Carson Lund’s “Eephus” captures the spirit of baseball: how it can be boring and poignant at once, especially for someone, like me, who prefers the idea of the game to the reality.

Lund drops us into the final game to be played at Soldier’s Field, a public spot in a small New England town in the 1990s that’s about to be razed for the construction of a school. It’s nearing Halloween, and the images are so crisp and bright and evocative that you swear you can smell the leaves and taste the firewood in the air. It’s that kind of movie, tapping manna of nostalgia and yearning.

There are images in “Eephus” that are so heartbreakingly beautiful that I gasped. I’ve seen the movie twice, and my appreciation intensified the second time. You can often see multiple players in the outfield in perfect focus and unison as they throw the ball, the glorious lucidity affirming that autumnal New England atmosphere as well as the spirit of camaraderie that is the true reason for this game’s existence.

We are watching two adult-league teams, Adler’s Paint and the Riverdogs, who are composed mostly of middle-aged men with guts and mortgages and children and wives who might not understand why this game must last all day. There are a few younger, muscled men, who remind the older guys of the promising futures that they might have once had, now in the rearview. There isn’t a trace of the maudlin in these details. A family leaves a man to play ball and his daughter tells him that she will save him a potato for dinner. He will bring dessert, he says. Being a soft middle-aged guy has its disappointments, but it has comforts too.

This game is the entire movie. We are with these men from the sunshine of the afternoon until they move their old trucks so that the headlights can enable gameplay in the darkness of night. There isn’t much plot because there is no need for one. This atmosphere and these ecstatic details are “Eephus.” Lund drifts confidently between the teams and a few dozen characters, offering little traditional exposition. Thank God. As an audience member, I love when filmmakers trust me to read between the lines.

Random little things that tend to only happen in real life happen here. A pitcher with the haunting, taciturn face of, well, a fading ballplayer, seems like he might be the central hero of the movie, until he’s called away for a niece’s christening. An old man who has clearly watched thousands of these games talks about all the hot dogs he’s eaten. The ref, an aging, muscled guy with a limited taste for the players’ bullshit, leaves when the time for which he’s been paid elapses. Lund plays against the sentimentality that’s inherent in this scenario with anticlimaxes and bits of absurdity. “Eephus” has a wonderful and subtle sense of humor, which runs underneath the beautiful tableaux, like a current.

There’s a moment in which a player, one of the more volatile people in the movie, talks in the dugout of life as perpetual combat. Given his bearing, we wonder if he’s a veteran. As he gives his speech, preparing to give what sounds like a filmmaker’s Big Statement, another player interrupts him and the whole thing is dropped. That is a brilliant flourish precisely because Lund doesn’t seem to make a big deal of it. People talk over each other, mixing the profoundly personal with the banal detritus that’s passing through their minds at any given time.

Watching this film of a game that for these men might be the game, I thought of “The Swimmer,” both the John Cheever story and the movie that was made from it, starring Burt Lancaster as a man who decides to swim in every pool in his neighborhood as he makes his way back home. By the time he gets home, years have passed, and his home life is gone, lost while he was swimming. “Eephus” isn’t nearly that bleak, but it similarly communicates an idea of this event as a stand-in for lives in total. I barely caught many of these characters’ names, and yet I left the movie feeling as if I knew them.

Carson Lund was once a writer at Slant Magazine, for which I also write, and he is the cinematographer for Tyler Taormina’s films, most recently “Christmas Eve at Miller’s Point.” Taormina is a producer here, and their company, Omnes Films, has quickly established a house style. They make elegant, rueful, nostalgic yet tough-minded films about pieces of life that are being lost to modern society. Lund and Taormina are among the most unique and promising of rising American filmmakers.

The baseball game. The beat-up pickup truck. The hotdog stand. Local advertisements and newscasts rather than polished corporate bulletins, a sense of the handmade and of ongoing cultural tradition—these yearnings aren’t only for reactionary cranks. Humanist filmmakers can have them too. In these yearnings, many of us may find something, in fact, over which we can unite. Or maybe not. As I write this, I can practically feel my girlfriend’s daughter rolling her eyes over my shoulder.

Based on the novel by Sigrid Nunez, Scott McGehee and David Siegel’s “The Friend” sounds like a movie that might have once starred Diane Keaton—a chick flick with upscale gloss. Iris (Naomi Watts) is a writing teacher who has been working on her novel for ages, now mourning the death of her friend, a famous writer named Walter (Bill Murray).

In the classic tradition of the American male writer of a certain generation, Walter left a bevy of wives and lovers in his wake, though Walter has entrusted his Great Dane to Iris. The dog, Apollo, is huge, and he doesn’t make too much sense in Iris’ trendy shoebox of an NYC apartment.

There is quite a bit of formula in that set-up, and McGehee and Siegel aren’t embarrassed about it, which is refreshing. Rather than trying haphazardly to recalibrate a familiar recipe, they execute it with uncommon grace and sensitivity. Iris’ grief is taken seriously—it isn’t merely something to be acknowledged so that we may proceed to more narrative bric-a-brac. Her grief is the narrative.

Watts has a way of allowing emotions to skip across Iris’ face fleetingly before anyone else can see them. Little is made over Iris’ potential book. We assume that it will be one of many books in many aspiring writers’ lives that will remain unfinished. The casualness of that awareness gives you an idea of the film’s maturity. Grief over a dead friend mingles freely with grief over dashed expectations.

Murray appears in flashbacks and, best of all, in a late scene in which Iris imagines a conversation between her and Walter after his death. He hasn’t been this good in ages. The tricks are gone, and Murray’s straightforwardness here is startling. This is a man imagined by a woman, who in her projections has allowed his selfishness to burn into a kind of hard-won grace. He’s transcendent, mournful, lost, and still kind of a dick, reflecting Iris’ unresolved feelings. Don’t let the “working woman meets dog” stuff distract you from the surprisingly thorny sentiments being expressed here over death.

I’m burying the lead, which is Apollo, played by a dog named Bing, who is remarkable. McGehee and Siegel don’t oversell Bing’s cuteness, as they know it sells itself. They are more interested in Apollo’s personality, his own disappointment and feelings of rejection over being left behind by a master. His hugeness—he’s the size of a small pony—is a readymade and poignant metaphor for the unwieldy work of extending empathy to someone so wracked with pain that they border on insufferable.

There’s no overwrought and cheesy moment when Iris “earns” him; it just happens, as time gradually grants Iris and Apollo a reprieve from their pain.

“Eephus” is on VOD Tuesday, April 15. “The Friend” is playing in theaters everywhere.