Vanara Taing

Early in the low-key drama The Unknown Country, a fuzzy-haired waitress at a roadside diner passes out plates with compliments and good cheer. “I try to treat my customers really well because you never know what’s going on in somebody’s life,” she says. Hers is just one documentary-style vignette that fleshes out this theme, showing the hidden lives of people a young woman encounters along a road trip from the Midwest to the Texas-Mexico border.