one’s standards aside from his own, but that he is also ready to weaponize it for his amusement. Ours, too, if we’re willing to humor him.

An earnest portrait of a country and a subtle inquiry into the direction it’s been heading, “Nomadland” shepherds us to snow-capped mountain ranges and dry plains, derelict towns and lonely roads, redwood forests and gulf-stream waters. Traversing these spaces – captured with a necessary sense of majesty – is Frances McDormand’s Fern, and it’s in her that “Nomadland” emphasizes the truth in that American hymn’s most important lyric, as well as its contradiction: This land may be made for you and me, but what about the structures physical and economic raised over more and more of that land? Who are they for?