She tries to rescue her son from a war zone

Susan Sarandon stars in Viper Club, a story about the distraught mother of an independent journalist who has been captured and held for ransom in war-torn Syria. Sarandon plays Helen Sterling, an emergency room nurse who has been fighting to rescue her son Andy (Julian Morris) from kidnappers who have demanded a $20 million ransom, a sum Helen has no way of raising. At work, Helen tries to mentor a new doctor (Amir Malaklou) in the ways of the ER. Adepero Oduye adds credibility as Helen's supervisor. In her free time, Helen gets the bureaucratic runaround from both the State Department and the FBI. Hope seems to be fading when Helen learns about Viper Club, a network that draws attention to the plight of kidnapped journalists and also raises money to pay ransoms. Enter Charlotte (Edie Falco), a rich woman who rescued her son in a similar situation. Charlotte urges Helen to go public. Sarandon and Falco are superb, with Falco getting an opportunity to play an upper-class woman whose life is foreign to Helen's middle-class existence. These scenes and Sarandon's performance throughout elevate the English-language debut of Iranian-American director Maryam Keshavarz(Circumstance). Viper Club doesn't build enough high-voltage tension around political questions connected to a journalist's disappearance, but Sarandon gives the movie plenty of ground-level humanity.

She's young, gifted and gay

A coming-of-age story with Hip-Hop kick.

Few things are as resistant to upset as the apple cart of parental expectation. And for some middle-class families, coming to terms with a child’s gayness can qualify as a threat to deeply entrenched values.

But what about the gay child? What’s life like for him or her in a household ruled by denial? And what if that child happens to be black?

That’s more or less the question answered by Pariah, a powerful and affecting drama that centers on Alike (Adepero Oduye), a gay, self-aware high school student who’s still got one foot in the closet.

Alike’s dad (Charles Parnell) is a cop; her mom (Kim Wayans) looks for solace at church and suspects that her husband might be having an affair. Neither parent is prepared to deal with the sexuality of a straight daughter – much less a gay one.

For her part, Alike (pronounced All-Lee-Keh), endures a tense existence with her parents and her younger sister (Sahra Mellesse) in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn.

A good student and budding writer, Alike tries to hold her world together. It’s not easy. She changes clothes when she leaves the house, donning a kind of genderless Hip-Hop look, sometimes hanging out at a gay club.

Oduye does lots of things well, including capturing Alike’s pain and the intensity with which she assess every situation in which she finds herself. Oduye’s playing a character who’s not fully formed and can’t be until her truth is acknowledged – particularly by a father who insists she’s “normal” and a mother who has enough suspicions about her daughter that she wants her husband to intervene.

Dad resists, and after a conversation in which Alike tries to talk to him about love, he concludes that she must have a boyfriend.

You’ll appreciate Oduye’s deeply felt performance even more if you know that she’s a 33-year-old actress; she obviously hasn’t forgotten that at 17, emotional setbacks tend to hurt more than they will in later life.

At one point, Alike’s mother pushes her daughter into a friendship with “good girl” Bina (Aasha Davis). This relationship – which is supposed to steer Alike away from the bad influence of the openly gay Laura (Pernell Walker) – becomes pivotal for Alike in unexpected ways.

As often seems to be the case these days, the adults in Pariah live in a totally different world than their children. Mom and Dad have worked hard to attain and maintain a middle-class lifestyle, which means they also embrace the kind of convention that makes it difficult for them to accept a gay daughter.

Director Dee Rees, who also wrote the screenplay, tends to work in a style that includes lots of close-ups. Cinematographer Bradford Young uses them to make us understand the claustrophobic nature of a world that has yet to open for Alike.

An end-of-picture plot twist may resolve things for Alike too conveniently, but Rees has made a movie that’s open-ended enough to make us wonder what all its characters might be like a year from the time the final credits roll. You'll find the expected coming-of-age triumph here, but it’s tempered by Rees’ knowledge that not all the wounds we’ve seen opened are likely to heal.