‘Novitiate,’ ‘Lady Bird’ shed light on growing up female and Catholic

In “Novitiate,” Maggie Betts’ searing, sensitive drama of religious and sexual awakening, Margaret Qualley plays a young woman in the 1960s who falls in love with God and enters a convent as a postulant. The movie is a quietly riveting study of life in this most ascetic and cloistered of environments,…