‘Every Family Is Kind of Cultlike’

Miranda July’s cinematic output has always been concerned with human connection. Her first two features, 2005’s Me and You and Everyone We Know and 2011’s The Future, are crucial tales of generational malaise in a diffuse, internet-dominated culture. But in the nine years since July directed a movie, she’s embarked on other acting work (in the great Madeline’s Madeline), premiered new art projects, developed a social-messaging app, written a novel, and had a child with her husband, the filmmaker Mike Mills.

Starting a family informed July’s new movie, , a sweetly offbeat comedy that’s far more high-concept than her previous films. It follows a family of shabbily dressed con artists, Robert (played by Richard Jenkins), Teresa (Debra Winger), and their daughter, Old Dolio (Evan Rachel Wood), a tracksuit-wearing oddity who speaks in a guttural register and whose hair extends down to her waist. The family exists in a world of marginal crime, robbing post offices and executing coupon scams. While performing one of their many strange heists, they