&nbsp;THE MAIN CHARACTER&nbsp;in Jim McKay&rsquo;s En el S&eacute;ptimo D&iacute;a is an undocumented Mexican immigrant and food deliveryman named Jos&eacute;, and while the film isn&rsquo;t nonfiction (Jos&eacute; is played by an actor, Fernando Cardona), he has similarities to the guy who brought me dinner last week and the guy who swerved into my car&rsquo;s path while I was making a turn. Was that me in the film yelling, &ldquo;Ya dumb fuck!&rdquo;? Could have been&mdash;it&rsquo;s Brooklyn. Beyond that contact, I have no idea how a man like Jos&eacute; came to live here; how he lives, period; and how a privileged person like me looks through his eyes.&nbsp;Thanks to McKay&rsquo;s gentle but overwhelming film, I know that Jos&eacute; sleeps in a Sunset Park apartment alongside nine other undocumented Mexicans&mdash;the number fluctuates depending on whom the super brings in on any given day. He has a pregnant wife back home: He wants to get her up here so the baby can be born&nbsp;in the U.S., but he can&rsquo;t trust her fate to a coyote. He&rsquo;s also superb at f&uacute;tbol&mdash;so good his team could win the championship, scheduled for a Sunday, seven days after the film begins. But his boss, Steve, says Jos&eacute; has to work that seventh day because of a private birthday party, and Jos&eacute; needs Steve&rsquo;s help to get working papers, as well as off his bike and onto &ldquo;the floor&rdquo; as a waiter and&mdash;maybe someday&mdash;a manager. You get the point: God rested on the seventh day, but no way, Jos&eacute;.&nbsp;Unable to tell his teammates that he can&rsquo;t play, Jos&eacute; leans against his bike and eats his lunch and thinks &hellip; and eats &hellip; the only soundtrack the squeals and horns of Brooklyn traffic. It goes on almost a minute, but it&rsquo;s not remotely boring because by that point, we&rsquo;re thinking along with him, trying to figure out how we&rsquo;re going to navigate an impossible situation. True, that soccer game isn&rsquo;t the whole world, but it&rsquo;s the one time in Jos&eacute;&rsquo;s life that he can show mastery and that he can feel free.McKay does no editorializing in En el&nbsp; S&eacute;ptimo D&iacute;a. He&rsquo;s a simple, graceful storyteller&mdash;so graceful that we don&rsquo;t notice all the technique he brings to the task of making us see the world through Jos&eacute;&rsquo;s eyes. In the course of his over 20-year career, the director has moved back and forth between community-based dramas like the highschool-marching-band film Our Song and TV series like In Treatment, Rectify, Treme, and The Good Wife&mdash;as well as random episodes of your favorite shows like The Wire, The Americans, and Bosch. Even with all those credits, this is one of the high points.Nothing slows down McKay&rsquo;s narrative, but nothing is casual either. The other poor immigrants Jos&eacute; greets in food stores&mdash; peeling carrots or wrapping flowers, under the eyes of Korean owners&mdash;are essential parts of this urban ecosystem. A priest pops up briefly to ask about Jos&eacute;&rsquo;s wife and encourage him to think about unionizing, the way the beleaguered car-wash employees have, but his is a voice from another world. So is the voice of the well-dressed Spanish-speaking guy at one of the fancy buildings to which Jos&eacute; delivers. He&rsquo;s very friendly (he has a Mexican girlfriend, he says, who follows f&uacute;tbol), but Jos&eacute; plainly registers the enormous social gap between them. This is a world defined by gaps&mdash;chasms, really, as implacable as the canal over which Jos&eacute; rides back and forth, the Gowanus, now the world&rsquo;s hippest Superfund site. An unjustly belligerent customer in a cool Gowanus warehouse works at &ldquo;Resistance Media,&rdquo; but what&rsquo;s being resisted isn&rsquo;t clear&mdash;certainly not economic inequality or the plight of immigrants.En el S&eacute;ptimo D&iacute;a has a built-in Go For It hook&mdash;that championship game, in which Jos&eacute; is forbidden to play but somehow gets to, by near-farcical means. The movie is very enjoyable, though with a sting in its tail. The nominal bad guy, Steve (Christopher Gabriel N&uacute;&ntilde;ez), is a creep, but he&rsquo;s not evil. He simply has too many incentives to have no empathy. Knowing the hearts of his employees would get in the way of doing business in a tough market. McKay leaves those of us with vastly more power than Jos&eacute; feeling angry at ourselves for living comfortably within this system, for lacking not so much empathy as curiosity. I didn&rsquo;t know much, and now I know a little more. And I know that it&rsquo;s nowhere near enough.SIDE BY SIDE IN THE MULTIPLEX with giant blowups of Han Solo and various Avengers is Fred Rogers, the subject of Morgan Neville&rsquo;s surprisingly moving Won&rsquo;t You Be My Neighbor? You ask: How can a man so square now be so hip, maybe even&mdash;with any luck&mdash;big box office?Neville gently&mdash;how could one not be gentle in this context?&mdash;eases us into a neighborhood-as-world in which all talk is soft; all fantasy is plainly handmade, as if by a child in a playroom; and the most important thing we&rsquo;re meant to take away is that no matter how we look or feel (sad, mad, plaid), we&rsquo;re special, each of us, loved unconditionally by this nice, nice man. If you&rsquo;re looking for an ironic punch line to the above sentiment, look elsewhere.I&rsquo;m not a Mister Rogers&rsquo; Neighborhood newbie. When I was a kid, I wrote him a fan letter. The odd thing is that I was going on 11, past the age most kids would admit to watching the show, but I&rsquo;d go back and forth between the ol&rsquo; neighborhood and Dark Shadows, along with other noisy, violent programs. Neville&rsquo;s documentary brought it all back. There he is, breezing through the front door, jauntily trading his shoes for sneakers and sports coat for a button-down or zip-up sweater. I loved him then because he seemed to me like an uncle who was a little&mdash;don&rsquo;t take this the wrong way&mdash;slow, in the sense that he wasn&rsquo;t in sync with the fast-and-getting faster times. He was so not in sync that he seemed radical, a word that&rsquo;s used in the film by the actress who played Mrs. McFeely, the postman&rsquo;s wife. Also, I liked knowing Mister Rogers would never be a critic&mdash;a grim thing for a righteous critic to admit, but psyches are complicated.Neville reminds us that Fred Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister who made sure not to put God&mdash;at least explicitly&mdash;into his programs. But he felt that he was a missionary. For Rogers in the late 1960s, spiritual healing meant, in the words of one of the show&rsquo;s directors, &ldquo;[taking] all the elements that make good television and [doing] the exact opposite.&rdquo; There were a lot of contented silences, as critic David Bianculli points out. But Neville also reminds us that the Land of Make Believe (reached via trolley) was not a place of escapism. The first week on the air, King Friday XIII established a border guard, and it fell to Lady Aberlin (who&rsquo;s not in this film, alas) and others to teach him that even a king could welcome the stranger in need. On the live side of the trolley, the neighborhood policeman (Fran&ccedil;ois Clemmons) was black, and in one momentous scene he and Rogers dipped their bare feet into a wading pool&mdash;not long after the era of segregated swimming pools. (Rogers was upset when Clemmons was spotted at a gay bar because he didn&rsquo;t think his sponsors could handle it&mdash;but he did, eventually.) Out from behind the TV, Rogers charms a snide congressional-committee chairman with his message of kindness&mdash; and single-handedly ensures $20 million in 1960s dollars for the fledgling PBS.Neville is a little smug in cutting to such hosts as Soupy Sales and Pee-wee Herman to prove that kids&rsquo; TV can be overly loud and brutal. Kids need the antic and unruly as much as they need the soft acceptance of Fred Rogers. But there is no doubt that we miss him, badly. Won&rsquo;t You Be My Neighbor? is a wonderful breather from reality, from which you come back more conscious of&mdash; and dismayed by&mdash;the hate that more than ever runs the world.&nbsp;

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