A children’s movie about how great science is, The Martian has a pragmatic message for budding astronauts: you solve one problem, then another, and see if you survive. The film’s obsession with years-long plans imparts a Soviet feel to the space program depicted, but its sunny optimism keeps the movie all-American. Not once do we believe The Martian will end with a shot of Matt Damon’s skeleton half-buried in sand. Maybe the film is so bright because the days are thirty-nine minutes longer on Mars than on Earth, the same thirty-nine minutes that should have been cut from this Friday-less Robinson Crusoe. Kristen Wiig, however, is on hand to show that girls aren’t into The Lord of the Rings.

A fairy tale of lean-in capitalism about a Cinderella without a prince, David O. Russell’s Joy recasts the crazy family of a Capra comedy with stellar toxicity. Joy’s (Jennifer Lawrence’s) undermining relatives are the selfish American clan par excellence, claiming to know everything about Joy’s business while sabotaging her future. Robert De Niro and Isabella Rossellini, playing evil-universe versions of themselves as Joy’s father and stepmother, delight in their performances as fickle scoffers.

Joy is a natural inventor prone to epiphanies about household products — the film could be called A Beautiful Mop. Her ingenuity and tenacity save her from a life of drudgery, though by the end her victory seems hollow. The film, busy with fake TV soap operas and flashbacks, doesn’t imagine another life for her, except maybe settling down with a cable-TV executive (Bradley Cooper) who lectures her and is wrong half the time. The mitigating factors in her struggle are that she can turn a profit, employ her friends, and help younger women manufacture improved lint brushes. Set in the early 1990s, Joy suggests these were the consolations working-class Gen Xers could hope for.