Here’s a sample of the first weekend’s films:

“Mother and Son” (unrated): The Goya-esque sweep of Aleksandr Sokurov’s “Mother and Son”--a virtually silent work that is more painting than film--suggests a striving toward heaven, a gesture of escape from the mortal coil that is quickly running out on Mother (Gudrun Geyer). Tenderly cared for by her son (Alexei Ananishnov), she is slowly dying, a fact her son denies. Their relationship, depicted as it is in a series of reverse-Pieta tableaux, is totemic, emblematic, archetypal; although there is little actual motion in this motion picture--other than, for instance, a train in the distance, which the son watches ruefully--Sokurov may move his audience to tears with the utter and insoluble link he forms between pure cinema and pure human hope in divinity.