Fans of the late Hal Hartley muse Adrienne Shelly will pack screenings of Waitress to see the directorial debut she wrapped shortly before her murder, a movie that will (sadly) get more attention now that she’s gone … Meryl Streep lends star power to Chen Shi-Zheng’s obscure indie Dark Matter, playing a university patron who falls for a brilliant young Chinese physicist … John Cusack plays a husband whose wife is killed in Iraq, in Grace Is Gone … Acting-awards alert: Philip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney play a brother and sister who have to care for their mother in Tamara Jenkins’s The Savages … Jake Paltrow attempts to give nepotism a good name in The Good Night, his romance starring Penélope Cruz, Martin Freeman, and, yes, his sis Gwyneth … Southern auteur David Gordon Green may be poised for a breakthrough with his first New York film, Snow Angels, a romance starring Sam Rockwell, Kate Beckinsale, Michael Angarano, and Olivia Thirlby … Justin Theroux, whose career hasn’t gone as far as some would have liked post–Six Feet Under, has his directorial debut with Dedication, a dark romance starring Billy Crudup as a neurotic children’s-book writer who falls for Mandy Moore … Victor Rasuk and Heather Graham fall for one another in Adrift in Manhattan … Debut New York director Steven Berra scored a terrific cast for his film The Good Life: Harry Dean Stanton, Zooey Deschanel, Bill Paxton, and others … The controversial John Lennon assassination film Chapter 27 finally arrives, with Jared Leto playing Mark David Chapman and “Page Six” sharpening its knives … Perennial lift-ticket holder Lili Taylor is back at Sundance with Starting Out in the Evening, by sharp New Yorker Andrew Wagner (The Talent Given Us) … SNL vet Molly Shannon stars in Chuck & Buck scribe Mike White’s directorial debut, Year of the Dog (yep, it’s a dark comedy) … Acquisition alert: Jeffrey Blitz, director of the spelling-bee doc Spellbound, makes his fiction-feature debut with another geek—a stuttering debate-team champion from New Jersey—in Rocket Science … Fiction bleeds into real life in On the Road With Judas, the directorial debut of New Yorker JJ Lask … And finally, Binghamton’s supposed kid-prodigy painter (or hoax participant?) Marla Olmstead gets her own documentary, My Kid Could Paint That.