“If we don’t split now, it’ll be much harder later.” How many relationships reach that ledge, where one person says something to that effect to their partner? Many, that’s how many. Too many to quantify.

In “Together,” the droll, fiercely well-acted codependency horror movie, Alison Brie delivers the news to Dave Franco, when their characters, Millie and Tim, a put-together schoolteacher and a coming-apart musician, have gotten a little too close in tricky, arguably unhealthy ways. But is it too late? Are they stuck with each other?

The Australian writer-director Michael Shanks makes his feature debut here, and for a movie so ardently devoted to body horror — a literalization of this couple’s particular dynamic — it has an unusually sprightly sense of humor. Brie and Franco, as you may know, are a married couple, and “Together” uses their ease with each other’s bodies and verbal rhythms to highly useful ends. Even when Shanks hits the primary theme of his movie a little too insistently, the actors are vivid throughout. Brie, especially, is spectacularly effective in every emotional register, in the keys of D (Distress), E (Eh what’s going on with our suction-lips?) and C (Commitment is all).

After a murky, fragmented prologue indicating another couple’s recent disappearance, “Together” gets down to its cautionary tale of city folk giving the country a try. Like “Se7en” and various other genre thrillers, this one’s intentionally dislocated so that it could be any big city — though probably New York, or possibly London— and any charming little town a couple of hours away. (The movie was filmed near Melbourne and Victoria, Australia.)

At a going-away party for Millie, whose new teaching job requires her and Tim’s move to a nice little burg on the train line, Tim suffers a mistimed and painfully public proposal of marriage. Millie is thrown for a loop, and the pause Millie takes before responding, two, maybe three seconds, lands like a day and a half. Brie is a wizard of timing and naturalistic cadence, and the film’s strategic introduction to their characters works like a flop-sweat charm.

After the move-in upstate, things seem initially better yet very quickly worse. The new house has an unexplained odor. Tim, insecure and itchy for a sense of career purpose, commits to a band tour, while Millie befriends a genial faculty colleague (Damon Herriman) who lives down the lane. The woods near Tim and Millie’s house are lovely, dark and deep, plus strange: Remnants of a ruined chapel of some kind have settled into the mucky earth. More suddenly, these two fall down into a literal and metaphoric well of trouble, a hidden entrance to an underground cavern laden with secrets as well as a pool of clear water that looks safe enough to drink.

From there “Together” escalates in cannily paced fashion, thanks to director Shanks’ forward momentum and editor Sean Lahiff’s destabilizing visual rhythm. After their underground discovery the couple isn’t the same. The teacher down the lane offers a sympathetic ear and some insights to Millie, who confesses her doubts about Tim, who cannot leave her alone for long. The neighbor responds with advice from Plato’s “Symposium” and Aristophanes’ theory (as written by Plato) of two human beings completing each other, aka the “Jerry Maguire” principle. “Together” relies on much blood and some severing of body parts, true, but from one angle it’s a romcom with an all’s-well capper that “Jerry Maguire” didn’t have the nerve to try.

Filmmaker and screenwriter Shanks goes a bit far with his completion-theory thesis, with the Spice Girls’ “2 Become 1” on the soundtrack and perhaps one too many examples of the physical extremes undergone by Millie and Tim. The effects, however, are pretty terrific, especially in the neighborhood of the eyeballs. I’ve probably said too much, but it’s in the elegantly wrought teaser trailer, and while “Together” has a very different authorial voice (male) than last year’s “The Substance” (female), “Together” tells its fantastical tale a lot more efficiently.

It works, I think, largely because Shanks has the guts to write a male protagonist (though Millie has the edge, on the page and in the performance) who is no hero, no villain, just a mass of garden-variety insecurities, all too reliant on his partner for a sense of direction. Maybe these times have made it easier for male filmmakers to lay off redemption arcs and stalwart heroics, and lean into chaos and the humor of despair.

But an actor always has the last word in a character’s life, and here the key actor is Brie. While the combination of Brie and Franco serves the story well, in nearly every moment they share on screen she’s the one who makes urgent sense, both dramatic and comic, of every new relationship obstacle. On paper, Millie’s doubts conveniently fade when the story requires as much, and that’s very much a product of the man who wrote and directed this film. On the screen, with Brie, you buy it. And unless your ick tolerance is low to low-medium, you’ll likely roll with the merry ick of “Together.”

“Together” — 3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for violent or disturbing content, sexual content, graphic nudity, strong language, and brief drug content)

Running time: 1:42

How to watch: Premieres in theaters July 31

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

Ten years after a “Fantastic Four” movie that wasn’t, Marvel Studios and 20th Century Studios have given us “The Fantastic Four: First Steps,” a much better couple of hours.

It takes place in the mid-1960s, albeit a sleekly otherworldly jet age streamlining of that time. Result? Extras in fedoras share crowd scenes with a Manhattan skyline dotted with familiar landmarks like the Chrysler Building, alongside some casually wondrous “Jetsons”-esque skyscrapers and design flourishes. Typically a production designer working in the Marvel movie universe doesn’t stand a chance against the digital compositing and effects work and the general wash of green-screenery. “The Fantastic Four” is different. Production designer Kasra Farahani’s amusing visual swagger complements the film’s dueling interests: A little fun over here, the usual threats of global extinction over there.

In contrast to the current James Gunn “Superman,” worthwhile despite its neurotic mood swings and from-here-to-eternity action beats, director Matt Shakman’s handling of “The Fantastic Four” takes it easier on the audience. Having returned from their space mission with “cosmically compromised DNA,” Reed Richards, Sue Storm, Johnny Storm and Ben Grimm adapt to their Earthbound lives with some new bullet points for their collective resumé. Richards, big-time-stretchy-bendy, goes by Mister Fantastic, able to out-Gumby Gumby. One Storm’s alter ego is Invisible Woman, while the other Storm is the flying Human Torch. Grimm returns to Earth as a mobile rockpile, aka The Thing.

So what’s it all about? It’s about a really hungry tourist just looking for one last meal before he “may finally rest.” So says Galactus, devourer of worlds, for whom noshing involves planets, and whose herald is Silver Surfer. Galactus wants Sue Storm’s soon-to-be-newborn baby in exchange for not devouring Earth. How the Fantastic Four go about dealing with Galactus culminates in an evacuated Manhattan, in the vicinity of Times Square, while the New York throngs hide away in the underground lair of Harvey Elder, the infamous Moleman.

One of the buoying aspects of Shakman’s film is its avoidance of antagonist overexposure. You get just enough of Paul Walter Hauser’s witty embodiment of auxiliary more-misunderstood-than-bad Moleman, for example, to want more. And Galactus, a hulking metallic entity, is such that a little of him is plenty, actually.

The Fantastic Four run the show here. Not everyone will love the generous, relaxed amount of hangout time director Shakman’s film spends setting up and illustrating family dynamics and medium-grade banter. Others will take it as a welcome change from the 10-megaton solemnity of some of the recent Marvels, hits as well as flops.

While Pedro Pascal, aka Mister Ubiquitous, makes for a solid, sensitive ringleader as the ever-murmuring Mister Fantastic, the emotional weight tips slightly toward Vanessa Kirby’s Sue Storm, as she weathers the travails of imminent parenthood, wondering along with her husband whether the child of DNA-scrambled superheroic parents will be OK. I wish Ebon Moss-Bachrach had better material as The Thing, but he’s ingratiating company; same goes for Joseph Quinn’s Johnny Storm, a boyish horndog once he sets his sights on the metallic flip of the screen’s first female Silver Surfer (Julia Garner).

Michael Giacchino’s excellent and subtly rangy musical score is a big plus. The costumes by Alexandra Byrne are less so. This is where indefensible personal taste comes in. There’s no question that Byrne’s designs fit snugly into the overall retro-futurist frame of “The Fantastic Four.” But holy moly, the palette dominating the clothes, and picked up by numerous production design elements, is really, really, really blue. Really blue. The movie works bluer than Buddy Hackett at a ’64 midnight show in Vegas.

Few will share my aversion to the no-doubt carefully varied shades of French blue prevalent here, but what can I do? I can do this: be grateful this film’s just serious enough, tonally, for its family matters and knotty world-saving ethical dilemmas to hold together. It’s not great superhero cinema — the verdict is out on whether that’s even possible in the Marvel Phase 6 stage of our lives — but good is good enough for “The Fantastic Four.”

“The Fantastic 4: First Steps” — 3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for sequences of intense action, and some suggestive content)

Running time: 2:05

How to watch: Premieres in theaters July 24

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic. 

“Write what you know” only gets you so far. An awful lot of debut films, even from writer-directors with talent, start from a personal place only to end up at a weirdly impersonal “universal” one you don’t fully believe, or trust.

“Sorry, Baby” is so, so much better than that. Eva Victor’s first feature as writer-director, and star, feels like a lived experience, examined, cross-examined, ruminated over, carefully shaped and considered.

Its tone is unexpected, predominantly but not cynically comic. The movie doesn’t settle for “write what you know.” Victor followed a tougher, more challenging internal directive: Write what you need to find out about what you know.

The story deals with a college sexual assault, without being “about” that, or only about that. “Sorry, Baby” concerns how Agnes, the sharp-witted protagonist played by Victor, makes sense of her present tense, several years after she was mentored, then raped, by her favorite professor, with the bad thing now in the past but hardly out of sight, or mind.

Victor arranges the telling non-chronologically, which keeps this liquid notion of past and present flowing as a complicated emotional state. When “Sorry, Baby” begins, Agnes is thriving as an English literature professor at the same tiny New England college she attended as a graduate student. She now lives near campus with her cat in a somewhat remote old house, crammed with books. Lydie, Agnes’s good friend from grad school played by the superb Naomi Ackie, has come for a visit, and the magical rightness of the interplay between Victor and Ackie gives the film a warm, energizing hum.

At one point, Lydie asks her if she leaves the house much. Agnes responds verbally, but her body language, her evasive eyes and other “tells” have their own say. Lydie’s question lingers in the air, just before we’re taken back to Agnes and Lydie’s grad school years for the film’s next chapter.

Here we see Agnes on the cusp of her future, surrounded by ideas and novels and opinions, as well as an envious fellow student (Kelly McCormack, a touch broad as written and played in the film’s one tonal misjudgment). Agnes’ writing has attracted the attention of the campus conversation topic Decker (Louis Cancelmi), a faculty member with a faulty marriage and a barely-read but undeniably published novel Agnes admires. The admiration is mutual, even if the power dynamic is not.

At the last minute, the teacher reschedules his meeting with Agnes to take place at his house near campus. We see Agnes arrive, be greeted at the door and go inside. The camera stays outside, down the steps and by the sidewalk, for an unusually long time. Finally she tumbles, more or less, back out on the porch; it’s getting dark by this time; Decker appears in the doorway, trying to apologize, sort of? Kind of?  And the scene is over.

Only later do we learn some unnerving particulars of what happened to Agnes, once she is ready, finally, to talk about it with Lydie. “Sorry, Baby,” as Victor said in one post-screening discussion, began with the notion of how to film the assault — meaning, what not to show. “In real life,” the filmmaker said, “we don’t get to be behind the door. We hear what happened and we believe people. (And) we don’t need to be inside to know.”

From there, “Sorry, Baby” continues its flow back and forth, in the years in between what happened and where Agnes is now. There’s an eccentric neighbor (Lucas Hedges, unerring) who initially appears to be call-the-police material, but it doesn’t work out that way at all. Lifelines can come from anywhere, Agnes learns, and expressing oneself honestly and directly is easier said than done.

Throughout this precisely written film, we see and hear Agnes caught in weird language-built labyrinths as she squares off with the college’s HR department while attempting to file a report against the professor, or — much later — Agnes at jury duty selection for an unrelated matter, explaining the incident in her past to her questioner in weirdly funny ways. Victor’s a tightrope-walker in these scenes; “Sorry, Baby” is as much about everyone around Agnes, performing their understanding, or concern, regarding the Bad Thing in her past.

Some of the more overt bits of bleak comedy are better finessed than others, and you wouldn’t mind another five or 10 minutes of hangout time, complementing the well-paced overall structure. But even that’s a sign of success. How many standout movies have you seen this year that made you think, you know, that actually could’ve been a little longer? Clear-eyed, disarming and, yes, plainly semi-autobiographical, “Sorry, Baby” takes every right turn in making Agnes far more than a tragic yet wisecracking victim, with a smiling-through-tears ending waiting around the bend. She’s just living her full, up-and-down-and-up life, acknowledging the weight of that life without solving or dissolving the bad thing.

This is Victor’s achievement, too, of course. Already, this quietly spectacular first-time filmmaker’s promise has been fulfilled.

“Sorry, Baby” — 3.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for sexual content and language)

Running time: 1:44

How to watch: Premieres in theaters July 4

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

Most comics-derived superhero movies really wouldn’t be much of anything without buried rage, and what happens when it won’t stay buried. Their stories’ relentless emphasis on childhood trauma and the crippling psychological load carried by broken souls (heroes and villains both) — that’s the whole show.

With its adorable little asterisk in the title, “Thunderbolts*” goes further than most Marvels in its focus on psychological torment, mental health and, more broadly, a shared search for self-worth among a half-dozen also-rans who learn what it takes to be an A-team. Their sense of shame isn’t played for laughs, though there are some. Mostly it’s sincere. And it’s more effective that way.

“A” stands for Avengers, among other things, and with the legendary Avengers AWOL for now (hence the asterisk in the title), there’s a vacuum in need of filling.  Targeted for elimination, with Julia Louis-Dreyfus returning for duty as U.S. intelligence weasel Valentina, the combatants of the title have their work cut out for them. Who can they trust? If not Valentina, taking a more central role this time, then who?

Joining forces are Yelena/Black Widow (top-billed Florence Pugh); her gone-to-seed father Alexei/Red Guardian (David Harbour); the tetchy John Walker/Captain America (Wyatt Russell); Antonia/Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko); the quicksilver invisible Ava/Ghost (Hannah John-Kamen); and the Winter Soldier himself, Bucky Barnes (Sebastian Stan), whose entry into the “Thunderbolts*” storyline is most welcome. Their mission: To neutralize as well as rehabilitate the all-too-human lab experiment known as Bob, aka The Sentry, aka The Void, played by Robert Pullman. He’s Valentina’s little project, more dangerous than anyone knows.

The misfits scenario guiding “Thunderbolts*” is nothing new. “Suicide Squad” did it, “Guardians of the Galaxy” does it, and this motley crew keeps the tradition alive. It works, even when the material’s routine, because Pugh’s forceful yet subtle characterization of a heavy-hearted killing machine with an awful childhood feels like something’s at stake. She and the reliably witty Harbour work well together, and while there’s a certain generic-ness at work in the character roster — these insecure egotists are meant to be placeholders, with something to prove to themselves and the world — the actors keep the movie reasonably engaging before the effects take over.

Even those are better than usual, for the record. That sounds weird when you’re dealing with another $200 million production budget commodity. Shouldn’t they all look good, preferably in wildly different ways?

It’s a matter of simplicity and selectivity, not assault tactics. The poor, tormented newbie Bob has a superhero guise (The Sentry, fearsomely powerful, essentially all Avengers packed into one fella). but SuperBob has a dark side. When The Void takes over, it’s insidious psychological warfare, with The Void’s victims suddenly, quieting disappearing into a massive black handprint. His targets must relive the worst guilt and shame they have known, whoever they are, wherever that shadow of anguish and rage may lead them.

Sounds heavy, and it is. But at its best, the visualization of this part of “Thunderbolts*” feels like something relatively new and vivid. And there you have it. The 36th MCU movie, if you’re interested. It’s the most pretty-good one in a while.

“Thunderbolts*” — 3 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: PG-13 (for strong violence, language, thematic elements, and some suggestive and drug references)

Running time: 2:06

How to watch: Premiered in theaters May 1

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.