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Craig Gillespie’s “Cruella,” starring Emma Stone, and the Finnish bio-pic “Tove” illustrate the pitfalls and the possibilities of cinema’s fixation on children’s classics and their authors.

Save this story for later. How many crimes have been committed before “The Dry” begins? One barbarous act we know about for sure: a man named Luke Hadler (Martin Dingle Wall) has been found dead, with a shotgun beside him, outside the town of Kiewarra. (It’s a fictional place, but the movie, adapted from the novel of the same name by Jane Harper, and directed by Robert Connolly, was filmed in the Australian state of Victoria.) Back at Luke’s house are the bodies of his wife and son, and it is presumed—for want of a better theory—that he killed them before taking ...

Save this story for later. A man sits alone at a table, in a restaurant, reading a newspaper. Beside him is a white-jacketed waiter, holding a bottle of red wine. The man tastes a little of the wine and nods. The waiter starts to pour and fails to stop. The wine brims over the top of the glass, like water in a fountain, and spreads across the tablecloth. The waiter mops at the spill with his napkin, to no avail. He could be a murderer, trying to wipe away his crime. Not a word is spoken. In voice-over, though, a nameless woman says, “I saw a man with his mind elsewhere.”

Save this story for later. In the late nineteen-fifties, James Stewart was on a roll. “Vertigo” came out in 1958, as did the sly and funny “Bell, Book and Candle,” followed by “Anatomy of a Murder,” in 1959. A decorated veteran and a loyal Republican, Stewart seemed at once trusty and perplexed—still a straight arrow, but no longer sure, in the postwar world, of where, exactly, he was aimed. Yet to come was “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962), in which he and John Wayne duke it out for the values of the Old West. Was it, perhaps, Stewartâ€�...