May is here, and while the blooming spring has every Mainer long to finally go outside, let’s not forget the unique pleasures of a nice, quiet night at the movies. This time around, we go back to the past with a silent classic, back slightly less to the past for a 1960s and 1980s pair of classics about restless men, and experience the hazy 1990s in a new film about one family’s wrenching Canadian summer. 

‘Our Hero, Balthazar’

Thursday, May 7, and Friday, May 8, Apple Cinemas Westbrook, applecinemas.com/

Yarmouth native Oscar Boyson brings his acclaimed feature home for its Maine premiere. Co-written, produced and directed by the Greely High graduate (also a producer of “Good Time” and “Uncut Gems”), this timely and insightful film follows a wealthy young online influencer (“IT”s Jaden Martell) who becomes convinced that one of his followers is about to commit a school shooting. Traveling to Texas to meet the unstable young man (Asa Butterfield of “Hugo”) leads to a perilous dive into online incel culture, where young American males are taught to turn their personal problems into violence. No less than Stephen King has said of the film, “I loved this movie, felt it was a real bolt of indie lightning.” King also compares Boyson’s movie to Martin Scorsese’s “Mean Streets.” Filmmaker Boyson will be on hand at the Thursday premiere for a Q&A. 

‘Blue Heron’

Starts Friday, May 8, PMA Films, 7 Congress Square, Portland, portlandmuseum.org/films

Filmmaker Sophy Romvari’s exquisite, heartbreaking semi-autobiographical film examines how love, memory, and family combine to color our memories of childhood and loss. When a Hungarian immigrant family settles into a seemingly idyllic life on Vancouver Island in the 1990s, young Sasha watches as her beloved older brother Jeremy reacts to the change in increasingly disturbing ways, leading the loving family to contemplate unthinkable choices. A delicately moving, deeply personal story told in shades of melancholy and childlike wonder.

‘Barbara Forever’

May 13, Space, 538 Congress St., Portland, space538.org.

Barbara Hammer, who died in 2019 at the age of 79, was a pioneering experimental filmmaker who broke artistic and cultural barriers in both her life and her expansive work. Helming over 80 films in her long career, Hammer explored and documented LGBTQ+ lives, gender roles, lesbian relationships, and aging with a frankness and boldness no repressive forces could silence. And they tried, again and again. Her 1992 documentary “Nitrate Kisses” remains Hammer’s best known work, but this new film by Brydie O’Connor presents the most comprehensive and personal overview yet of the life and work of a true filmmaking original whose themes and concerns remain more relevant than ever. 

‘Paris, Texas’

May 13, Nickelodeon Cinemas, 1 Temple St., Portland, patriot cinemas.com

Legendary and irreplaceable character actor Harry Dean Stanton (“Alien,” “Repo Man”) got one of his few lead roles in Wim Wenders’ mesmerizing 1984 drama. An impossibly weathered man (Stanton, with his lined and soulful face) wanders out of the Texas desert, barely alive. We learn he left his young wife (Nastassja Kinski) and infant son four years earlier and follow the man as he attempts to piece his fractured life back together. A synopsis can’t do justice to Wenders’ meditative tale of loss and rebirth, with the quietly magnetic Stanton creating a portrait of rootless American maleness as symbolic as it is achingly specific. And the score by Ry Cooder remains one of a kind. Thanks to the Nick for their Wayback Wednesday series, which allows us to experience singular films like this on the big screen again. 

‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’

May 13 and 16, Kinonik, 121 Cassidy Point Drive, Portland, kinonik.org

Karel Reisz’s 1960 film is remembered as a “kitchen sink drama” or an “angry young man” film, where working-class English men were depicted embodying the frustrations of economic hardship and rigid class structures. Which is all sociologically interesting and all, but this intense drama is best remembered for launching the career of the young Albert Finney, who plays a hard-drinking factory worker whose sexual frustrations and barely acknowledged dreams see him trifling with a married woman, pining after a virginal girl his own age, and ultimately confronting the dingy choices open to them all in the early ’60s UK. As gripping as young Brando, young Finney’s morally gray protagonist is a clenched fist of repressed anger, lust and longing. Presented on striking black-and-white celluloid by the film archivists at Kinonik. 

‘Girl Shy’

May 16, The Leavitt Theatre, 259 Main St., Ogunquit, leavittheatre.com

Silent film legend Harold Lloyd might not be as well-known as contemporaries Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, but the unassuming-looking Lloyd remains one of the true founders of film comedy. In this 1924 romantic comedy, Lloyd plays a terminally bashful tailor whose decision to write a farcical pick-up guide for men sends him on a whirlwind adventure where he meets a lovely lady (Jobyna Ralston), rescues a dog, tries to foil a wedding and constantly exhibits the sort of daring, impeccably timed stunts and gags that make his every film an enduring delight. Presented as part of the 101-year-old Leavitt Theatre’s Silent Films Series, “Gun Shy” will be shown alongside a live piano score from Jeff Raspis.