In large part, what made Joe and Andrew Russo’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier such a successful and somewhat transcendent superhero movie was that its going concern wasn’t a global or even galactic catastrophe, but a personal one. The friendship between Brooklyn bros Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) and James Buchanan “Bucky” Barnes (Sebastian Stan) threatened to fall apart over the course of the film’s explosive events, though, in the end, their lifelong bond endured.

“I’m with you to the end of the line,” Captain Rogers says to his brainwashed, killing-machine friend at the close of Winter Soldier in a chilling, melodramatic declaration of brotherly love. Their bond is once again the beating heart of the story in the Russos’ follow-up, Captain America: Civil War, and it’s the key ingredient that makes Marvel Studios’ latest offering their best yet.

Unlike last year’s Avengers: Age of Ultron, Civil War is an ensemble superhero movie whose heroes don’t get lost in all the ass-kicking commotion. Sure, there’s more than enough ass-kicking to satisfy even the most rabid MCU fan (more on that later), but the impressive thing is that each character has an emotional arc that’s at once affecting and easy to keep track of.

Take for example Elizabeth Olsen’s Scarlet Witch. In Age of Ultron, we learned that her parents were killed in a city-leveling act of war; at the outset of Civil War, we see her on the other side of that scenario as we watch her inadvertently kill innocents during an Avengers mission in Nigeria. The wicked irony of the situation leaves her in an awful state of mind, but she finds solace in the arms of her otherworldly android teammate Vision (Paul Bettany), who’s feeling romantic butterflies in his semi-synthetic belly for the first time.

You’ll find simple, affecting side stories like this running throughout the movie, but the going concern is the moral divide between Steve Rogers and Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.). Following the destructive events in Nigeria, the governments of the world decide it’s time for the Avengers to answer to a higher power, stripping them of the liberty to choose when and where to act. Tony, tormented by guilt (the lives lost in Nigeria, New York and Sokovia as a result of the Avengers’ gigantic battles hang over his head like the sword of Damocles), is in favor of the proposal; Steve still feels the world is safest in the Avengers’ unshackled hands.

Some of the heroes vote with Tony, like Vision, his best buddy, War Machine (Don Cheadle), and the painfully conflicted Black Widow (Scarlet Johansson). Falcon (Anthony Mackie) goes into hiding with his Captain, and they finally track down Bucky, the ever-elusive Winter Soldier, who’s deemed public enemy number one when he’s framed for recent deadly terrorist attacks. When Steve uncovers that the person responsible for the attacks is a man named Zemo (Daniel Bruhl), he gathers fresh recruits to help him stop the mad bomber, including Scarlet Witch, Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) and Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner). Tony’s counter move is to recruit two new faces to the MCU: The Black Panther (Chadwick Boseman) and a bright, super-powered teenager from the Bronx named Peter Parker (Tom Holland). Yes, Spider-Man’s MCU debut is as amazing (no pun intended) as anyone could have hoped.

The ensuing clash between team Stark and team Rogers (taking place in an evacuated Leipzig/Halle airport) is the most gloriously nerdy thing I’ve ever seen. It’s so fun I wanted to burst, with the Russos giving each of the heroes an incredibly cool moment or two to flex their powers in strange and inventive ways. What really puts things over the top is the dialogue, which showcases each character’s colorful personality in an economic, wildly entertaining way. Spider-Man is fascinated by Bucky’s metal arm (Holland is terrific), Ant-Man is still getting used to the abilities he gained in his solo movie (he even breaks out a new trick), and Black Widow and Hawkeye discuss how bizarre it is to be fighting each other as they pull their punches.

The airport showdown (shot in glorious IMAX) is hard to top, but the climactic one-on-one battle between Iron Man and Captain America (with poor Bucky caught in the middle) raises the stakes to new levels of tear-jerking high drama. The unexpected star of the show here is RDJ, who gives not just his best performance as Stark, but one of the best performances of his career. Civil War is as much his movie as it is Evans’, and the emotional rollercoaster he takes us on is unpredictable and utterly heartbreaking.

Civil War is the best thing Marvel Studios has produced. Not only does it work well as the third act of the ballad of Steve and Bucky, but it sets up the future of the MCU brilliantly. I can’t wait to see how the odd mentor/pupil relationship between Tony and young Peter Parker develops in next year’s Spider-Man: Homecoming, and the romance between Scarlet Witch and Vision is so strange and delightful that it may be one of the main reason’s people will shell out even more dough when we arrive at Avengers: Infinity War (or whatever they’re calling it these days). Then there’s Black Panther, whose forthcoming solo movie will mark the first minority-led (and directed) entry for Marvel studios. Somehow, eight years in, the future of the ever-expanding MCU looks brighter than ever.

The story behind Dean Fleischer-Camp’s documentary Fraud is an interesting one. The director is said to have stumbled upon footage on YouTube—over 100 hours worth—of a American middle-class family of four living out their lives in front of a video camera, but this isn’t just any wannabe reality story. Fleischer-Camp pared that footage down to a scant 52 minutes to paint a picture of a man and woman so materialistic, they would jeopardize their own freedom and their children’s future for the chance to spend, spend, spend.

The family of four—thirty-something parents and two young children both under the age of about seven—is introduced to the viewer on 5/26/12 (according to the camera’s date stamp). Little is known about the family other than what can put together through the footage: they live in a small, cluttered house, suggesting lower-middle-class, and they are obsessed with anything related to an affluent lifestyle. As their bills mount and their resources dwindle, the family takes desperate measures to improve their cash flow so they can live what they perceive to be the good life, consequences be damned. The film ends on 10/3/12.

Less than five minutes into Fraud, I had my hand raised, calling shenanigans (please forgive the granularity of the next paragraph; it’s in support of a greater point).

At the film’s start, The Man, who does 99% of what presents itself as around-the-clock filming, records The Woman reading a pair of bank notices. The first notice is a decline letter for a new credit card. The other is in reference to a bounced payment. I understand the narcissistic obsession that comes with self-recording, but that The Man would record something as humiliating to himself and his family as that, and The Woman wouldn’t object, felt like a stretch. Still, and despite any change in tenor to The Family’s mood, I allowed that maybe reaction shots and debates had been edited out. I allowed it, that is, until the next scene where, in the interest of raising money, The Family has a yard sale. By the time the dust settles, they take their loot and head off to several retailers, including an Apple store, where everyone in The Family scores a new iPhone.

I called shenanigans again. Their declined credit card application suggests they were maxed out on their existing plastic, and the bounced payment suggests they were cash-strapped too, leaving only their yard sale earnings to fuel their shopping spree. I’ve never known a yard to generate north of $1000 in a single afternoon, and while the quick cuts of the film don’t afford a good look at the wares on sale, The Family’s living conditions suggest they didn’t have anything of high value to begin with, nor did they have a high quantity of lower-value items to unload.

This sequence is a terrific example of the film’s strength—it moves fast—but it’s also emblematic of the film’s great, great problem: it strains credulity from start to finish. Even if the action in the first five minutes of the film is factual, it raises such an eyebrow that all subsequent moments become the subject of intense scrutiny. That scrutiny then helps expose other improbable actions and events, up to and including the crime the film is named after and the subsequent cover-up; blatant timeline discrepancies between when events actually happen and the time stamp of the video; more private, humiliating moments filmed without shame or objection; the complete absence of questions from people The Family interacts with; and, perhaps most unsettling, the lack of any sense of genuine emotion between The Man and The Woman (and by extension, The Kids). These two people are more like high school buddies than a committed couple, and not once did I believe they were emotionally involved with each other or their children.

By the end of the film, so many unbelievable events and moments and decisions had happened, I called shenanigans on all 52 minutes. In a world where anyone is capable of anything, and anyone is capable of filming anything they are capable of, the four months this family spends on a money-burning binge rang as improbable as anything can.

And yet I couldn’t stop thinking about the film after it was over…and the next day, too. Despite the superficiality of it, I couldn’t deny how mesmerizing it was. Part of this is because of the audacity of the director, but the other part of it, the larger part of it, is that while this so-called family might not have gone through those onscreen moments “in real life,” a lot of families in America have indeed suffered (or enjoyed, depending on how you look at it) some of those moments—living beyond their financial means, committing fraud, endangering children, you name it—all in the name of being able to spend money they otherwise wouldn’t normally have to spend. The nuclear (wasted) family Fleischer-Camp presents onscreen is like a composite of the unseemly denizens of an America obsessed with materialism and wealth, and it is chilling.

Therein lies the dilemma in terms of rating this film. As a documentary, it’s bad, and the title is apt. In fact, I wouldn’t even grant this specious work a “docudrama” moniker. But as a piece of visual art, effectively lean in runtime and edited with surgical precision, its statement on the skewed perceptions of the importance of money versus responsibility held by so many Americans, is like nothing I’ve seen before. That it achieves this without passing judgment makes it all the more impressive. Fraud is not a documentary about one family; it’s a reflection on a culture—a reflection that is as hard to look at as it is as hard to look away from.

Watching a documentary filmed in real-time is always fascinating to me. Unlike a traditional doc that starts with an idea and involves months of planning, research, scheduling, and execution, a real-time doc feels much more adventurous; the filmmakers are just as unaware of what will happen next as the viewers. It requires a little luck, too. Picking a compelling subject for a traditional doc is one thing, but for something compelling to happen to a subject in a real-time doc is another thing entirely. Director Christy Garland hopes to capture some of that magic in Cheer Up.

The city of Rovaniemi, Finland is located at the Arctic Circle and, as one might expect, offers a stunning and picturesque winter landscape. But in addition to all that beautiful snow and cold, the city is home to the Ice Queens, a competitive cheerleading squad led by Coach Miia. The term “competitive” is as literal as it is generous, though. The squad technically competes at the Finnish National Qualifiers, but they are dreadful, even to the amateur eye. Tired of losing and tired of coaching a lackluster team, Miia seeks inspiration where nobody does cheerleading better: Dallas, Texas, USA. At Cheer Athletics, Miia visits with the staff and squads who put on a cheering (and coaching) clinic, producing the kind of results Miia could only dream about. Dazzled by the energy of the staff and the commitment of the cheerleaders, Miia returns home energized and ready to make some changes for—and to—the squad, until developments happen in her personal life that change the course of the team’s collective future.

In her third feature documentary, Christy Garland doesn’t simply cover the sad-sack exploits of the cheerless cheer squad. She also focuses her lens on the private lives of three individuals from the team: Coach Miia and two teenage cheerleaders, Aino and Patricia. On the surface, they are all unique. Aino is the raven-haired rebel, smoking behind the school and partying at night when she isn’t trying to land a flip. Patricia is the girl-next-door, but one garnering sympathy with a life marred by the loss of her mother. And Miia is the single woman whose obsession with Marilyn Monroe ranges from decorations on her walls to bleach-blonde hair and a “Monroe piercing” above her lip.

While these differences make the young women unique, and while cheerleading connects them, what bonds them (unbeknownst to them) are their fractured relationships with men and their sometimes staggeringly-poor life choices. Aino rushes to live with her immature boyfriend, Patricia is at stubborn odds with her father, and Miia’s man trouble defies even a veiled mention here for fear of revealing too much.

This is the kind of narrative that makes real-time documentary filmmaking so great—a director chooses a general topic that is unique, finds the smaller stories within the larger tale that might lead to something special, and pursues those stories. All of these components are present in Cheer Up, and yet the magic never quite happens.

Most of where Garland struggles is with trying to keep the story compelling. The monotony of the lives of these women seeps through the screen to turn the experience into a monotonous experience. This is no indictment of the women or their lives, but rather how they are presented on film. It’s as if Garland is concerned with being melodramatic, so she reigns everything in so tightly she creates something anti-dramatic. The result is observation to a fault.

Even the most structured and well-planned of documentaries need some kind of drama, so surely a real-time doc needs it too. Cheer Up doesn’t have it.

Garland also retreats from any kind of ongoing focus on the cheerleading aspect of the story, instead occasionally returning to it as a reminder that, oh yes, this is what these girls do. There are moments in practice when Miia pushes the girls harder, and there are moments when more than one girl loses a little blood in the process, but it’s all very rote in its revisitation. The lessons learned in life never translate to lessons learned in the gym, nor vice-versa.

Cheer Up is incredibly well-intended and has some good moments, particularly Sari Aaltonen’s cinematography. But with its flat presentation and dearth of any riveting moments, the film plays more like an after-school special about the pitfalls of teen decision-making than it does a documentary about young women struggling to make something more of their lives.

One of the great joys for fans of true independent documentary filmmaking is having the chance to hear stories that might not otherwise be told. High-profile documentaries are great, and those stories need to be heard as well, but for every flashy doc there are countless other docs that offer unique glimpses into unknown lives, uncharted worlds, and times that have long since passed. Such is the story of Hotel Dallas from Livia Ungur, who acts as co-writer and co-director on a film about her own experiences.

As the 1980s wound down, Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu recognized that the people oppressed under the boot of his Communist tyranny were growing restless and itching for freedom. In a placating move, Ceaușescu allowed the state-run television station to air reruns of America’s wildly popular drama Dallas. The prime-time soap starred Larry Hagman as evil oil tycoon J.R. Ewing and Patrick Duffy as his much kinder brother, Bobby. So popular did the show become in Ceaușescu’s corner of the Eastern Bloc, an entrepreneurial individual modeled a building after the home of the Ewings’ fictitious Southfork Ranch and turned it into a hotel, where guests could temporarily pretend they were living in 1980s Dallas.

While it’s technically accurate to call Hotel Dallas a documentary, the term both oversells and undersells the film, a juxtaposition that offers an interesting opportunity for Ungur (and her co-creator/husband Sherng-Lee Huang), but one that hampers the work as a whole.

From the oversell perspective, Hotel Dallas offers less in the way of what a viewer might expect in a documentary set in this place and time. While the filmmakers properly frame the geopolitical landscape so the importance of the TV show to oppressed Romanians is clear, there isn’t a great amount of interest from the filmmakers in exploring it too deeply. There are some fine voiceover testimonies to be heard from people who lived there and then, and it’s clear the show was a godsend to those people (and perhaps something of a backfire on Ceaușescu), but they are only soundbites offering a sketch, not narratives offering a complete picture.

This is where calling it a documentary somewhat undersells the film, as it is far more artistically experimental than the average documentary, with parts of the film delving into everything from philosophical oppression to complete fantasy.

The highlights of this avant-doc portion of moviemaking are three scenes played out by Romanian child actors dressed as Pioneers—Romania’s Communist youth organization. In one scene, the kids reenact the death of Bobby Ewing as seen on TV (something Ungur admits to being traumatized by when she was a child). In another scene, Bobby Ewing is “reborn,” a moment taken from Dallas‘ now-infamous shower episode. In the third scene, and in keeping with themes of life and death, the children replay the Christmas execution of Ceaușescu and his wife, Elena—a chilling moment in stark monochrome, especially as performed by youngsters. There is also the chance to see an old Romanian oil company commercial starring Larry Hagman.

But the most fascinating artistic piece is the inclusion of Patrick Duffy himself throughout the entire film. He plays a character named Mr. Here (with a clever comic reason behind the name), but he channels his Bobby Ewing persona as if it were in a constant state of semi-consciousness. He is only seen onscreen once (in a recording studio scene that is slickly edited), and the rest of his “appearances” are voiceover, but from his POV. His purpose in the film is to bridge the gap between Hollywood fantasy and Romanian reality, along with bridging the time between Ungur’s modern-day existence and her Romanian youth. The pair actually travel back in time throughout the length of the film.

While some of the filmmaking is quite good when being judged on its own merits, the blending of documentary and drama becomes too cute by half. Even if every scene was good, the filmmakers don’t quite have the skills to pull off something this audacious. Using fantasy to tell the truth, or injecting the truth with fantasy to make a point, is tricky, and too often I found myself wondering what was real and what wasn’t, a question a viewer shouldn’t have when watching something that presents itself as factual. The filmmakers’ raw talent here is evident, but it’s unfocused. The facts are interesting, and the artistic choices are compelling, but the two aren’t meaty enough to work together very well.

Darius McCollum loves public transit. More specifically, he loves the trains that stream through the MTA system. The New York subway has been a lifelong obsession for him—a playground, a safe haven, and a place where new friends are never in short supply. It’s also a forbidden source of temptation, as Darius has been arrested more than 30 times for impersonating a train operator as well as various other transit employees. Considering his passion for the Transit Authority and his considerable knowledge of subway routes and procedures, one might wonder why Darius doesn’t apply for a position with the MTA rather than continue on as a criminal. As director Adam Irving details in Off the Rails, the reality of the situation is not so simple.

At the root of Darius’s compulsion is his Asperger’s syndrome. A defining characteristic of the disorder is an intense interest in one subject, and this has led Darius to study everything there is to know about the New York subway system. There is nothing malicious about his repeated transgressions. While most hijackings of public transit might spring from violent derangement or anarchistic intent, Darius’ actions rise from personal fulfillment and uncommon dutifulness. He follows the schedules, making every stop without deviation and carefully attending to any malfunctions with the necessary precautions.

Off the Rails takes viewers through the origins of this infatuation using home movies, cartoons, and testimonies from his mother as well as extensive interviews with the subject himself. We learn that Darius was bullied as a child and struggled to make friends. He found solace in the subway, where people didn’t judge him. Beloved by MTA employees for his enthusiasm, Darius became a kind of junior volunteer, helping out the operators with various tasks and eventually being taught how to run the train (an experience he compares to losing his virginity). But things turned sour when he was spotted behind the controls by police at the age of 15. Darius was arrested on the spot and soon became Public Enemy Number One to MTA executives for his repeated crimes, as posters bearing his image covered the subway walls. Even after growing to be of age, every application Darius sent to the corporation was rejected. Most of his life since that first arrest has found him wavering between jail time and virtual homelessness.

The documentary builds upon the context of Darius’s past to deliver a compelling study of his character and inner conflicts. We spend a lot of time with Darius, as the filmmakers capture his feelings with a compassionate camera, juxtaposing personal reflections with vibrant montages of train yards, bustling subway stations and brief scenes of everyday NYC street life. Listening to Darius, one gets the impression of a heartbreakingly sincere man—a man who sees the value in a few words of levity spoken to brighten another person’s day, who refers to Superman as a moral standard to live by, and who wrestles with delusions of his capacity for self-control. Darius may call himself “shy,” but he makes some fascinating insights, and his consistent presence really holds the film together.

Unfortunately, the audience isn’t allowed to draw its own conclusions on his behavior, as multiple therapists and Asperger’s specialists are brought on as talking heads. A certain degree of clinical observation is necessary to better understand Darius’ needs, but the impulse to frequently cut to the experts feels excessive. Rather than letting the implications of the subject’s words and actions stand by themselves (with perhaps some minor supporting commentary from those close to him), the filmmakers lean a little too heavily on the objective assessments to fill out their central characterization. As a result, Darius’ narrative comes off as slightly less intimate and more constructed.

About halfway through Off the Rails, the film begins to shift its focus from Darius to the legal system he finds himself ensnared in. Irving confronts the perpetual cycle of law-breaking and incarceration, taking aim at a courtroom that fails to acknowledge Darius’ unique psychological circumstances and a correctional department that doesn’t know what to do with him. This is where the sound bites from therapists and experts are most meaningful. The film campaigns for common sense solutions, calling upon the MTA to hire a man who would likely be their best employee and arguing for court rulings that wouldn’t serve to exacerbate the situation. A portrait of injustice begins to take shape and Darius is effectively painted as the victim of institutional neglect.

Pulling its unusual subject matter from the tongue-in-cheek headlines of local TV news, Off the Rails serves to humanize a person too often made out to be an eccentric curiosity. It’s a solid character study that admirably balances empowerment, hardship, empathy, and advocacy.

Deep in the wilderness of northern British Columbia beats the heart of the Tahltan people. They’re a First Nations tribe, surrounded by breathtaking snow-capped mountains and sharing space with various beasts they’ve called neighbors for thousands of years. The glorious expanse is seemingly timeless, largely unspoiled by deforestation and man-made structures. But as the Tahltan people struggle to retain their language and keep up native traditions in the 21^st century, a new threat to their land and way of life looms. Companies wanting to mine the area for its copper and gold set up shop, and their plans put the health of the land at stake.

Director Nettie Wild weaves a dazzling tapestry with KONELĪNE: our land beautiful. More formally experimental than the average documentary, the film doesn’t attack the environmental issues through any one perspective. In fact, there isn’t much of anything here that qualifies as an “attack” at all. The approach is far more meditative. A multitude of voices overlap, sharing feelings and personal histories while Wild showcases the region through expressive cinematography and editing. What this method produces is a lyrical ode to a bountiful and diverse landscape, along with the human beings who make it their home.

For all the beauty of KONELĪNE’s visuals, it’s the human subjects who make up the bedrock of the film. A series of vignette-like sequences are threaded throughout, giving the audience some quality time with the lifestyle and viewpoints of Tahltan natives and foreigners alike. Wild follows local fishermen as they cast their nets, a woman guiding hunters on horseback through steep mountain ranges, and a man with a dogsled who speaks with pride about running the same trails his ancestors followed. She speaks with a driller who chronicles the area’s geological history, and turns her camera on a pair of conflicted Tahltan mining employees who say that, in their impoverished state, they can’t afford to turn down the jobs.

This is only a sampling of the subjects that take the spotlight. The doc’s colorful tableau of experiences brings the viewer close to the realities of living in the region, and Wild appears to take pleasure in documenting the nitty-gritties of everyday work, showing a narrow focus on the work each person does with their hands. Horseshoes are fashioned and fastened to scuffed hooves, transition lines are painstakingly set up by a small crew, and fish are carefully cleaned at homemade butchering stations by the riverbank—all of this captured with a strong attention to detail. For fans of Werner Herzog, some of these scenes may feel reminiscent of his film Happy People: A Year in the Taiga in their fascination with the earthly qualities of independent living.

The film cannot be discussed without addressing its handling of the environment. The remote countryside is lensed with the same attention to detail as the people, but the land conveys the added weight of something formidable and pure. Wide shots capture postcard-ready vistas, and well-placed close-ups—such as one of hailstones falling on butterfly wings—express a measure of fragility. As one of the interviewees notes, it’s a land “with a personality.” Aided by a soundscape that mixes twinkling bells with wind gusts and rhythmic tribal drums, Wild demonstrates how that personality transfers to the spirit of the people who live off the land.

KONELĪNE: our land beautiful is a serenely delivered tribute to the Tahltan people and the earth they’re tied to. The themes here echo environmentalism, but the film moves more like a poem than a preachy assault on corporate greed. This is transportive, ethereal documentary filmmaking that is well-worth experiencing on the biggest screen possible.

Not every sub-genre of cinema needs to contain likable characters for films to be successful. A huge number of affecting films have been produced, for years, concentrating on antiheroes: unpleasant characters not featured for the sake of enjoyment. However, when filmmakers are working within the confines of a tight sub-genre like talk-heavy, NYC-based tales of flawed romance, which is essentially what Negin Farsad and Jeremy Redleaf‘s 3rd Street Blackout is, the characters must be relatively pleasant. That’s because rather than focusing on philosophy or atmosphere, the film chooses the route of a double character study and centers entirely on the mind state of the two protagonists, a seemingly happy couple named Mina and Rudy, played by the directors themselves.

Sometimes, when a director makes the decision to place themselves in the spotlight of their own film, they can become so wrapped up in their own vision that the story becomes overly personal and difficult for those who haven’t shared their life experiences. Here, the opposite is true; Farsad and Redleaf are so naturally able to realize the characters they’ve written for themselves that it’s difficult to remember that they’re the co-directors and not a silly New York couple with a set of eccentric friends.

3rd Street Blackout tells the story of a few days in the life of this couple, during which a blackout occurs across the entire city and they’re forced to actually communicate with one another rather than spending all of their time on their phones, as they usually do. This eventually leads Mina to reveal something to Rudy that she’s been bottling up for some time; said “something” is also revealed to the audience in flashback fragments throughout the majority of the film.

The non-linear style of editing that the film utilizes works to its advantage in raising the emotional stakes of the narrative, and simultaneously, creates a feeling of palpable suspense not common in most lo-fi romantic comedies. The film is indeed a comedy, but not in the pure sense at all because the audience is, for the most part, left in the dark regarding the portion of the story being flashed back to. It’s a sincerely funny film—you could draw comparisons between 3rd Street Blackout and shows like Broad City or High Maintenance with regard to its uniquely New York sense of humor—but its structural fragmentation also makes it an effectively frustrating and anxiety-inducing experience.

One of the main reasons why the film works so well is because of the talented supporting cast. Farsad and Redleaf are fantastic and believable as the leads, but the film wouldn’t have been nearly as strong had the slew of supporting characters not been so comically satisfying. The cast is stacked with recognizable faces such as Janeane Garofalo (Wet Hot American Summer), Devin Ratray (Home Alone), John Hodgeman (Bored to Death), Ed Weeks (The Mindy Project), Michael Cyril Creighton (Spotlight) and Phyllis Somerville (Little Children) who, in particular, gives an utterly delightful performance. Lesser known actors such as Katie Hartman and Becky Yamamoto show that they deserve recognition, the former taking on one of the chief supporting roles in the film and nailing every scene, and the latter having only one scene in the whole film, though it was possibly the film’s most hilarious moment.

Ultimately, 3rd Street Blackout is a simple movie focusing on complex characters. The way that the couple avoids addressing important issues through comedy is a realistic dynamic that’s easy for viewers to understand and even sympathize with. Much of the comedy in the film is admittedly crude, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Farsad and Redleaf pull off the crudeness, mostly because the audience can tell it’s not malicious and poorly intended; it feels harmless and reminds one of how important it is to be goofy every once in a while. Characters pop in and out of the film without much introduction, but it doesn’t matter. Actually, it works to the film’s advantage because every character is captivating, and that’s sort of exactly how it is in New York City anyway.

3rd Street Blackout isn’t just great because provides a good laugh; it’ll make you want to sit down and write some comedy of your own. It’s exciting to see a pair of independent directors with such an inspiring and authentic comedic voice.

What if men no longer served any purpose on Earth? That’s more or less the hook of the mockumentary No Men Beyond This Point, which presents an alternate universe where, in the 1950s, women suddenly gained the ability to reproduce asexually (it’s called parthenogenesis, as one of the talking heads explains). As the years went on, and the population of women kept increasing (since they’re reproducing asexually they only use the X chromosomes, meaning no more males being born), men eventually became of no use. No Men Beyond This Point starts in the present day, where the documentary crew follows 37-year-old Andrew Myers (Patrick Gilmore), now the youngest man in the world.

Writer/director/editor Mark Sawers uses a standard documentary approach to his absurd subject matter, employing talking head interviews, archival footage and black-and-white re-enactments, among plenty of other old tricks found in any average middlebrow doc made today. The familiar and banal approach works here because of its pairing with a fantasy/sci-fi concept, and the way Sawers focuses on some of the more nuanced changes that would come from the switch in dominant gender roles makes it easy to go along with his dystopian (or utopian, depending on how you look at it) vision.

Aside from playing out his big “What if?” scenario through social and political contexts, Sawers also focuses on Myers and his situation as the youngest man in the world. With the World Governing Council—a new body of government running the planet—sending men off to sanctuaries across the world to live out their remaining days, Myers manages to get a job as a servant for partners Terra (Tara Pratt) and Iris (Kristine Cofsky). Eventually, Andrew and Iris being showing an attraction for each other, and Sawers uses their flirtations to delve into the messier aspects of his universe.

It’s when No Men Beyond This Point starts exploring sex that the mockumentary begins to falter a bit. Especially giving a rather bland attempt at poking holes in the idea of how women would handle being in power. Earlier on, when Sawers highlights how the stubbornness of men in power ultimately led to their downfall, the idea works. But once women take charge and rule in a reactionary way towards men, essentially trying to speed up their extinction, Sawers portrays their rule as a conservative, sex-shaming authority, where women are not allowed to speak about their feelings of attraction whatsoever. It gives off an implication that women are inherently repressive when it comes to sexuality, a point that some people may take offense to. And with gender and sexuality turning into prominent issues recently, there’s something a little old hat about Sawers’ film operating within the same standards that are being constantly challenged today.

But still, anyone who tries to tackle gender is bound to get into a sticky situation of some sort, and for the most part No Men Beyond This Point is enjoyable despite its issues. It may be a little too deadpan for its own good, but even when the laughs aren’t there it’s fascinating to see just how much Sawers has thought out his idea of a world where women rule everything. I can’t say that No Men Beyond This Point lives up to the mockumentaries of the likes of Christopher Guest (and I’m sure some people will grow tired of Sawers’ premise pretty fast), but I can’t deny that I wasn’t entertained for the most part.

This review was originally published on September 14, 2015, as part of our coverage of the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival.

The sinister potential of New Age practices gets explored yet again in Karl Mueller’s Rebirth, a psychological thriller continuing the somewhat recent trend of films about cults like Faults, The Invitation, and Martha Marcy May Marlene. This time, rather than taking inspiration from the likes of the Manson family or Jonestown, Rebirth bases its eponymous enlightenment group off of the Church of Scientology, and anyone vaguely familiar with L. Ron Hubbard’s creepy “religion” will pick up on the influence within minutes. And while Mueller provides enough intrigue to keep viewers guessing, he has a hard time coming up with a proper conclusion for his small-scale mind games.

Kyle (Fran Kranz) is a typical upper-middle-class office drone, living in a big suburban home with his wife and daughter and spending his days working at a bank in the city. An opening montage establishes the happy monotony of Kyle’s life, which soon gets interrupted when his old college friend Zack (Adam Goldberg) shows up at his work. Zack asks Kyle to cancel all his weekend plans and participate with him in something called Rebirth, which he only describes as “an experience.” Kyle bristles at the boldness of his old friend’s proposal, but he decides to go for it after succumbing to his nostalgic feelings.

Things get weird in a short amount of time, as the hotel Kyle checks himself into for the weekend getaway turns out to be a ruse. A series of clues leads him to a bus filled with dozens of other men, all of whom have to hand over their cell phones and wear blindfolds for the entire ride while they’re taken to Rebirth’s real location. Upon arriving, Kyle and the other bus passengers get taken to a room where a man (Steve Agee) explains Rebirth’s anti-establishment philosophies, making it sound like some sort of college bro’s attempt at copying Chuck Palahniuk. From there, several strange events draw Kyle away from the main group and off into a sort of hellish funhouse, exploring a derelict building where each room offers a different, stranger facet of what Rebirth has to offer.

This section of the film turns out to be its strongest, even though its structure and influences are plain as day. Kyle bounces from room to room, and every door he opens functions as an excuse for Mueller to come up with a bizarre situation to throw his protagonist into. An early highlight involves Kyle stumbling into some kind of support group whose leader (Andrew J. West) torments people both physically and psychologically. It’s a gripping sequence, but it’s a borderline remake of the classroom scenes in Whiplash. Plenty of other influences pop up throughout Rebirth, including David Fincher’s The Game and Charlie Brooker’s TV series Black Mirror, but these comparisons aren’t complimentary; it just shows that Mueller is a competent copycat.

On the other hand, Mueller’s focus is squarely on creating an entertaining game of figuring out what’s real or part of Rebirth, and Kranz and the committed ensemble (including Harry Hamlin and Pat Healy, who take full advantage of their small roles) make the film’s transparent qualities easier to forgive. It’s in the final act, when the group starts exerting its influence on Kyle’s personal life, that the screenplay starts to break down. By breaking away from Rebirth’s controlled environment and into the real world, the plausibility of the whole scenario gets extremely thin, but not as thin as whatever message Mueller tries to tack on in the closing minutes. After an abrupt ending, the film switches over to one of Rebirth’s promotional videos while the credits roll. The video, a deliberate attempt to mimic Scientology’s promos (including the infamous Tom Cruise video), makes the whole film feel like the set-up for a corny punchline. A brief section of the video, where Rebirth promotes its branded product line, suggests a bit of a sly commentary on New Age ideas getting swallowed up by capitalist interests, but it’s drowned out by the parodic, wink-nudge nature of the clip.

Gangly-armed or thick-necked with off-colored skin tones or noses—the harshly drawn inhabitants of Nerdland don’t have the benefit of beauty to mask their ugly insides. They’re off-putting even when appealing. Like many of the character designs on Adult Swim cartoon shows, the characters’ distinctive features are sharpened and exaggerated in ways that makes their appearances unsettling. It should be no surprise that Nerdland comes from Chris Prynoski (Metalocalypse, Motorcity), veteran of the late night Cartoon Network universe, where absurdist and divisive humor has thrived for the past couple decades.

In the heart of the entertainment industry, nearly 30-year-old roommates John (voiced by Paul Rudd) and Elliot (Patton Oswalt) feel their shot at world fame is dwindling. At first, both seem like familiar characters repurposed for Nerdland’s grimy, stoner sketchbook aesthetic. The pair live together in a rundown Hollywood apartment with old beer bottles and pizza boxes strewn across the floor. Elliot, a would-be screenwriter, who spends more time on the couch playing video games than writing (a depressing familiar conceit) ends up penning a script about a vengeful Rip Van Winkle waking from his slumber to shotgun blast open the skulls of strip club patrons. His roommate John—an aspiring actor—is the gentler, naïf, Lenny Small-type. When John tries to pass off Elliot’s script to a well-known movie star, John fumbles the pages and rips his pants in an effort to pick them up, exposing his puckered anus to the crowd.

The hand-drawn feature animation is the first feature from animation house Titmouse, Inc., a smooth transition to the big screen that borrows animated TV comedies’ fast-paced style. Quick cutaways pepper the dialog-heavy moments with visual gags. They reveal the protagonists’ dreams of red carpets lined with adoring fans or boob-filled, heavenly utopias, many of which feel ripped from an angsty teenage boy’s fantasies. But like a random episode of Family Guy, these jokes range in quality from shocking and fun to predictably cynical. Its misanthropic charms often redeem Nerdland, but John and Elliot’s aversion to productivity can become grating to watch for the duration (even if that length is only 83 minutes).

John and Elliot’s pursuit of fame at any twisted cost makes the pair progressively harder to like. Nerdland‘s mocking vision of LA is short on any redeeming personalities. Filled with silly caricatures of the fame-worshipping underclass, it’s clear that the director Prynoski as well as the screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker hate just about every person in this world. And yes, that’s the same Andrew Kevin Walker who wrote Se7en and contributed an uncredited rewrite to Fight Club—a film with similar nihilistic social satire. With a considerably scattershot plot, one which has a somewhat episode design, Nerdland lacks some of the narrative momentum that comes from more cohesive stories.

While a majority of scenes revolve around the funny duo at the cartoon’s center, recognizable voices make cameos throughout. Comedians such as Molly Shannon, Paul Scheer, as well as Garfunkel & Oats’ Kate Micucci & Riki Lindhome make extended appearances. Among the funniest roles, Hannibal Burress’ discomforting slant on the standard, slovenly Comic Book Guy pairs well with his wry delivery. Like many of the notable comedians that lend their voice to Nerdland, Oswalt and Rudd don’t alter their voice for their roles—they’re each well-suited to the characters and make for an amusing, albeit unlikely pairing.

Victims of a media-driven culture, John and Elliot ultimately determine that their shortest path to recognition is through notoriety—though as a hapless pair of unskilled, intermittently unemployed slackers the duo’s ability to accomplish anything is questionable. Some of their antics are hilarious but as the film progresses, many of the bits drag on too long. Prynoski and Walker find some strange insights on their race to the moral bottom with John and Elliot—a commentary that often acts more searing and urgent than it is—but like a developing TV comedy, Nerdland is often best in small patches.

The Jungle Book, Disney’s latest cartoon-to-live-action adaptation, gets a lot of things right: It’s wildly entertaining, full of great vocal performances by a stacked A-list cast, and boasts a hilarious/creepy musical number by none other than Christopher Walken. But, as delightful as it is hearing Walken sing a jazzy Disney classic (fond memories of Pennies From Heaven come rushing back), the thing that makes this John Favreau-directed romp so enjoyable is its spellbinding presentation, which is worth the price of admission alone. This thing looks and sounds like pure movie magic and elicits the same gasps of wonder the original 1967 animated feature did at the time. Hell, this modern update may even be better. Time will tell.

Aside from star Neel Sethi, who plays our tumbling, red-loinclothed hero, Mowgli, every character is a computer generated, anatomically correct animal. Cartoons they are not: wolves don’t have insanely big “Disney eyes,” and birds don’t suddenly flash inexplicably human-toothed grins. These animals look real. They’re of our world. The animators and sound designers have done such good work here that it’s hard to express in words how damn amazing this thing looks, so let’s dive into the other aspects of the movie as a sort of respite before I continue gushing about the sound and visuals.

The story feels like a mash-up of the original 1967 animated musical and 1994’s The Lion King (several images—a stampede, a fiery final battle—will give you deja vu). It’s a combination that goes together like peanut butter and jelly. But PB and J can get old (especially when you find it). There are no ideas, themes, plot contours, or characters in this modern update that feel fresh or exciting. This isn’t a big issue, though, as the narrative formula Favreau and his team follow is tried and true and will work like gangbusters for those stepping into the theater expecting nothing more or less than a good ol’ time at the movies.

Plot-wise, screenwriter Justin Marks stays pretty close to the ’67 original. Mowgli is found in the jungle by stoic panther Bagheera (Ben Kingsley), who brings the “man-cub” to a pack wolves led by the noble Akela (Breaking Bad‘s Giancarlo Esposito). Nurturing Mowgli as his adopted mother is Rashka (Lupita Nyong’o), who rears him as her own. There’s no greater threat in the jungle than prowling tiger Shere Khan (Idris Elba), and Mowgli has the unlucky distinction of being at the top of his kill list (for reasons learned later in flashback).

To keep Mowgli out of the tiger’s clutches, Bagheera leaves to take the boy to the nearest man village. They get separated along the way thanks to a ferocious interception by Khan, and Mowgli falls in with loafer bear Baloo (a game Bill Murray, which is always a treat). Mowgli uses a pulley contraption to knock bee hives down from a high ridge (the animals disapprovingly refer to his handmade tools as “tricks”) and the two become fast friends. They, in fact, break out a jaunty rendition of “Bear Necessities,” which will please fans of the original and likely underwhelm youngsters who bring no nostalgia into the theater.

Baloo and Bagheera embark on a rescue mission when Mowgli’s captured by monkeys and taken to King Louie (Walken), a gigantic orangutan who’s like the jungle’s Don Corleone. He wants the boy to harness the power of the “red flower” and pass it along, making him the true king of the jungle. The “red flower,” of course, is fire, and when Mowgli learns that his family has been terrorized by Khan in his absence, he chooses instead to use the “red flower” as a tool of revenge.

It’s hard to understand how the digital artists made the animal characters both anatomically accurate while also expressing the wide range of emotions brought forth by the voice actors. Animals can be extremely expressive with their faces, but the fact that these onscreen beasts are speaking English and it doesn’t look weird at all is a feat of animation that’s hard to wrap your head around. Most CG animals look too clinical and fall headfirst into the uncanny valley, but these creatures look utterly seamless. While the plot isn’t anything special, the movie has a unique momentum to it in that you’re constantly dying to see which animal will be brought to life next (the elephants are particularly wondrous).

The unsung heroes of The Jungle Book, no doubt, are the sound designers and engineers. Their work here is astonishing. The animated characters look great, but what really sells them and makes them look convincing are the sounds they make as they walk around the lush jungle environments. Baloo is a big ass bear, so when he plops down to eat his honey, you can hear and, more importantly, feel the thud. Great sound design typically goes unnoticed, but in the iconic scene where Mowgli gets seduced by giant snake Kaa (Scarlett Johansson), her hypnotizing hisses swirl around you and squeeze like her coils, Johansson’s sultry voice fading in and out, swinging back and forth on the speakers.

Favreau’s always had a knack for giving his movies a sense of constant propulsion, even when there isn’t that much going on. His movies tend to just glide by, and The Jungle Book is no exception. It’s a rollercoaster thrill ride with simple, somewhat clichéd set pieces that nevertheless work like gangbusters because Favreau’s a good filmmaker who knows what beats to hit to get maximum excitement out of an action scene. There’s a tense hide-and-seek sequence involving Mowgli and Louie in the monkey temple that we’ve all seen before (you see the jump scare coming from miles away), but the way it’s edited and shot is just so riveting that you can’t help but eat it up.

There is one aspect of the movie that is, unfortunately, a constant distraction: Sethi’s dialogue delivery. Honestly, the kid’s just not good at saying his lines convincingly, and it makes some scenes just feel weird. It’s not his fault, really. He’s acting opposite imaginary characters whose voices are provided by some of the best actors in the business. But the sad reality is that it’s pretty jarring to hear this kid speak semi-awkwardly while his co-stars coast through their lines like butter.

What Sethi’s is good at is emoting with his body; he’s a physical actor, and a talented one at that. He’s a convincing wolf child, leaping through the trees and sliding down slopes with an effortlessness and sense of purpose, like jungle parkour is all he’s ever known. The film’s best, most touching moment sees Mowgli help a herd of elephants save one of their young, who’s fallen into a pit. The sun is rising, and in semi-silhouette, we see him save the calf (using one of his clever “tricks”) and wave goodbye to his new friends. He feels honest in moments like these, and thankfully, there are several. Sethi’s a mostly worthy Mowgli in a more than worthy retelling of a gem from the golden age of Disney Animation. If they can keep up this standard when bringing more cartoon classics into the world of live action, I say keep ’em coming.

Writer’s note: If you can, watch the movie in IMAX 3-D. The sound is spectacular and the 3-D is some of the best I’ve seen. Also, the closing credits definitely benefit from the added effect.

Many documentaries, no matter how good they might be, either follow a traditional structure or achieve the same general narrative goal along a nonlinear path. Even a doc like Listen To Me Marlon, which presents Marlon Brando’s personal audio recordings in such a fashion that the actor posthumously “builds” his life story, is essentially a clever telling of a nonlinear tale. But a new documentary from Swiss writer/director Nicolas Steiner, Above and Below, eschews traditional structures and even clever devices, embracing documentation on film in the most literal of senses.

The film examines the daily existences of five people living on what society would be generous to deem its “fringe.” Cindy and Rick are a couple living in a flood channel beneath the streets of Las Vegas; Lalo, aka The Godfather, lives in the same series of tunnels; Dave is a military veteran living alone in an abandoned bunker in the California desert; and April is a member of the crew at the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, living her life simulating exploration on the red planet in the middle of nowhere. These five souls, and their four stories, have more in common than one might think, but the history of that commonality leaves much to be desired.

Above and Below opens like a crackling horror movie. Lalo acts as a tour guide of sorts, leading the viewer into a tunnel as he tells the tale of a family who once lived underground but died during flooding caused by heavy rain; he says the little girl still appears. Lalo’s theatrics, combined with Markus Nestroy’s sumptuous cinematography, is beyond compelling—it’s demanding.

Some technical wizardry continues with wide shots of stunning vastness, paired with great audio, used to frame April’s world as someone preparing to one day colonize Mars (perhaps in the event of the end of Earth). In the desert, Dave takes an acetylene torch to fire ants, crisping them on contact while explaining the pain they cause when they bite, as if he feels compelled to justify his killing. Also using a torch, although as a means to cook dinner, are Cindy and Rick, whose perpetually candlelit underground world has order alongside its chaos.

It’s all so riveting, and yet something isn’t quite right.

Still, Steiner continues to impress by finding connections between and among his subjects that forever link them. Some are superficial, like April playing ping-pong with a crew member, compared to Dave sitting alone in his bunker and bouncing a ping-pong ball off the wall to pass the time, compared to dozens of ping-pong balls flowing through drainage as if en route to Rick and Cindy (while aesthetically pleasing, this bit reeks of being contrived). Others are not so superficial: April and Dave are both military veterans with harrowing experiences, while Cindy and Dave have children and grandchildren in the “real world” they don’t see because they have lost touch with their families.

There is also contrast, not only between those who live above the surface versus those who live below it (thus the title), but also between people’s faith, the creature comforts they have access to, and the degree of solitude in which they live.

But as the film continues, that not-quite-right feeling takes shape. And I use the term “continues” specifically because there is no real progression to be found here. Despite a runtime that’s just shy of two hours, very little happens beyond the observational. It’s quite maddening, really. On one hand, and to Steiner’s credit, there is no opportunity to pass judgment on these people beyond basic moral thumbs-up/thumbs-down consideration, because there is no context available to use as a frame around current behavior. For example, Cindy goes trick-or-treating on Halloween so she and Rick have candy. She’s petite enough to pass for teen-sized, and with a full mask hiding her age and an over-exaggerated squeaky voice belying it, she scores big. Is it wrong? In spirit, sure; trick-or-treating is for kids. But how wrong is it? There’s no way to tell because there isn’t enough revealed about Cindy to make that call.

Therein lies the other hand: with no traditional backstory to these people, and only tidbits of information randomly presented, there is nothing to invest in emotionally. Yes, some sympathy is garnered for April because of her parental situation, and one can’t help but feel sorry for how Cindy or Dave are detached from their children and grandchildren, but without more context, these stories are nothing more than bits of discussions overheard at a café or in an elevator. For two hours.

This sterile, arm’s-length view is a glimpse at lives and not into them, and that is a big distinction. The viewer gets to see Steiner’s subjects, but the viewer never really gets the chance to look at them. Above and Below has artistic merit, but it begs for more from its viewer than it is willing to offer in return. Told without narration or title cards, the film is the epitome of observation, and Steiner tries hard to have it both ways. He offers subjects who might be worthy of sympathy, but never delivers on anything sympathetic, instead remaining all-observant. By the end of the film, the viewer is left wondering if there is something more compelling to look at.

In Louder Than Bombs, Isabelle Reed (Isabelle Huppert) was a world-renowned war photographer who risked her life in pursuit of an endless string of perfect shots. She didn’t always come out of the war zone unscathed, but she always came out. It’s ironic, then, that despite surviving countless dangers around the globe, she wound up the lone fatality of a single-vehicle car crash in a cozy New York suburb. Three years later, a retrospective of her work is being organized, and her widowed husband Gene (Gabriel Byrne) has been tapped to display his wife’s photographs; he enlists the help of his grown son Jonah (Jesse Eisenberg).

Complicating matters is a New York Times piece set to be written in advance of the showing by Isabelle’s former colleague, war reporter Richard Weissman (David Strathairn). The piece will reveal that Isabelle’s car accident was no accident at all, but rather a suicide, something Gene is fully aware of. Not only would Gene prefer to keep a more positive memory of his wife at the forefront of the celebration in her honor, he would rather his younger son, the teenaged Conrad (Devin Druid), not know the truth about his mother’s death.

Louder Than Bombs, the first English-speaking film from Norwegian director and co-writer Joachim Trier, sets itself up to be a significant melodrama. All of the pieces are there and ready to be played.

There is Gene, the widower and father of two who, thanks to the retrospective being organized in his wife’s memory, must do more than face life’s small daily reminders of a love lost—he must immerse himself in the life she lived. He must look at every photograph she took and know that he’s seeing her life, a life she spent far away from her family, through her eyes. This takes its toll on Gene, which in turn takes its toll on how he handles his relationship with Hannah (Amy Ryan), his coworker and lover.

Next is Jonah, who is a lot like the old man and not just because they’re both teachers. When Jonah is faced with an event of overwhelming emotional magnitude, he also makes poor choices. In this instance, his wife Amy (Megan Ketch) has just given birth to their first child, but when the frazzled new dad scours the hospital halls for a vending machine, he runs into an old girlfriend. Their hug lasts almost as long as the lies he tells.

Conrad, whose life is challenging enough as a teenager without a mother, has all but disconnected himself emotionally from his father, opting to live in a world of loud music and online gaming. He’s awkward and introverted and everything one would expect from a 14-year-old in his situation, but he’s also undaunted in his secret love for his classmate crush, the cheerleader Melanie (Ruby Jerins).

Even Richard, the war correspondent, brings more to the story than just the byline on the revelatory posthumous profile of the revered photographer, wife, and mother.

Again, all of the melodramatic pieces are there, but much to his credit, Trier never plays those pieces the way most would expect them to be played. Instead, the filmmaker lets his characters progress through subtle developments that require the viewer to stay keenly attuned to the little things they say and do, rather than waiting for the next bombastic outburst to occur. A lot of that character progression is negative, but it’s genuine, and it’s fueled by the fatal flaws the trio shares—a wicked combination of denial, deceit, and dreadful communication. Watching them fool themselves and others isn’t like watching people spiral out of control and perish in a fiery crash. It’s more like watching people slowly dissolve. Only Conrad, despite (or perhaps because of) his youth, offers a glimmer of hope with his unflappable crush on Melanie and his refusal to be anything but the person he is. Husbands, fathers, and sons make poor choices that carry with them the potential for irrevocable consequences, and yet just like in real life, they can’t stop making those choices; it’s in their nature.

And what about Isabelle? She appears in flashback and in dreams, but she is more mystery than matriarch. Yes, she was a loving mother and wife, as well as a successful war photographer, but beyond that (and beyond the suggestion of depression), little else is known about her. This is a terrific move by Trier, because it maintains a sense of wonder about who this woman was and why she meant what she meant to the men in her life. To explain more would have done a disservice to the character. In the role, Huppert is mesmerizing, and Trier knows how to capture the best of her, including a long, lingering, dialogue-free close-up of Huppert as she stares down the camera, leaving you wondering what she is thinking about and hoping you’ll have the chance to learn.

The rest of the cast is excellent, anchored by an amazing performance by relative newcomer Druid as Conrad Reed. Byrne and Eisenberg may have (combined) decades more experience than Druid, but they need him to be great more than he needs them to be great, and he delivers.

Louder Than Bombs is a wrenching tale about the criticality of communication and the collateral damage of deceit in the wake of significant loss. The film has barely a false note in it, hardly a moment when a character says or does something that demands to be challenged, and only the ending left me disappointed as ringing somewhat hollow. Still, despite the questionable destination of the tale, the journey is completely worth it.

If you saw her recent hosting stint on Saturday Night Live, you know that it’s easy to imagine an alternate universe in which Melissa McCarthy is an SNL alum, using the late night show as a springboard in very much the same way Will Ferrell, Kristen Wiig, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler have. McCarthy’s new comedic venture, The Boss, directed by her husband, Ben Falcone, feels like a movie based on one of her most popular characters from said alternate-universe SNL (in our reality, it’s a character she, Falcone and collaborator Steve Mallory created during their time with The Groundlings). It’s an unabashed star-vehicle that, while not as successful or funny as last year’s Spy, is still solid entertainment and even harbors some heartfelt moments that add some unexpected dimension to an otherwise straightforward story.

McCarthy plays Michelle Darnell, an enterprising billionaire/motivational speaker who wins at everything, stomps over everyone, and pushes away anyone who gets too close to her heart. Ethically impaired and insanely confident, Darnell is both a symbol of white privilege and female empowerment, giving McCarthy lots of room to flaunt her gift of gab and sling inventive vulgarities like only she can (the movie’s R rating is essential). One minute she’s asking her dutiful assistant Claire (Kristen Bell) to apply whitener to her teeth, a plastic contraption holding her mouth open so wide she looks like the Predator; the next, she’s demanding her helicopter pilot remove his shirt as they fly off into the night sky. Darnell is McCarthy’s critique on rich, greedy people and it’s really funny for the most part though some jokes (like a recurring one involving her bullying a young girl for not being effeminate enough) fall absolutely flat. Overall, it’s a sharp performance with some hit-or-miss material, which is common for movies of The Boss‘ ilk.

The story starts with a montage origin story, showing how Michelle grew up an orphan, suffering rejection after rejection as she struggled to find a home and a family. Eventually, she gives up and adopts a one-versus-all attitude, becoming a cutthroat, take-no-prisoners, turtleneck-wearing finance mogul. One of her victims on her rise to the top was ex-lover and fellow big-business bastard Renault (Peter Dinklage), who’s since dedicated his career to stealing and piggybacking on Michelle’s success (though he still has a burning passion for her “wonderful body”). Renault is presented with the perfect opportunity to strike Michelle down when she’s arrested for a white-collar crime that lands her in rich-person jail for a while (inmate tennis court and all) and results in the government seizing all of her assets and belongings.

The only person Michelle can turn to is Claire, who’s hesitant to take her former, tactless, self-obsessed boss in from off the street. Her apartment is cramped as it is, but Claire’s daughter Rachel (Ella Anderson, cute as a button and full of potential) convinces her to lend a helping hand. From there, a family drama develops, with Michelle building a Girl Scout-adjacent brownie-selling empire for Rachel and her friends; everything goes swimmingly until Claire and Rachel start to feel like a family, prompting Michelle to run away scared and sell the company to the slimy Renault. It’s as contrived a plot as any, but McCarthy makes it work with a tearful scene that sees Michelle admit to her deepest faults. In a movie full of absurdist, in-your-face humor (in an Anchorman-inspired fight scene, McCarthy clotheslines a little girl in slo-mo), this admission of guilt actually feels real, almost jarringly so. The rest of the chosen-family drama that plays out isn’t nearly as genuine, though, which is a big problem considering that the story essentially hinges on the relationship between the three leading women.

The crudeness of the comedy won’t be for everyone, but I took a fair measure of enjoyment in watching a Girl Scout gang war break out in a quiet, posh neighborhood. Screwball physical comedy is well within McCarthy’s wheelhouse, and she goes for it big-time, from getting pancaked by a faulty sofabed to selling the classic fall-down-the-stairs. Perhaps the film’s biggest feather in its cap is that it passes the Bechdel test with flying colors—this is a movie driven by women, with men existing only on the periphery, which is always refreshing in the male-dominated Hollywood landscape. McCarthy’s been better in other projects, but The Boss is nonetheless a crudely entertaining studio comedy and a solid showcase of the surging actor’s many talents.

Few filmmakers can put together a hangout movie like Richard Linklater has, and his crowning achievement in that realm is, to this day, 1993’s high school cult classic Dazed and Confused. The movie’s trailer recommended you “watch it with a bud,” but most of us who’ve seen it know that there’s no need; Linklater’s wonderfully funny, charismatic, super cool characters are all the company you could ever want.

Billed as the “spiritual sequel” to Dazed and Confused, Linklater’s latest, Everybody Wants Some, follows its predecessor’s formula to great success, its director’s tools now several times sharper than before. The two films share a general locale with both taking place in Southeast Texas, but while Dazed followed its characters on the last day of high school in the ’70s, the new film takes us to the early ’80s, following a fictional university’s baseball team as they shack up and party on over the long weekend before the start of the fall semester.

Bromance and romance overflow as we watch the boys get acquainted with each other and with the pretty girls scattered around their little college town. Our in is Jake (Blake Jenner), a chipper freshman who’s joining the team as pitcher. When he arrives at the semi-decrepit campus house designated for the team, he’s met with a mixed reaction: the older players don’t take kindly to pitchers, while Jake’s fellow wide-eyed newbies have no problem palling around. The common denominator is the team’s passion for partying, and party they do. By day, they laze about, smoke pot, sit in circles and space out to psychedelic rock records; by night, they’re tearing it up at local clubs and trashing their already-crumbling abode beyond recognition with all-night ragers.

While this may sound like a re-up of Animal House, the film actually skews more toward the arthouse, with Linklater threading some unexpected poignancy underneath all of the (incredibly funny, entertaining) shenanigans. Jake’s more than happy to partake in all the meathead madness, but as we learn more about where he’s from and the people he used to hang out with, it becomes clear that he’s a bit smarter and more compassionate than the lovable lugs he’s bunking up with. Jake’s full personality is brought out when he meets Beverly (Zoey Deutch), a theater major with the proverbial key to his heart. She has a way of stopping him dead in his tracks, and their hot August romance is a showstopper in itself; Jenner and Deutch are that rare onscreen couple who are so easy with each other that you suspect their romance may spill over into the real world.

Enough can’t be said about the rest of the feathery-haired cast as well. Square-jawed Tyler Hoechlin plays team captain McReynolds, whose violent competitive streak is at first repugnant, though his die-hard dedication to the team makes him more endearing as the weekend rolls on. Each of the dozen-or-so housemates has a similar, gradual development to their character that’s facilitated by both the memorable performances and Linklater’s uncanny dialogue, which sounds so natural it’s staggering to learn that absolutely none of it is ad-libbed. Some of the movie’s highlights involve the guys just lounging around, saying stupid stuff. It’s easy, simple viewing on one level, but the artistry lies in the affection that grows for the characters as we spend time with them.

Everyone will walk out of this movie with a favorite character, and the fact that (at my screening, at least) they varied wildly speaks to how great they are. There’s Finn (Glen Powell), the faux-intellectual ladies man; Dale (J. Quinton Johnson), the cool-as-a-cucumber, cultured team veteran; Willoughby (Wyatt Russell), the golden-haired, guru-like stoner with a secret; Beuter (Will Brittain), the cowboy outsider with a needy girlfriend back home. The list goes on, and every one of them is fantastic and hilarious. My favorite is Plummer (Temple Baker), a secondary character who nonetheless makes a big impression with his sleepy-dumb-guy appeal. I had a friend just like him in college (that’s a line you’ll hear a lot of people say walking out of the theater). This was actually Baker’s first acting role, but Linklater’s casting instincts are ridiculously good at this point in his career. The chemistry between the cast members is like butter, which is and always will be the key to hangout movies.

One of the most extraordinary things about Boyhood is that it doesn’t have any sort of forced dramatic agenda. It’s a quality Everybody Wants Some!! shares; there are no big fist fights, shocking betrayals or tearful breakup scenes to be found. There’s emotion running throughout, but it all flows and arises organically, which takes away a lot of the anxiety we’re used to swallowing in coming-of-age tales. This is easy viewing through and through, though that’s not to say it’s shallow. It’s far from it, in fact; living with Linklater’s characters as they explore life, unsupervised, without inhibition, engages the heart and takes you back to a freewheeling, optimistic state of mind and body that many of us let go of a long time ago.

Few documentaries open as dramatically as Omo Child: The River and the Bush. Headlights pierce the dead of night somewhere in Southwest Ethiopia, a jeep pulls up at a settlement, and a man in Western-style clothing gets out. He is led into the darkness to another man, dressed in tribal gear, who is cradling a tiny baby. “He found her in the bush.” someone explains. “Is she alive?” someone else asks. The answer is obvious.

John Rowe’s gripping documentary introduces us to the Kara tribe of the Omo valley. They live off the land in a remote part of the country, their elders strikingly decorating their bodies with white markings. Like many indigenous tribes living in isolated parts of the world, the Kara are a deeply superstitious people, and believe that children can be born with a curse that will threaten their very existence. For generations, these cursed Mingi children have been killed by the women of the tribe, by strangulation, drowning, or leaving them in the bush for wild animals to take care of.

Our protagonist is Lale Labuko, a well-spoken and pleasant-featured young tribesman. His father stood up against the village elders to send him for some new fangled “education”, only recently introduced to the tribe by visiting missionaries. On his return, Lale discovered the truth about the taboo Mingi killings, which claimed his two older sisters as victims. He set out to save Mingi children from certain death by adopting them as his own, bringing them up far away from his ancestral home, and eventually challenging the Kara elders to bringing the barbaric tradition to an end.

Rowe and his intrepid crew filmed over a period of five years, and the documentary works best when dealing with the rhythms of tribal life. He has a real photographer’s eye for both the landscape and the people, and his images are particularly eloquent when focusing on the hard-worn faces of the elders and their women folk, many of whom have lost children to the Mingi curse.

The director is less confident dealing with narrative and the pacing of Omo Child drags because of it. This could be because our modern-day expectations of documentary filmmaking, and the material at Rowe’s disposal in such a challenging shooting location. So many documentaries today are a montage of footage from various sources, from CCTV to smartphones, giving them a sense of urgency and spontaneity that old skool documentaries rarely had. Perhaps by necessity, Rowe has to rely on straight up testimony to tell the tale. There’s plenty of gorgeous landscape shots interspersed with talking heads giving their account. The endless talking heads have the effect of slowing a riveting tale down, and perhaps a more experienced filmmaker may have found ways to show rather than tell. The result sometimes feels a bit National Geographicky.

Still, the retro style of the filmmaking doesn’t hamper the overall punch of the documentary. This is the story of one man who had the courage to challenge the accepted wisdom of his society, dealing with death threats and succeeding in bringing about a change. The film won the Ethos Jury Prize at this year’s Social Impact Media Awards.

Rowe sensibly allows the elders to voice some opinion. They are wistful about the modernization of their culture. One woman tells how traditionally the tribe would wear animal skins, but the kids just want to wear Western attire. Despite their resistance to the modern world, traces of modernity are found—some elders sport bucket hats like those favoured by Oasis and Ocean Colour Scene in their Britpop heyday; guns look even more brutal and deadly when handled by a half-naked tribesman.

The most shocking testimony is from an older woman who unapologetically admits to murdering twelve children without any remorse. Rowe encourages some empathy with the elder’s feelings—Omo Child is also a portrait of a community in transition, and treats their deep-rooted superstitions with respect.

Ritualized infanticide may be shocking to our sensibilities, but the film allows you to understand that to the elder’s sensibilities it would seem crazy not to kill these children when a curse is potentially hanging over the community. As Lale’s crusade gathers pace, one elder talks about letting the Mingi kids live with the air of incredulity some Westerners adopt when speaking about Political Correctness Gone Mad.

Despite the harrowing subject matter, Omo Child is an uplifting film. It enthusiastically demonstrates how one person can make a huge difference, and Lale Labuko’s fearless endeavours make it easy to overlook that Omo Child sometimes resembles an extended showreel for his organization. Beyond his exceptional work saving children’s lives in Ethiopia, his story also offers some hope to us all in our era of fear and intolerance.

A collision at the intersection of tragedy and addiction can leave countless emotional fragments strewn across life’s road. Decisions already handicapped by the perpetual specter of compulsive demons become further clouded by the blinding pain of raw emotion brought on by an unthinkable happening. Eventually, the consequences of the initial collision produce decisions that create consequences of their own, until life becomes nothing more than a spiraling series of missteps taken in an attempt to correct each previous misstep. Borealis, a comedy-sprinkled drama from writer Jonas Chernick and director Sean Garrity, looks at the victim of one such collision, a man whose years-long addiction and years-old tragedy have put him in a position to make a series of increasingly poor choices that not only threaten his safety, but the safety of his 15-year-old daughter.

That man is Jonah (screenwriter Chernick), his addiction is gambling, and the tragedy that befell him was the death of his wife and mother to their only child, Aurora (Joey King). After years of emotionally-charged bad decisions, Jonah finds himself in deep debt to Tubby (Kevin Pollak). The bad news about Tubby is he works for a loan shark. The worse news is that Tubby and Jonah go back to when they were kids, so Tubby finds a soft spot when Jonah wants to borrow money to place a bet. One cry of “all-in” later Jonah is $100,000 in the red.

Jonah’s day gets worse. Not long after playing the biggest losing hand of his life, his daughter’s eye doctor tells him that her eyesight, which has already been riddled with disease, has grown so bad that she will be completely blind in weeks. Unable to break the devastating medical news to the daughter he already has a fractured relationship with, and unable to meet the demands of Tubby and his hired muscle Brick (Clé Bennett), Jonah drags his reluctant little girl on a road trip to see the Northern Lights—partly to give her a fleeting glimpse of something he considers to be indescribably beautiful, and partly to avoid the financially painful inevitability.

For a 95-minute drama with only three primary players and three supporting players, Borealis attempts to do a lot. This is a blessing for the film. It provides a wide open space for its considerable talent to put on display a litany of emotions and memories, plus it affords opportunities for the story to avoid cliché. But the film’s “don’t just swing for the fences, swing for the parking lot” approach is inevitably its curse, as the supersaturation of backstories, plot lines, ideas, and character motivations become more than the filmmakers can handle.

The core of the story is wonderful. This father and daughter—a fractured pair as a result of mom’s passing, yet also individually broken by addiction and disease—are thrust into a unique circumstance. They are being chased as a result of one’s flaw while simultaneously chasing the clock as a result of the other’s flaw. This alone is fertile ground for emotional exploration, and adding an interesting circumstance to the mother’s death makes it even more compelling.

But that circumstance—or rather, the ripple effect from it—is never examined below surface-level. Clearly Jonah (and most likely Aurora) has been affected by this loss, and surely the loss has influenced the survivors’ behavior and contributed to the distance between them, but it is only presented to either generate pity or take a shortcut to an emotional goal; it’s never presented as a real catalyst for dysfunctional behavior.

Everything else in the film suffers from this same problem. It isn’t a case of superficiality so much as it’s a case of underdevelopment. Things like Jonah’s gambling and Aurora’s vision loss—real meaty topics—are only heavy character traits and high-level cause-and-effect cases. Other things like the childhood relationship between Tubby and Jonah, and the adult relationship between Jonah and his current flame Kyla (Emily Hampshire), are presented like early concept musings, not fully developed relationships. What remains after all of these missed chances is another road picture, a film about getting from Point A to Point Z, with stops at B through Y along the way.

It’s frustrating because these ideas are terrific as individual notions and as a creative collective. They’re also perfectly enjoyable presented as they are, but they are ultimately unsatisfying.

There are, though, some very satisfying parts of this film, led by great performances. Chernick shines as the father with all the wrong answers and the weight of the world—a world he helped create, both as a father and a gambler—on his shoulders. King is marvelous as the teen who is too angry with her father to help mend their relationship and too proud to let her deteriorating eye condition stop her from doing what she wants. And Pollak delivers the goods as the hard-ass with the soft spot.

The humor sprinkled throughout is genuinely funny, even if it doesn’t quite fit. Instead of providing a respite from the drama, the humor actually undercuts it. It’s an example of one more thing the filmmakers attempt to stuff into a picture that is already jammed with so much concept. Still, funny is funny.

There’s a lot to admire about Borealis, but the film sags under the weight of its own ambition, loading up on many solid concepts but never developing any of them thoroughly enough to do the film a greater good. Still, Borealis is very much worth seeking out, particularly for the performances by Chernick, King, and Pollak.

This review was originally published on October 7, 2015 as part of our coverage of the Vancouver International Film Festival.

I’m hard-pressed to think of the last time something of historical significance happened and there wasn’t a camera around to record the event. I don’t mean a news camera; I mean the kind of camera anyone might have in their pocket at any given moment. The advent of video technology on mobile phones has created a culture where anything that happens can be recorded at a moment’s notice and distributed globally via social media. It’s not hard to recall the days when personal video cameras weren’t as readily available, or when they were the stuff of home movies, weddings, corporate training videos, and sex tapes. It wasn’t too long before that, though, video cameras weren’t even an option for personal use. Here Come the Videofreex, a documentary from co-directors Jon Nealon and Jenny Raskin, looks at the genesis of video cameras for personal use, and how two early owners of video equipment started something of a media revolution.

The film opens with a harrowing scene: a present-day team of gloved experts pores over boxes of videotapes that have fallen victim to mold. In some cases, spooled tape is sticking to itself, creating a sense of urgency that must be restrained for the safety of the tape. This brief scene is followed by title cards that offer all the prologue the documentary needs:

In 1968, Sony introduced the CV-2400 PortaPak, the first portable video camera. For the first time, it was possible to record picture and sound and play it back right away.

The story moves to 1969, when David Cort and Parry Teasdale, strangers who both acquired video cameras, met by chance at Woodstock, where both were more interested in filming everything going on except the music. A friendship was forged, a partnership began, and a name was coined. Before long, the duo would recruit eight others, land a gig with CBS, lose that gig with CBS, and go on to record seminal moments and legendary figures in US history.

Here Come the Videofreex, presented chronologically for the most part, is really a tale of two histories. The first history is that of the group itself. In addition to Cort and Teasdale, members included Skip Blumberg, Nancy Cain, Bart Friedman, Davidson Gigliotti, Chuck Kennedy, Mary Curtis Ratcliff, Carol Vontobel, and Ann Woodward. Each person had their own specialty, from editing to accounting, and each was treated as an equal member (that said, like any team, this one had its all-stars and its role-players, and those designations are implied here).

The second history is what the group recorded. Moments of modern US history where the Videofreex were present include discussions with Abbie Hoffman during the Trial of the Chicago Eight, an interview with soon-to-be-slain Black Panther Fred Hampton, a Women’s Strike for Equality, Anti-War Protests, and the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami. This treasure-trove of footage is not just history in the making, it’s history in the raw. In today’s media, between our cameras-are-everywhere existence and the slick packaging we are used to being fed from news outlets and websites, it’s easy to forget what it feels like to organically witness history because we’re so busy consuming what we’re being fed. This film is a great reminder of that feeling. The footage, presented in its original 4:3 aspect ratio, is slick in its native, almost sterile, black-and-white images. It’s also very effective that the present-day interviews with the talking-head surviving members of the Videofreex, while in color, are also in presented in 4:3.

But what the film is flush with in terms of footage, it lacks in engaging narrative. While there is plenty of history to be had, it all has a museum piece feel to it, as if the film isn’t really teaching anything, but rather putting everything on display to be admired. It’s history being shown, not history being shared. The filmmakers also seem to be so enamored by the footage they have, they think any footage is good footage. Nealon and Raskin use many clips that are nothing more than the Videofreex recording themselves and/or each other. It’s cute at first, but soon that footage takes on the feel of any other home videos found in most households in the 1980s.

As their tale winds to a close, the Videofreex again find themselves ahead of the new media curve. Fed up with New York and their inability to distribute their content, they move to a large farmhouse in the Catskills. It’s there that they curry favor with the suspicious locals by creating what will eventually be known as Cable Access Television. They even fancy themselves pirates of the airwaves, and while technically they are, it’s not as sexy as it sounds. The locals eat it up, but to watch the locals create and record cable access programming tests the patience more than actually watching cable access programming.

Here Come the Videofreex succeeds in telling a tale of how a two-person partnership became a ten-person collective, and how their efforts simultaneously made history and made them historians. The film also shows how anyone rolling video today, whether by camera or cameraphone, stands on the shoulders of that collective. It’s an important documentary about an important point in the timeline of American media and technology, even though its presentation struggles to connect with the viewer.

Here Come the Videofreex opens April 6th at The Royal Cinema in Toronto, Ontario.

Jean-Marc Vallée enjoys playing heartstrings. He’s drawn to more irreverent forms of playing them but his end goals are clear, and what worked so well in Dallas Buyers Club and Wild—using broken and imperfect people to explore physical and emotional journeys—breaks down Demolition. The flawed protagonist in this case-study in grief is Davis Mitchell, whose emotional intelligence is so low it borders on sociopathic, proven by the (literally) destructive way he chooses to deal with the sudden death of his wife. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Mitchell as well as can be expected for such an irrational character, and Vallée’s introspective style pushes things as far as it can in building real feelings toward the story. It’s Bryan Sipe’s screenplay (his first major feature) that appears to be at fault, shoving as many emotionally explosive elements as possible into one script and only hinting at the sort of saving grace that would allow audiences to forgive the sentimental melodrama capping off the film.

Davis Mitchell is reminiscent of American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman in more ways than just his emotional numbness. Clean-shaven, well-groomed, and career-driven, the house he and his young wife Julia (Heather Lind) share is all glass and metal—antiseptic like he is. During an argument while driving one day he and his wife are hit by a truck and Julia dies at the hospital while Davis escapes without a scratch. Shortly after receiving the news of her death, Davis attempts to buy some M&Ms from a vending machine and, when the package sticks in the machine, he takes down the vending machine company’s info.

With keen editing, Davis’ experience of the details of his wife’s death focuses more on everyone else’s emotions surrounding him, while he remains undisturbed. He escapes during the funeral reception to write a letter to the vending company, describing in awkward detail the circumstances surrounding his attempt to buy M&Ms. It feels distinctly unnatural, as nothing of Davis’ nature suggests he’d care much either way at having gotten the candy or not, but we’re meant to understand this is his way of emoting.

After returning to work as an investment banker soon after Julia’s death, Davis’ father-in-law Phil (Chris Cooper), who is also his boss, encourages him to take some time off and deconstruct his feelings. Davis decides to take him at his word, and though he doesn’t immediately take time off work, he does start taking apart almost anything that annoys him or causes him to wonder. This includes a bathroom stall, his refrigerator, an espresso machine, and his work computer. This behavior, of course, leads to some forced time off, and by this point the customer service representative of the vending machine company, Karen Moreno (Naomi Watts), reaches out to Davis after becoming intrigued by his letters.

What follows is a hard to swallow friendship between the privileged Davis and Karen, a low-income single mother dating her boss and a marijuana—or cannabis, as she prefers to call it—user. While much of what happens on-screen is difficult to believe, such as Davis joining a construction crew to help destroy a house just for a reason to use a sledgehammer, his relationship with Karen and her son Chris (Judah Lewis) feels the most contrived. As if unable to pick a theme, the film slips into piling one high drama scenario onto the next, but through the filter of Davis’s inability to feel anything. If emotional appropriation is a thing, this movie embodies it.

How much more can a rich white man take from the world just to try and elicit some sense of grief for his perfectly awesome dead wife? As Davis bitches to the void through his letters to Karen (which continue, by the way, even after he knows she’s reading them, like some real-life Facebook status update), destroys millions of dollars of material possessions many people would be thrilled to own, and then forces his sorry self into the lives of poorer and more generous people than himself all while ignoring his own family’s attempts to show him love, it gets harder and harder to feel any empathy for Davis. It’s a case study in indulgent and privileged grieving.

Vallée is ever ambitious in exploring the nuances of the human condition and, as usual, he creates a film that looks and sounds beautiful. He’s an expert at incorporating music, even if Heart’s “Crazy On You” doesn’t fit here as smoothly as he might think. I find obvious fault with Gyllenhaal’s character but it’s not to do with his performance. If given the chance to express a more complicated range of emotion, it would have been easier to be endeared to Demolition. Watts is likable but her character is a washrag for Davis to wipe his face on. But the standout of the film is Judah Lewis, who is the only one capable of breaking hearts as a teenager trying to both find and be himself. Lewis’ character is the only one portraying emotions that make some sort of sense: teen angst, passion, and uncertainty. If only the film was about him.

There’s something off with Darling, Mickey Keating’s latest horror movie (his second in 2015, after unveiling Pod at SXSW). Shooting in black-and-white on a presumably low budget (given its single location and glossy digital sheen), Keating’s film is a combination of familiar elements from psychological horror that never feels genuine in its execution save for the set-up: a young woman (Lauren Ashley Carter, referred to only as “Darling”) gets a new job as a caretaker for a large house in Manhattan, which the owner (Sean Young) claims is the oldest house in the city. But right before the homeowner leaves Darling to care for the house on her own, she also mentions two other pieces of information: the house has a reputation for being haunted, and the previous caretaker jumped from the roof to her death. Darling doesn’t seem to mind, seemingly unfazed by her new boss’ oversights.

With the owner out of the way, Darling turns into a largely one person show for Carter, who goes insane as she picks up on some strange things in the house: a room she can’t enter, a necklace with an upside-down cross, doors opening on their own, and other sorts of things that can only be attributed to unseen, sinister forces. Keating shows an awareness for traits commonly associated with austere, refined horror (rigorously composed shots, an emphasis on mood, and obfuscated character development, to name a few) but he has no idea how to properly implement them. Darling is woefully underdeveloped, with an ominous shot of some scars on her body serving as backstory, and the eventual reveal of Darling as a victim of sexual trauma is more offensive in its laziness than its insensitivity. Keating makes his protagonist nothing more than a victim succumbing to her traumatic past, and by doing so exposes his usage of sexual/physical abuse as a plot device, the sort of behaviour that should be left in the time period Darling tries to emulate.

The offensiveness of Keating’s story might not have been so transparent if everything else didn’t feel so half-baked. A five-chapter structure feels as superfluous as the different typefaces used to introduce each section, but the worst part has to be Keating’s insistence on stroboscopic effects and quick cuts throughout. What might have been an attempt to portray Darling’s fractured mental state turns into an obnoxious and annoying attempt to shock rather than scare, relying on bursts of static over Carter’s screaming face as a way to jolt viewers awake. Carter, looking like a grown-up Wednesday Addams, manages to come out of the film unscathed, doing a fine job acting unhinged while easily carrying the film along on her shoulders. But no matter how magnetic Carter’s presence is in front of the camera, it’s no escape from Keating’s asinine attempt at both a horror film and a character study.

This review was originally published on November 16, 2015 as part of our coverage of the Ithaca International Film Festival.

“I don’t need permission to do good things.” states Pastor Gennadiy Mokhnenko halfway through Steve Hoover’s absorbing, unsettling sophomore feature Almost Holy (originally titled Crocodile Gennadiy). Mokhnenko wears the collar of a clergyman, but he also devotes himself to vigilante activities, scooping drug-addicted kids off the streets of his hometown, Mariupol, Ukraine, and forcing them into rehabilitation. He’s a charismatic, outsized presence, and his self-assurance in making that statement provides the documentary with its tricky moral quandary.

Hoover’s crew follows Mokhnenko on his nocturnal raids of gruesome shooting galleries around the city. The Pastor’s nickname “Pastor Crocodile” comes from an old Soviet-era children’s show, where a friendly crocodile goes about righting wrongs and battling an evil witch. Some of the kids Mokhnenko encounters with track marks on their arms are as young as ten-years-old. These kids have fallen through the cracks of society and belong to broken families with parents who themselves are junkies or alcoholics. Simply put, there’s no-one around to help them. There’s no state scheme to aid their plight, and the police are shockingly apathetic. The situation creates a space for someone like the Pastor, operating in grey areas of the law. Once in his care, he adopts some of them, and under his patronage, many will go on to lead healthy, normal lives. Others will leave or escape back to the “freedom” of the streets.

Hoover weaves together footage to create a portrait of this self-styled saviour. Hoover eschews a straight narrative by using a fragmented series of vignettes, skipping back and forth through time. With the aid of cinematographer John Pope and utilizing a discordant score of industrial ambience, Hoover creates an atmosphere of hallucinatory dissociation, presenting the Ukraine as a post-Communist dystopia. News footage and soundbites chronicling the country’s troubled recent history put the events in some context, Mokhnenko’s rescued souls representing smaller, more personal dramas set against a backdrop of national identity crisis.

Mokhnenko is a person of boundless energy and self-confidence. He has set up 40 rehabilitation centres under the banner “Pilgrim Republic”. Mokhnenko describes feeling like Superman when he first saved someone’s life, working as a firefighter in his younger years. It’s interesting that he reaches for the Man of Steel comparison, when his methods are closer to those of Batman. Dressed all in black, with a long coat flapping round him like a cape and an oversized crucifix on his chest like an emblem, he’s a self-modelled dark knight, as comfortable roughing up sex offenders as he is making insinuating threats to pharmacies supplying under-the-counter drugs to kids.

Hoover presents many of the episodes in stark verite style, showing the harrowing reality of the drug addict’s surroundings. One especially squalid encounter involves a mentally ill, deaf and dumb woman kept in a shed by an older man, who routinely sexually abuses her. Distraught and discombobulated, the woman can’t even remember or articulate what became of her baby, a mystery that Pastor Crocodile later resolves. As self-cast judge and jury in the cases Mokhnenko involves himself in, he decides that she should be taken into psychiatric care, and cooks up a bogus statement to make sure the hospital accepts her admission.

While Hoover describes the film as a portrait, the most significant problem with Almost Holy is a lack of perspective. It becomes obvious that the director is enamoured by Mokhnenko’s outsized personality when he treats him like a movie star, filming him swim in slow motion and working out at the gym. At times it feels a little like hero-worship, showing the Pastor as an inspirational speaker, a badass on the streets, a political firebrand, and a father to his extended family of lost boys.

On the flip side, Hoover often lights the pastor from behind or obscures his face with shadow, making him look like a gangster. Hoover acknowledges the shady side of the pastor’s activities, without offering any opinion of his own. These conflicted directorial choices make it a little difficult to decide what the Hoover’s actual stance is, and testimonies from other people in the story would give us a more rounded portrait of the man. Is the pastor motivated by fame, power and self-interest, as his critics suggest, or moved to help these people by a genuine sense of altruism? Is he playing tough for the cameras, or his he toning down his methods because a camera is present? What do his rescuee’s really feel about the pastor’s methods, once their past the shock of being virtually abducted by him?

“I don’t need permission to do good things.” Pastor Crocodile states, and in his environment that statement is at least partially true. It seems that he has transcended the law and is doing whatever he feels is best. The difficulty is that in doing his good deeds, he takes the voiceless from one dire situation and puts them in another where once again their feelings or opinions are disregarded. The question hanging over the whole piece is this—Gennadiy Mokhnenko is saving these people from themselves with his questionable methods, but should he? In many cases shown here, he’s rescuing them against their will.

Almost Holy is a handsomely shot documentary (though not surprisingly considering Terrence Malick as an executive producer) and some segments are as well-crafted as a prestige fiction film. With a charismatic and enigmatic central figure like the Pastor Crocodile, it should go down well with discerning arthouse audiences, and offers plenty to debate.

Pandemic is exactly what it says it is. There is no deceptive setup, no mind-altering plot twist, and no moment where the story’s world suddenly expands to encompass something much more grand and complex. Director John Suits’ infection thriller has none of the disease politics of Contagion or the thematic underpinnings of Blindness. It skews much closer to the raw thrills of something like [REC], sticking to a simple, survival plot, relying on its POV gimmick (the film is shot almost entirely through cameras mounted on the characters’ hazmat suits) and gore money shots for entertainment value. This is an unpretentious B-movie executed with enough competence to keep it out of the Syfy Channel’s late night rotation, but that doesn’t mean it’s particularly compelling.

Lauren (Rachel Nichols) is newly stationed at a compound that serves as a quarantine zone for survivors of an outbreak that has swept across the planet in the near future. The origins of the disease are kept relatively vague, but we’re given plenty of hints at the condition of the outside world through a dose of exposition that opens the film. Our protagonist gets assigned as a doctor to a four-person squad. Their mission is to maneuver a bus across a ravaged Los Angeles to a school, where they must gather any survivors hiding there and pick up whatever supplies they might find. As you might expect, the trip doesn’t exactly go as planned, and the team finds itself stranded amongst diseased monsters.

Standing in the way of the main characters’ survival are the infected hordes. They’re never referred to as “zombies” but they might as well be, if not for their intelligence. There are multiple levels of the virus’ degradation, and depending on where someone falls on that scale, they may have the ability to set traps and use tools, or they may possess superhuman strength and exist in an animalistic, heightened state of awareness. Either way, they’re out to kill anything that moves.

The environment of Pandemic is a post-apocalyptic cityscape that’s all too familiar. Short drive-by montages show signs of a severe societal upheaval; bodies hang from a towering crane, disenfranchised citizens shuffle along the sidewalks, and the walls are covered with ominous messages written in graffiti. The film’s world is grimy and squalid, but the up-close and personal nature of the POV camerawork does little to sell viewers on its authenticity. Clearly showing the limits of its low budget, the key locations are confined to empty interiors and small portions of isolated side streets. The idea of a larger city, teeming with dangers, existing beyond the boundaries of these secluded spaces is almost never grasped with any tangibility, and this is a major blow to the sense of immersion that Pandemic tries to evoke.

When it comes to the compact unit of protagonists, the details aren’t any more inspired. The armed bodyguard of the group (Mekhi Phifer) is gruff and authoritative, full of big talk and more than capable of backing it up with action. He criticizes Lauren for her dangerous indecisiveness and knocks heads with the team’s driver (Alfie Allen), a scrappy ex-con who manufactures a snarky line or hotheaded retort for every occasion. Completing the group of four is a navigator named Denise (Missi Pyle), a warmer presence in comparison to the other two who befriends Lauren. Phony banter between team members is consistent throughout, and the chemistry shared by the actors is nothing more than superficial.

Screenwriter Dustin T. Benson tries to fill out these one-dimensional characters with a series of emotionally contrived backstories, giving almost everyone a missing or dead loved one. The undercurrents of self-doubt and atonement give some weight to the characters’ predicaments, but these redemptive arcs are so tired it’s hard to care about how they play out. As with the setting, these conflicts are far from new, and neither the middling direction nor the serviceable performances are enough to elevate the familiarity to something more nuanced.

However, Pandemic is a film with schlocky roots and instincts, taking more pleasure in its cheesy-looking creatures and bloody encounters than in its tacked on human drama. But a mix of dark settings and shaky POV cinematography makes it difficult to see every moment of action. Only one sequence—which transforms a locker room into a gory obstacle course—stands out as especially riveting. But it’s only one scene in a long string of dull skirmishes and numbingly repetitive jump scares.

When looking for outbreak thrillers, there are a lot of films worse than Pandemic, but this is hardly prime material. The film offers nothing new besides its POV visuals perspective, and even that aspect isn’t terribly memorable. Poor effects and mediocre sound design round out what amounts to a bland, derivative experience.

As a small-scale Sundance character drama, writer-director Matt Sobel’s debut feature defies a handful of natural expectations. In its first act, Take Me to the River follows Ryder (Logan Miller), an openly gay California teen who wants to come out to his extended family during a visit to their farm in Nebraska. But his mother (Robin Weigert) and father (Richard Schiff) are considerably nervous about the consequences that would manifest if their conservative relatives were to learn the truth about Ryder’s sexuality. Sobel often goes out of his way to illustrate the level of social ineptitude that permeates the family. One blind relative, maybe an aunt, actually touches Ryder’s leg when she hears from others about the length of his shorts. In addition to this, Ryder is asked about girls and whether he has a girlfriend on multiple occasions. This initial conflict allows viewers to sympathize with Ryder quickly, but it doesn’t say anything new about what it’s like to be gay in America. It’s a good thing Sobel isn’t done setting up his story.

It’s perhaps worth noting that, while the teenage and adult members of Ryder’s extended family sneer at his queer appearance, the kids seem to adore it. One of his nieces, Molly (Ursula Parker), is particularly drawn to him and convinces her redneck dad Keith (Josh Hamilton) to allow them to search a nearby barn for birds’ nests. But something happens in the barn that results in Molly tearing back toward the gathered family with a bloodstain near her crotch. The accusations from her father are instantaneous and damning: Ryder is a pervert who has, in one way or another, assaulted and injured his daughter. The mysterious cause of the bloodstain could be anything from a fall to a cut to a case of premature menstruation, but Sobel avoids getting to the bottom of this enigmatic rising action. In this crucial early moment, and in many thereafter, Sobel insists on employing cinema’s eternally overvalued subterfuge: ambiguity.

Because key developments are so murkily communicated, the otherwise straightforward world of Take Me to the River often registers as surreal and dreamlike. This enhances the film aesthetically but cripples it narratively. Sobel doesn’t venture far enough into the skeletons in the closets of the quarreling relatives to properly grasp the tension boiling under nearly every scene. The framework of his story suggests an exploration of conflicting American mindsets, yet the actions of the characters are left shrouded in mystery when they could be used to reveal much more about what’s actually going on.

Misplaced obscurity aside, Sobel does do an impressive job of enhancing individual scenes. Whatever’s going on, there’s usually something engaging about the frame. Sobel will often inject queer imagery into the film’s redneck-laden Nebraska landscape. One shot, for example, depicts Ryder and one of his nieces riding small horses over a hill blanketed entirely by shimmering yellow flowers. Keeping in mind that Ryder’s nieces are the only members of his extended family with speaking roles who accept him, it’s almost as though the shot is conveying their environment’s satisfaction at being momentarily occupied only by people who accept each other.

More of what glues Sobel’s debut together is the strength of his cast. Robin Weigert is a standout as Ryder’s mother, embodying a woman clinging to a sliver of resolve to protect her son with deft skill. Logan Miller is also quite convincing in the central role. But the most impressive work might come from Ursula Parker, who seems to fully grasp the implications of her role in the film and uses that level of understanding to her advantage. Her ability to grasp complex concepts and then apply them to her character is astonishing considering she can’t be more than twelve or thirteen. Take Me to the River proves Sobel is a talented director, one who knows how to frame a shot so it’s visually explorable. If he would’ve been able to dig deeper into key plot elements rather than expecting the audience to fill in the gaps for him, he would’ve had quite the noteworthy first feature.

During a time when most mainstream movies seem to run around thirty minutes too long, it’s refreshing to see features that can pack a full story into a brisk running time. Ted Fendt’s feature debut Short Stay clocks in at just over sixty minutes, and still manages to tell a complete—albeit somewhat lackadaisical—narrative about a generic guy living a generic life.

Similar to Kevin Smith’s famous debut Clerks, Short Stay is a slice-of-life character study about Mike (Mike MacCherone), a perpetually bored twentysomething whose job at a local pizzeria isn’t providing him with the excitement he desires out of life. When a friend of a friend offers him a job giving tours of Philadelphia, Mike reluctantly moves out of his Jersey apartment and takes the job, thus beginning a new chapter in his mundane life. Of course, the move doesn’t change the man’s outlook on life, and being a timid loser frequently results in Mike being walked all over by coworkers, roommates, and potential love interests. The feel-good movie of 2016 this certainly is not, but it’s still a film worth watching.

One of the more interesting plot points in the film revolves around Mike’s attraction to a girl who assures him that she’s in a relationship but values his friendship. It doesn’t take a sociologist to figure out exactly what’s going to happen next, and while the film doesn’t offer any significant swerves on that end, watching the whole uncomfortable disaster play out is quite entertaining. Mike’s troubles with the ladies are somewhat relatable, but mostly just sad. The scenes in which the poor bastard tries to overcome the problems in his love life evoke secondhand embarrassment in ways that very few films can.

It’s all photographed on grainy 35mm, mirroring the haziness of Mike’s life. Opting for a documentary-like aesthetic, Fendt and cinematographer Sage Einarsen seem determined to capture aspects of real life, and they frequently do so. Reminiscent of mumblecore films from the mid-2000s, Short Stay is comprised of long takes, what appears to be improvised dialogue, and consistent naturalism. There are no action-packed set pieces or larger than life plot points but the film still entertains in spite of this.

Some members of the supporting cast aren’t exactly convincing, delivering lines with little believability and the charisma of a wet sock. This is somewhat routine in these kinds of films, but it still detracts from the experience. Naturalism simply doesn’t work when those performing it don’t come across as natural. MacCherone, however, portrays the mousy protagonist in successful fashion. He’s a total loser, admittedly, but Mike is a generally easy guy to root for. It seems as though his entire goal in life is to not be a complete and utter failure, but he just doesn’t know how to succeed. In that regard, Fendt’s feature debut is thoroughly depressing, but the tone is actually comedic. There aren’t any “jokes,” per say, but the strange manner in which Mike handles all of his problems is laughable in the right way.

Films like Short Stay are an acquired taste, and can justifiably be viewed as both brilliant and lazy, depending on individual perspective. Evoking shades of the early works of Andrew Bujalski, Joe Swanberg, and the Duplass Brothers, there should be little doubt as to what kind of cinematic experience Short Stay provides. The film does exactly what it sets out to do, and that’s always something to be appreciated.

In a 2004 interview with The Guardian, filmmaker and film historian Peter Bogdanovich recounted a conversation he once had with Golden Age Hollywood legend Jimmy Stewart. In the conversation, Stewart, while speaking about making movies, said, “… then what you’re doing is, you’re giving people little … tiny … pieces, of time … that they never forget.” It’s a great quote that has stuck with me since I first read it, and I was reminded of it while watching the excellent new documentary Cameraperson.

The film comes from director Kirsten Johnson, who has been a cinematographer on more than 40 documentaries since 2001. The pieces of time she presents are truly pieces of time from her life: dozens and dozens of cinematic moments she has shot over the years. But these are not solely excerpts from the films she’s worked on; these are clips of when she rolled film to test lighting, scout locations, discuss shots with her directors, experiment with camera angles, and even just footage of her own family she shot at home, too. Assembled in no chronological order, there are no mentions of the original films the clips are associated with. It’s an effective tactic, as it takes the focus away from “Look where this scene is from,” and moves it to, “Look at this scene.” Johnson presents the clips only with title cards to indicate the geography of the moment, and what geography it covers, globetrotting from Bosnia to Brooklyn, Gitmo to Nodaway County, MO, and everywhere around and between.

At first, the presentation seems so random. There’s an early scene of a boxer in his Brooklyn locker room, preparing for a big fight. In the next scene, a midwife aids in the delivery of twins in Nigeria. These two worlds could not be further apart geographically or thematically, and yet they aren’t necessarily ripe for direct contrast, either. Johnson leaves those scenes where they are and moves onto others, and then patterns start to emerge.

Men in Herat, Afghanistan are connected to a troupe of young ballerinas in Colorado Springs, CO, who are both connected to Johnson’s own family in Beaux Arts, WA, all by a theme of religion. This segues into the theme of how death is approached by connecting another documentarian, a spokesperson for the Syrian Film Collective, and the prosecutors of a murder trial in Jasper, TX. Many other patterns take shape in this manner as the film progresses.

The scope of it all is what’s so amazing about Cameraperson: how themes of life, death, faith, crime, childhood, parenthood, government, joy, and sorrow intersect, overlap, and intertwine across time and around the globe.

This film isn’t the work of a director who has an idea for a documentary and decides to gather new footage or mine soundbites to make what they want. This isn’t someone, for example, who wants to showcase the looming specter of governmental distrust, and in doing so shoots scenes at Guantanamo Bay, adds a Washington, DC interview between a documentarian and a Marine willing to go to jail to avoid a second tour of duty in the Middle East, and caps it off with a shot of a mysterious thumb drive being entombed in fresh cement at an undisclosed location. This is a filmmaker who shot scenes at Gitmo in 2010 for one story (Laura Poitras’ The Oath), in DC in 2004 for another (Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11), and at an undisclosed location in 2014 for a third (Laura Poitras’ Citizenfour).  Johnson then combines her pinpoint eye for filmmaking with her broad eye for history to illustrate how the more things change, the more they stay the same. It’s breathtaking in both ambition and execution.

Edited with great skill by Nels Bangerter (whose work on Jason Osder’s Let the Fire Burn is must-see), Cameraperson has such a great variety of entries that everyone will surely have a favorite subject, even when that subject is taken on its own merits and not looked at as part of the greater whole. My favorite? Two, actually: the boxer and the midwife from the start of the picture. How Johnson concludes their individual stories is supercharged with raw, genuine emotion. How she connects the two tales is visionary.

Cameraperson is a dazzling example of storytelling in its purest form—being observed, not told—and every little piece of time she gives us is time well spent.

Cameraperson screens as part of New Directors/New Films in New York City. To learn more about the festival or buy tickets, visit www.newdirectors.org.

Clocking it at well over five hours in length, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s Happy Hour isn’t so much a character study as it is an entire character course. Following four women in their late thirties as they attempt to deal with their individual relationship troubles, the film is filled with relatable struggles and honest, emotional performances, but ultimately becomes a victim of its own ambitions.

Having been best friends for many years, Jun (Rira Kawamura), Akari (Sachie Tanaka), Sakurako (Hazuki Kikuchi), and Fumi (Maiko Mihara) have formed a nearly unbreakable bond together. They meet up frequently to gossip about their lives and air their grievances about their currently living situations. Having all been married at one point, their ideas about a woman’s place in a marriage differ. After Jun reveals a shocking secret about her own marriage, her friends have mixed reactions, adding a strain to their friendship.

Above all, Happy Hour is a movie about infidelity and how it affects not only those in the relationship but their acquaintances as well. Knowing that your friend is committing adultery is a tough spot to be in because it leaves a choice between loyalty to a friend and a commitment to doing what’s right. Adding to the complexity is the discovery that the infidelity involves a mutual friend, which is a major issue explored in Happy Hour. The results aren’t over-the-top or cinematic in any way. Instead, they’re deeply rooted in reality. All of the events feel as though they could happen tomorrow, which has its pros and cons as a filmmaking technique. It certainly adds to the realistic tone of the film, but it prevents the movie from being particularly exciting. Happy Hour certainly isn’t boring, but it lacks a frenetic energy.

The defining aspect of the film is the almost unheard of running time, which wouldn’t feel nearly as gratuitous if many scenes didn’t come across as unnecessary filler. As human as it is, there are a significant amount of scenes that could be trimmed down—if not eliminated completely—without the film losing any effect. One early sequence finds the protagonists attending a pseudo-spiritual workshop where they participate in borderline cult-like team-building exercises. After ten minutes, the point is made—the women’s personal problems mirror the teacher’s lessons in a Boy Meets World kind of way, albeit much more mature and existential—but the scene continues on for much longer. Hamaguchi seems determined to beat certain ideas into viewers’ brains, despite establishing them successfully in the first attempt. In a way, it seems as though he isn’t completely confident in his ability to express certain ideas, even though his ideas are quite strong.

The four leads deliver naturalistic performances that make their already empathetic characters all the more believable. Engaging in numerous, lengthy conversations about both nothing and everything, it’s almost impossible not to see aspects of your own friends in the women. They’re complex, generally likable, and extremely relatable. They discuss mundane aspects of everyday life with the same enthusiasm as more existential concepts involving their uncertain futures. Thankfully, these conversations are generally entertaining, considering the film is almost brutally dialogue-heavy. It’s not just a film with a lot of talking—it borders on being a film about talking.

At times, Happy Hour is a strenuous watch and a pretty tough sell, given the over five-hour commitment needed to experience it in full. However, if you do commit to viewing the film, the payoff is there. The characters are fully developed and fascinating, and their story arcs are engrossing in ways that few are. It lacks many of the qualifying themes to call it an “epic,” as there are no colossal set pieces or big action sequences—or action of any kind, really—but there is a strangely “big” feel to the film. It’s a heavy drama, thick with human emotion, that could benefit from being just a bit more brisk. Perhaps in the future, Hamaguchi will consider creating a similarly engaging feature that is much shorter in length.

Like Paul Bunyan, Bigfoot, and Pecos Bill, the heroes and villains of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice are more mythical than super, writing a new page in American folklore as they split the skies with each thunderous blow. Director Zack Snyder‘s approach to DC’s now timeless characters is apt—few modern myths stand taller than Batman and Superman—but, as usual, the Watchmen and Man of Steel director gets lost in the grandeur, delivering a solemn, overly studied, slog of a movie.

The super-brawl promised in the movie’s title is as spectacular as anyone could have dreamed, but before we reach the main event melee, there’s a two-hour-long preliminary bout that sees Snyder pitted in a sweaty grappling match against complex themes of ideology and theology. Spoiler: he loses. Consequently, we lose too. By the time Batman and Superman (and a few surprise guests) get all bashy-bashy, stabby-stabby, we’re bored to tears by Snyder’s glorified lecture on man v god.

Henry Cavill returns as alien do-gooder Superman, who, at the story’s outset, is the subject of worldwide debate. His city-levelling battle with General Zod (Michael Shannon) at the end of Man of Steel cost the lives of thousands, calling into question whether his actions were justified and whether his presence on earth is a benefit or detriment to the future and well-being of mankind. Some see him as a messiah; others, an omnipotent pariah who could reduce our planet to dust should we refuse to bow down.

One man who has no plans of kneeling to “the Superman” is billionaire brooder Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck). One of the buildings decimated by Superman and Zod was Wayne Enterprises, which toppled right in front of Bruce’s eyes, hundreds of his employees’ lives blinked out in what some would call “collateral damage.” It’s a tragedy that haunts Bruce almost as much as the memory of losing his parents to a mugger in that classic alleyway scene we all know so well from countless movie, comic book, and TV iterations of the Batman origin story (which Snyder mercifully zips through in the opening credits). The story picks up 18 months later, with the Bat keeping a watchful eye on the bulletproof Kryptonian as he patrols the skies, above all men and above the law.

Bruce and the rest of Superman’s detractors are given more fuel to feed their fire when more lives are lost during a rescue of his beloved Lois Lane (Amy Adams). A reactionary congressional hearing is held, calling for him to appear in court to consider the consequences and ethicality of his actions. As fear and paranoia surrounding the continue to spread, tech genius Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg) offers a solution to the world’s Superman problem in the form of Kryptonite weaponry. All he needs is to get his hands on a chunk of the extraterrestrial rock, but his political maneuverings to do so are blocked by Senator June Finch (Holly Hunter, unexpectedly one of the movie’s strongest assets). As Superman is increasingly viewed as more of a threat than a savior, however, Luthor’s scheme begins to fall more easily into place.

For what seems like ages, Snyder and writers David S. Goyer and Chris Terrio bat around big ideas like the ever-evolving nature of homeland security and, most predominantly, the fraught relationship between man and god. The movie’s got the “god” part down: Batman, Superman, and the debuting Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot, a delightfully entertaining ass-kicker) come across as all-powerful goliaths, striking the most epic superhero poses this critic has ever seen (Snyder’s signature slo-mo, while as excessively implemented as ever, lends itself to characters of this magnitude).

As for the “man” half of the “man v god” thing, the movie drops the ball with an earth-shattering thud. The story’s obsessed with outlining the principles and lofty motivations of its heroes and villains without giving us a sense of what they are like as people. We’re so drowned in doom and gloom and planet-sized moral quandaries that we have no real grasp on what these heroes are actually fighting for. Clark’s got Lois and his mother Martha (a returning Diane Lane), and Bruce has got his butler Alfred (Jeremy Irons) and the memory of his parents, but all of these side characters are presented more as plot devices and pawns rather than living, breathing, relatable people. Snyder paints in such broad strokes that the nuances and details of our world are lost in the monstrous swirl of dark, folkloric imagery and ham-fisted dialogue.

When Batman and Superman finally fight, it’s so brutal and well-staged and irresistibly geeky that, while it doesn’t make up for the disastrous bulk of the movie that preceded it, it at least wakes us up from our stupor. Things get even better when Wonder Woman arrives to help them fight the Big Bad that eventually arrives to crash the party, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t enjoying the hell out of the climactic battle. If there’s a criticism, it’s that much of the dichotomous intrigue of Batman and Superman’s comic book confrontations is lost. When the two have battled on the page, the hook is that Superman should be able to crush Batman, but the fact that Bruce Wayne is not a good person (and is willing to cheat to win) gives him an unexpected edge. In the movie, Bruce is indeed a bad person; problem is, Clark doesn’t seem to be one either. He acts decidedly un-heroic on several occasions, flexing his super powers with a smug smirk on his face as he tosses Bats around like a ragdoll.

The character work is flawed all around, but this incarnation of Lex Luthor is the most confusing of the bunch. He’s more of a lunatic manchild cut from the same cloth as classic Bat-villain The Riddler than the imposing intellectual bully we’ve seen in the past. Is that a good thing? Sometimes. Eisenberg puts on a good, charismatic performance, and his wiry frame is an interesting visual juxtaposition to the heroes’ bulky physiques. But a part of me would rather have a supervillain who’s more menacing and less of a mischievous meddler.

Batman v Superman is a bonafide letdown, but the blame doesn’t rest on the shoulders of the actors. Everyone’s game and looks great, especially Cavill and Affleck, who are both black belts in the art of chin-jutting, come-at-me-bro machismo. Adams, Lane, and Irons are invaluable as they try valiantly to ground the story in some sense of realism. But alas, the script doesn’t give them enough room to work (the movie’s 153 minutes, for goodness sake). If the aim was to offer a more mature, “serious” superhero experience than Marvel Studios’ Avengers movies, Snyder and his team overachieved; this is as cynical, depressing, and emotionally hollow a blockbuster as we’ve seen in some time, a filmic representation of the adulthood misery that’s pushed the wonder of childhood fantasies out of the hearts of crotchety old-timers everywhere. Surely we were meant to have more fun than this.

Almost as long as there has been teen angst, there have been films about teen angst. From Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause  to Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers, and including many in between and since, the teen angst film has been a moviemaking staple for six decades, offering insight into what teens go through during each film’s point in time. In most cases only the details change, as higher level themes of disaffection, identity crisis, and peer pressure have been common teen problems for generations. But those details are important, and can drive just how good a film is.

Kill Me Please is set in an affluent section of present-day Rio de Janeiro, where a clique of bored teenage girls finds titillation in a series of murders—murders that happen to be of other teenage girls. Facts are at a minimum but that doesn’t stop the rumor mill from grinding out plenty to quench their morbid fascination. As the body count rises, 15-year-old Bia’s (Valentina Herszage) obsession with the crimes and their victims grows too. Teens are still teens, though, and there is plenty else for them to cope with as they go about their daily high school lives.

The opening scene of Kill Me Please is terrific, showcasing the harrowing demise of a teenage girl whose only crime was walking home alone at night. Panic leads to pursuit, which leads to the girl’s final, fearful gaze into the camera and her piercing, dying screams. Neither the killer nor the girl’s blood is ever shown. The sequence is all atmosphere and adrenaline, recalling the openings of slasher flicks from the 1980s, and it’s an opening that will grab viewers from frame one.

With the opening gambit established, the film settles in, introduces its players—Bia, her girlfriends, her slacker brother João (Bernardo Marinho), her boyfriend Pedro (Vitor Mayer), a few other students—and delves into the daily drama of the young, rich, and beautiful, with diversions into the darker side of life with every new victim.

There are several films that come to mind when considering Kill Me Please. Its horror strains invoke thoughts of Brian de Palma’s Carrie; its beautiful and privileged teens having their lives jolted by death, and how reactions to death vary from teen to teen, harkens to Michael Lehmann’s Heathers; and João Atala’s lush and colorful cinematography calls to mind Benoît Debie’s lens work in Spring Breakers. Unfortunately, this film is nowhere near the level of any of those.

The problems begin early on, when the film doesn’t know when to stop settling in and eventually becomes stuck in a rut. Writer/director da Silveira parts ways with the slasher film motif (and all its promise) to handle things like character development and plot, of which there is very little. The teens’ lives include the expected, like sexual awakening, competitiveness in the athletic arena (handball), petty jealousy, passive/aggressive body shaming, religion, and rival cliques. These are all part of creating, wrestling with, and solving teen angst. The problem is how lifeless the characters are. Kids meant to be regarded as soulful or introspective instead come across as apathetic bores. Even Bia’s growing obsession with the murders never takes on any kind of intensity; it’s only an increased interest.

Because the director never returns to the intensity of his opening sequence, subsequent victims are shown after their demise, not during, or they’re simply talked about (save for a montage of their faces late in the film, only proving the dead were just as beautiful as the living). Some might consider this to be a less is more approach, but that sense is never conveyed. The murders are cold, distant events that lose all gravitas because they are talking points about murders, not the actual murders. The fact that there are adult characters in the film is an interesting and gutsy choice, but it strains credulity as the body count grows since no police ever show up.

Kill Me Please is a gorgeous-looking film that ultimately falls victim to its own narcissism, relying on its aesthetic so heavily that the function of its story is mostly an afterthought. After squandering an excellent beginning, it never recovers to offer a satisfying finished product.

Kill Me Please screens as part of New Directors/New Films in New York City. To learn more about the festival or buy tickets, visit www.newdirectors.org.

I love a good ghost story, so when I read the synopsis of first-time writer/director Zhang Hanyi’s Life After Life—a description that included the spirit of a deceased mother possessing her son—I was all in. While I didn’t quite get what I bargained for, what I got wasn’t bad. It’s a ghost story for sure, but one unlike anything I’ve seen before.

Mingchung (Zhang Minjun) and his son Leilei (Zhang Li) are walking through the forest gathering fallen sticks to use as kindling in the fireplace that warms their home. After a brief spat between the two, Leilei sees a hare race by and gives chase. He’s gone for several minutes and when he returns, he is Leilei only in body; his spirit has been replaced by that of his late mother, Xiuying. Using her own voice, Xiuying asks her widowed husband to return to their previous home, dig up the tree she planted in the front yard (a gift from her father), and replant it somewhere safe from the industrialization that is growing and will eventually lay waste to that old land. Mingchung dutifully obliges, at first attempting to recruit help but eventually doing it himself, with Leilei/Xiuying’s help.

The setting, which Hanyi and cinematographer Chang Mang magnificently capture in wide static shots with sharp details and an achingly muted palate, reflects a barebones Chinese countryside forever skirting the edges of industrial sprawl. The land is mostly dead, but the sense is that the death is not some hibernation demanded by the wintery season; instead, it’s the earth’s terminal state of complete surrender to the assault it is under.

The film’s characters are not much different. Repressed by dreadful socioeconomic conditions, Mingchung and those whom he attempts to recruit to relocate the tree are distant, unemotional, and devoid of personality or excitability. If no one is phased by the notion that Xiuying has returned in the form of her own son’s possessed body, then it comes as no surprise that no one is phased at the site of a man suffocating a goat. That’s a level of repression that borders on abused. It might also explain why Mingchung can’t get the help he wants since nobody cares.

And yet buried deep within these doldrums are sparks of hope. Xiuying, at least in spirit, is back with her husband, and she gets the opportunity to see her parents one last time. This offers hope for an afterlife and a way back for those so inclined. And at one point, Xiuying alerts Mingchung that his deceased parents have since been reincarnated—one as a dog and one as a bird. It’s absurd to the point of being funny, although the constant hum of misery stifles any laughter.

Then there is, of course, the love story. It isn’t overt or sappy, nor is it traditional, but it’s there in the form of Mingchung taking on this massive task rather than not rejoicing in his late wife’s temporary return. He didn’t have much of a life, but the life he had was put on old to make her happy one last time. He seals the deal with a devastating monologue late in the film, where the reason for her demise is revealed and his regret surrounding the circumstances and the aftermath come to light. It’s never elaborated on, but their meet-cute must have been something special.

Life After Life, with its foreign arthouse sensibilities, its glacial pace, and its chasms of silence between sparse lines of dialogue, is a film that dares you to dislike it. And yet I didn’t. In fact, I found it quite hypnotic. I also found it rather sentimental, given the task at hand for its protagonist and who’s responsible for sending them on their journey. It isn’t a perfect film, and it won’t be for everyone, but it’s certainly worth a shot.

Life After Life screens as part of New Directors/New Films in New York City. To learn more about the festival or buy tickets, visit www.newdirectors.org.

It’s only taken 35 years for Isabelle Huppert and Gerard Depardieu to reunite on screen, but anyone expecting fireworks between the two French acting titans will come away befuddled by Valley of Love. What begins as a two-hander dealing with the grief of two parents in Death Valley gradually transforms into something more surreal and mysterious, a sort of Lynchian turn that tends to happen with films utilizing desert locations. It’s a switch that fascinates more than it satisfies, turning the questions surrounding loss into literal (and increasingly bizarre) mysteries. Writer/director Guillaume Nicloux’s attempts to make his film into something more spiritual by the end don’t pay off too well, but Huppert and Depardieu’s strong performances help soften the blow.

The tragedy kicking the story into gear is the suicide of Michael, the only son of actors Isabelle (Huppert) and Gerard (Depardieu). The two of them have been divorced for years, and their relationship with Michael sounds strained; Isabelle last saw him over seven years ago, and Gerard, while having a stronger bond with Michael, admits he didn’t have much of a presence in his son’s life. At some point before or after Michael’s suicide (Nicloux keeps the distinction unclear, the first sign that something metaphysical might be going on), both parents receive a letter from him urging them to meet in Death Valley several months after his death. He lays out a series of locations across the desert for them to travel to, promising them that, if they follow his instructions, they will get to see him again.

Beyond the letters, Valley of Love leaves Michael undefined as a character, a choice that makes sense given the film unfolds through the perspective of his absent parents. The decision to follow their deceased son’s instructions is both a way to confront their loss together and an attempt at making up for their poor parenting. The majority of the film plays out through conversations between Isabelle and Gerard about their own lives, reflecting on the past and pondering about their uncertain future (Isabelle is in the process of divorcing her current husband, and Gerard’s health has been failing). This is where the presence of Huppert and Depardieu elevates Nicloux’s screenplay to something more meaningful. Huppert does an expectedly great job, weaving through different emotional states while keeping Isabelle grounded as a character, but the real surprise here is Depardieu. It’s a different role for Depardieu considering his output in recent years, and it’s a welcome change, giving him the opportunity to play a more nuanced role alongside Huppert.

But Nicloux has other ideas in mind than just letting his two leads’ chemistry carry the film. Eventually, the supernatural elements take a larger role in the story, like when Isabelle claims that Michael grabbed her ankle while she was alone in her hotel room. The film’s shift from drama to surreal mystery creates some striking moments (like Gerard having a strange encounter with a woman at his hotel), but it comes at the expense of reducing the story down to a conflict between faith and skepticism. That conflict weakens the film, making it go from an involving exploration of two characters processing the loss of their son to covering a broader (and, therefore, less interesting) topic. Aside from Huppert and Depardieu’s committed turns, the only thing stopping Valley of Love from collapsing in on itself is Nicloux’s earnest approach, making some of the more bald-faced moments—especially the closing scene—avoid becoming too mawkish or absurd. The difficulty in finding an overall purpose for Nicloux’s venture into the metaphysical makes Valley of Love feel like tagging along on a road trip that goes nowhere, but with company like Huppert and Depardieu, it’s hard to find much reason to complain.

The Divergent series has, in many ways, been doomed from go. Propping up the dystopian hero’s story is a clumsily conceived, confusing “faction” system that makes so little sense it can cause spontaneous combustion if meditated on for extended periods of time. So, here we are, considering Allegiant, the third entry in the series based on Veronica Roth’s popular YA books, directed by Robert Schwentke. While the overlong, bland, uninspired, nonsensical movie didn’t cause said spontaneous combustion, my explosive demise is imminent; there’s another one coming out next summer, part two of this miserably drawn-out finale, and if there’s any silver lining, it’s that we can at least say there’s an end game in sight.

Again, we join Tris (Shailene Woodley) as she continues to unravel the mystery of “the founders,” the people who set up the cockamamie faction system however-many years ago. To catch up: Until the final events of Insurgent, Chicago had been divided into districts, whose residents are assigned according to their dominant personality traits. Upon opening a mystery box left by the founders, Tris and the rest of Chicago learns that there are people beyond the sky-high city walls that have confined them for all this time, a revelation that effectively collapses the longstanding faction system and sends plucky Tris, her super-soldier boyfriend Four (Theo James) and their rebellious friends on a quest to find out, once and for all, what’s beyond the wall.

An underwhelming run-n-gun sequence follows our heroes as they evade military forces sent by Four’s mom, Evelyn (Naomi Watts), who in the last movie disposed of the tyrannical Janine (Kate Winslet), only to (predictably) adopt the former leader’s totalitarian tendencies. The group makes it over the wall, but not before two of the series’ prominent characters of color—played by Mekhi Phifer and Maggie Q, who are each given virtually no dialogue as a parting gift—are gunned down, likely to make room for the new influx of white actors we’re about to meet (Daniel Dae Kim shows up for a second too, another minority bit-part designed to create a false sense of diversity). Not an uncommon Hollywood practice, but frustrating nonetheless.

On the other side of the wall, we find a Martian-looking wasteland, an army bearing futuristic weaponry, a new city (built, amusingly, on the remains of O’Hare International Airport), and a benevolent leader David (a sleepy Jeff Daniels), who informs Tris that she is the sole success of the “Chicago experiment” the founders set up all those years ago. There are details, but they’re too stupid and uninteresting to get into here. The basics are, Tris is the key to the prosperity of the human race, and David, who (surprise!) isn’t as benevolent as he appears to be, pampers her into ignoring her friends to concentrate on fulfilling his Hitler-y dreams. Four, Christina (Zoe Kravitz), and Tris brother Caleb (Ansel Elgort) do their best to snap Tris out of her self-aggrandizing daydream while also dealing with a civil war that’s broken out back in Chicago between Evelyn and Johanna’s (Octavia Spencer) respective followers.

The logic of the faction system was already frustrating, but now the series introduces this master-race narrative that only makes things worse. It simply isn’t clear what the message is Roth and the filmmakers are trying to get across. Is it that everyone’s special? No one is special? Tris seems pretty special. So do her friends. They all specialize in one thing—Four kicks major ass, Caleb’s good with tech—but the movie seems to be saying that their laser career focus is the result of genetic tampering or something, which leads us back to the secret behind the faction system mess. I can feel my body wanting to burst now, as I type this.

The enjoyable thing about Insurgent was that the action was urgent and inventive, but the set pieces here feel more trite and way less entertaining. The folks beyond the wall have nicer looking lasers and flying bubble ships than the dirty trucks and machine guns we’ve seen in the previous installments, which is a welcome change, but one can’t get over the fact that every bit of art design we see feels woefully generic, as if they were scrounged from a bin of unused video game assets. Unexpectedly missed are the surrealistic dream sequences from the first movies.

Perhaps the biggest head-scratcher of all is how a movie can fail so epically with such an amazing cast of seasoned vets and young stars populating the screen at any given moment. For goodness sake, you’ve got Spencer, Watts, and Daniels bouncing off of Woodley, Elgort, James (who’s not half bad here, actually), Kravitz, and Miles Teller, whose charisma can make the most terrible line work, at least to some extent. The Whiplash star is a standout as the opportunistic Peter, whose flips in allegiance have been enjoyable throughout the series. My feeling is that the cast makes a terrible script feel somewhat coherent and emotionally grounded, and for that the unlucky few who actually see this movie in a theater should be thankful.

Before my grandmother passed away, she taught my wife how to make homemade pierogi from scratch. There were no cookbooks nor smartphone apps to be found in the kitchen that day. All that filled the room were the intoxicating smells of our traditional Christmas Eve dinner, a pile of ingredients that dwindled as the day grew long, and two people standing side-by-side, one passing tradition along to the other in a culinary masterclass of ethnic cuisine. I was reminded of that day while watching Sweet Bean, the latest film from writer/director Naomi Kawase.

“Making bean paste is all about heart, sonny.” So says 76-year-old Tokue (Kirin Kiki) as she all but begs for a part-time job from baker Sentaro (Masatoshi Nagase). Despite her enthusiasm and her willingness to take less pay than he is offering, Sentaro is reluctant to employ Tokue because of her age, the frailty that accompanies it, and her gnarled hands. He isn’t dismissive, but he certainly isn’t open-minded. The next morning, Tokue returns with a container of her own homemade An (sweet red bean paste), along with a little trash talk about how Sentaro’s An isn’t very good. She argues that the paste he uses doesn’t taste good, and that the delicious pancakes he makes for his dorayakis are betrayed by such poorly mass-produced filling.

It isn’t until after he tries Tokue’s paste that Sentaro finds religion in the recipe. He hires Tokue, and in the process gets much more than a loyal and hardworking employee (and lines of new customers who have heard about this otherworldly confection). On his journey with the septuagenarian, one he shares with Wakana (Kyara Uchida), a teenage girl who frequents his shop, the baker learns much more than Tokue’s secret recipe.

While there is considerable depth to Sweet Bean, no other consideration can be given to the film without first addressing its culinary aspect. It’s marvelous. Some cooking scenes are brief but impactful, like several where Sentaro makes batter from scratch, pours the golden gooey goodness on the skillet, and flips the palm-sized pancakes at just the right golden-brown moment. Other scenes are a little more special, particularly the dazzling 10-minute sequence where Tokue and Sentaro work side-by-side so the elder can show the baker just how that paste is made. It’s all so dazzling in its meticulousness. Kawase’s observations on cooking are quite intimate, with many close-ups that give the viewer a sense of the food’s texture, combined with Shigeki Akiyama’s rich cinematography that strikes the perfect balance of soft and warm to create something of a visual tasting menu.

Deeper, though, the cooking sequences before the introduction of Tokue offer more than just gastric titillation. Nagase, who is excellent as Sentaro, uses the baker’s solo cooking scenes to convey a sense of heaviness in his soul. Cooking is driven by all five senses, making it a very passionate form of art. But through the listless repetition of his daily routine, Sentaro postures himself as one who has lost that passion years ago, with no desire to find it again. Even when a small group of giggling and chatty schoolgirls show up for their daily treat, he is unmoved by them. This is the result of something from his past that continues to haunt his present and affect his future, a secret that’s revealed later on in the film.

Also revealed later in the film is the part of Tokue’s life that at one time may have haunted her, but is now something that she has learned to live with and live through. Her approach to cooking has its roots in nature. She speaks of things like listening to the stories that the beans tell as she goes through her cooking ritual. One can’t help but wonder, at least at first, if these are simply the musings of a woman who has lived alone for too long. But the character is one keenly in tune with nature, particularly the cycle of the cherry blossoms, and who is mostly intoxicated by that connection, creating a giddiness that belies her age. Kiki, who is delightful in this role, presents Tokue as both the crazy aunt and caring grandmother everyone loves in equal measure yet for entirely different reasons.

Wakana is a little less developed as a character, thus a little more enigmatic, but no less important. Like Sentaro and Tokue, she is somewhat alone. She lives with her mother, but her mother seems more concerned about having spilled her beer than worrying about what the spill might have ruined. This less specific character sketch, coupled with the fact Wakana plays a critical role late in the film, suggests the girl is a step or two removed from being nothing more than a character of convenience. But her daily patronage of Sentaro’s shop, and how he treats her compared to the giggling schoolgirls who also come in every day, suggest Wakana has a certain gravitas that will eventually reveal itself. It does, but mostly in the sense that she will become the next generation needed to take up this art of cuisine and use what she has learned from those before her. She shares a brief but memorable moment over tempura with Sentaro, where the two of them meet by chance at a local restaurant one evening (before Tokue’s hiring) and decide to dine together. Sentaro speaks to Wakana like an adult, confiding in her something that surely took guts for him to admit, let alone share.

The film’s ending is predictable (and early), and that ending veers towards mawkish, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t satisfying.

Based on a novel by Durian Sukegawa, Sweet Bean (known also as An and Sweet Red Bean Paste) is a delicate, enchanting, layered Japanese drama about so much more than food. It’s about isolation, regret, and the sense of helplessness that comes with losing control of your own destiny. These three people are forever bonded as both equals and (unrelated) generations of a greater spiritual family. With excellent performances and a fine directing touch, Sweet Bean is a film worth finding and savoring.

Kaili Blues, which has made a quiet name for itself on the festival circuit, has described by fans and critics as dreamlike, and it truly is, in so many senses. For some, this dream is an incoherent poet, stumbling through the last few drops of whiskey in a flask. For others, it is an otherworldly calling, a dizzying sense of realisation—or what some might even call enlightenment. The line between the two is probably a fine one.

Set in the rural province of Guizhou, China, even the film’s foggy, mystical location exudes a surreal quality, as though we are floating from scene to scene, character to character. This experience is only heightened by director Gan Bi’s use of long, uncut takes, which frequently disorient our sense of time. Gan Bi himself explains his preference of long takes by describing them as “liberating” and “close to poetry.” Somewhere between the art of poetry and the motif of time is where Kaili Blues lies, driven not by a narrative but by a feeling. As much as we cannot tell where the film is going, we cannot tell if it is going anywhere at all, or if it even needs to be.

However, Kaili Blues is intermittently concerned with a more tangible journey, depicting the travels of Chen (Chen Yongzhong) from his hometown of Kaili to Zhenyuan in order to find his nephew Weiwei. Chen’s brother—Weiwei’s father—is the unreliable Crazy Face (Xie Lixun), whose character is best represented by the knowledge that he may have sold his son. On his journey, Chen stops through the town of Dangmai, where space, time and reason all become unfathomable, and the film relies solely on our emotional connection to each character as they transiently pass into and beyond the lens. It’s a bold move, but one that forces the audience to question our understanding of reality as the discernable opposite of fantasy, interweaving the two until their distinction is not only obscured, but rendered unimportant.

One of the most interesting ways Bi achieves this is through the inclusion of actual poetry, both his own and that from the Diamond Sutra, a text of ancient Buddhist teachings. Read by the protagonist as a voiceover during several shots, the poems center our experience of the film, allowing and encouraging us to speculate on various moments whilst ensuring we never stray too far into the ethereal. Indeed, these sharp, contextual poems feel somewhat necessary, as though without them we would be adrift in a sea of memories with no sense of direction.

This exploration of time and memory is also wonderfully portrayed through music—both in the film’s traditionally inspired soundtrack and within the story itself. Chen’s search for a group of men who play the Lusheng, a traditional Miao instrument, leads instead to a group of young men about to play a pop concert. It is a clear but unobnoxious signifier of the inevitable modernisation of rural China, demonstrating both visually and aurally the meeting point of two generations. Yet Bi’s construction of this encounter is critical of neither the modern nor the traditional, preferring to hang, motionless, in a chasm of time where both can exist harmoniously. This lack of any linear motion through time is almost entirely what the town of Dangmai seems to represent; it is a place where memories can happen tomorrow, and passing trains can turn clocks backwards.

Kaili Blues has thoroughly impressed many as a directorial debut, and it’s perhaps the promise of more to come from Gan Bi that truly grips our interest. One technical feat in the film has been rightly praised—a single shot that lasts over 40 minutes long, and must have required an incredible amount of choreography in order to seamlessly flow through so many scenes. It cycles through a wide variety of characters, each of whom plays a small but significant role in our gradual understanding of the film, if that ever happens. But just like a dream, understanding what has happened is a far less meaningful goal than embracing the experience: in this case, one of a delicate, pastoral trance.

Kaili Blues screens as part of New Directors/New Films in New York City. To learn more about the festival or buy tickets, visit www.newdirectors.org.

In addition to faith, scandal, and fundraising, the Catholic church also knows its way around paperwork. To its credit, at least from my own experience, the church keeps excellent documentation in the area of who received what sacraments, where, and when. To its detriment, though, and again from my own experience, it can mire itself in so many forms and processes, it becomes an institution less about spirituality and more about bureaucracy. The frustrations of searching for baptismal records and being subject to the slog of pro forma processes are only the beginning for the protagonist in Federico Veiroj’s latest, The Apostate.

Gonzalo Tamayo (Álvaro Ogalla) is that protagonist. He is a philosophy major who decides he wants nothing to do with the Catholicism he was raised on (thus the term “apostate,” meaning one who renounces religious beliefs). Furthermore, because gave no consent to his baptism due to being a baby at the time, he wants his baptismal certificate—the key document that connects him to the Catholic church—expunged entirely. The church doesn’t necessarily see his side of things.

Between Gonzalo’s existential crisis and the arcane machinations of the church, The Apostate has a foundation ripe for comedy, and the film shows flashes of it where one might expect. There is some fairly direct humor when Gonzalo visits his church, learns about the ridiculousness of what it takes to apostatize, receives blowback from his family as a result of his decision, etc. There’s even the broader humorous notion that Gonzalo’s grand efforts to detach himself from the Church are nothing more than efforts to update paperwork. The reality is if Gonzalo wants nothing more to do with faith or religion, he only needs to stop participating.

But rather than explore and enrich these themes, maximize their deeper impact (either comedically or dramatically), and let Gonzalo’s decisions set other events into motion, The Apostate treats his desire to free himself from the Church as little more than the core situation in an underdeveloped comedic anthology. Throughout the film, Gonzalo moves among a collection of situations that, while mostly connectable in some way, offer no greater sense of cohesion or flow. This is particularly frustrating, as these situations each have enough of a base to build something upon, but they only get in the way of each other’s development.

The first facet of this concerns Gonzalo’s studies. He is one class away from earning his degree and yet he fails that class. The fact that his philosophical slant drives his apostasy and yet he can’t close that deal gives an opportunity to delve into some rich irony, but it’s treated as little more than one more thing Gonzalo’s overbearing mother can complain about (Her cliché reaches its zenith when she ultimately learns of his desire to leave the church).

On the amorous front, Gonzalo has eyes for his comely cousin Pilar (Marta Larralde). He has been attracted to her since childhood, and when she shows up at his place looking for a place to crash because her marriage is failing, he sees an opportunity to score. The tenor of this is difficult to reconcile. Yes, there is the triple-threat of incest, infidelity, and adultery (not to mention the fact Gonzalo’s first attempt to bed Pilar occurs while she is sleeping), but there is never the sense of taboo to the degree one would expect. Like his desire to be rid of the church, his desire to be with Pilar seems superficially situational. Gonzalo also engages in sex with an older stranger on a bus and has an attraction to his neighbor Maite (Barbara Lennie), and while these relationships’ perceived sinfulness might suggest Gonzalo is acting in defiance of the church, there is nothing earned to be defiant over; his position is philosophical, not spiteful nor vengeful. It isn’t as if he has been wronged by the church in any way, he simply wants to disassociate himself from it.

This is not to say that the film doesn’t have its moments of humor. Some moments in The Apostate are laugh-out-loud funny (including an ending that deserves a better film preceding it), but it’s all so slapdash. Perhaps this scattered offering of moments and ideas is a result of the collaborative screenwriting effort among four scribes: director Veiroj, star Ogalla, Gonzalo Delgado, and Nicolás Saad. It certainly feels like a lot of ideas were pitched and those that were considered good on their own merits weren’t considered for how they would fit within a collective.

In addition to those funny moments, Ogalla, in his first role, is quite enjoyable and something of an onscreen natural. It’s no surprise that the film’s core and hook—an apostasy—is something Ogalla experienced in real life; that sense of experience comes through. Still, these few virtues cannot compensate for the greater sins the film commits, and while it isn’t the worst way to pass 80 minutes, it isn’t the best cinematic option out there.

The Apostate screens as part of New Directors/New Films in New York City. To learn more about the festival or buy tickets, visit www.newdirectors.org.

There’s a part of being the victim of infidelity that isn’t often discussed: the suspicion of infidelity. Unlike the flare of rage that comes with the surprise of catching a cheat, suspicion envelops the mind slowly like quicksand, pulling an already fragile psyche deeper and deeper into the abyss until there’s nothing left but suspicion itself. Innocuous happenings become something more, something ominous, but they never quite manifest into damning evidence. All they do is fuel more suspicion, because if that last thing was almost proof, the next thing surely will be proof. Suspicion creates a lot of smoke, but usually without ever producing the gun. In Asghar Farhadi’s Fireworks Wednesday, the suspicion of infidelity wreaks havoc on the psyche of a woman in Tehran.

Rouhi (Taraneh Alidoosti) is a beautiful young bride-to-be whose wedding won’t pay for itself, so she takes a temp role as a cleaning woman for a family of three. On her first day on the job, Rouhi finds herself dealing with more than messy rooms and dirty windows. The husband and wife who have hired her—Morteza (Hamid Farokhnezhad) and Mozhde (Hediyeh Tehrani)—appear to be on the last legs of their marriage as they ferociously argue in front of their new hire about how Morteza broke his promise to have a serious talk with Mozhde about their future so he could go to work on his day off. Mozhde sees this not only as a slight but as a sign that her husband is having an affair. Mozhde recruits Rouhi to spy on Morteza, but even that grows into something more than she signed up for.

Other than the glow from the soon-to-be-wed Rouhi, the first thing that becomes a constant presence in Fireworks Wednesday is the perpetual hum of chaos. The film takes place on Persian New Year when fireworks go off in the streets all day and night (seemingly by everyone in town). The constant bursts of noise sound like a military skirmish, creating a low-level hum of aural unease. This sets the film’s tone, acting as a celebration and a backbeat for the unfolding drama.

The highlight of the film is Farhadi’s construct of, and Tehrani’s portrayal of, Mozhde. The chaos in the streets outside and in the apartment inside are nothing compared to the chaos in Mozhde’s psyche. She starts out as angry, a woman defending her marriage and not feeling the same level of commitment from her husband to save it. But that anger is ultimately powered by suspicion, and when her husband is at work, that suspicion tears her down as it builds itself up. Every number on caller ID, every conversation overheard through the apartment’s ventilation system, every other randomly discovered factoid that doesn’t feel quite right becomes more smoke without a gun. Like a person with a terminal illness begging for a mercy-killing, Mozhde simply wants relief from her pain. Without saying it, she knows that relief will only come with discovering the worst because there’s no way of disproving her suspicion. In an effort to expedite that relief, she enlists Rouhi’s help.

Poor Rouhi. The young girl only knows love and happiness with her man, not whatever it is Morteza and Mozhde have. But over the course of only one day, Rouhi shifts from bystander to witness to full-on participant in a very messy domestic game, and in the process learns about the frailty of marriage, the criticality of communication, the trickery of deceit, and the importance of honesty. It’s a wedding gift no one intended to give her, and one she shouldn’t try to return.

Put it all together and the director of A Separation and The Past has done it again, crafting an excellent exercise in weathering sustained chaos. There are early moments when the film doesn’t have the steam it should, but once it gets going it plays almost like a psychological thriller, although one stripped of that genre’s tropes. Tension mounts, characters evolve, and secrets are revealed. Yet even with all that, and with the ominous sense of discovery forever looming overhead, nothing is ever overwrought or overplayed. Fireworks Wednesday was first released in Iran in 2006. After a decade-long wait, the film is finally receiving a release in the US.

After its premiere at 2015’s SXSW Film Festival (where it won the Grand Jury and Audience awards), Trey Edward Shults’ Krisha received comparisons to the likes of John Cassavetes and Terrence Malick. Given that Shults has worked on several of Malick’s recent films—starting out as an intern on The Tree of Life—those comparisons feel obvious, even though they’re earned. The Cassavetes comparisons come from both Shults’ low-budget, indie origins and his close-knit cast (almost everyone in the film is a family member). These associations with such big names in American indie filmmaking have critics and audiences making their point clear: Krisha marks the arrival of a new, bold voice for indie films.

Then again, referring to Shults’ work as nothing but an amalgamation of potential influences only does a good job describing what Krisha is like, rather than what it actually is. There’s something here that sets Shults apart from every other up and coming American director getting their break at film festivals around the country, and it’s evident right from the beginning: a close-up of the title character (Krisha Fairchild, Shults’ real-life aunt) staring the camera down, with ominous strings surging on the soundtrack. That stark opening shot is followed by a complex long take, where Krisha walks around a suburban neighbourhood looking for a house, finds it after winding up at the wrong place, and then introduces herself to the guests inside. It’s soon revealed that the guests are Krisha’s own family, who she hasn’t seen in over a decade, and she’s arrived to celebrate Thanksgiving with them. Shults’ decision to film the sequence in one lengthy shot implies either a keen understanding of his own material—the high-wire act of pulling off such a sequence feeding into the awkward nature of the family reunion—or a showy stunt, the kind first-time directors like to make as a way to get noticed.

What differentiates Shults from the pack has less to do with story (he’s far from the first person to tackle a disastrous holiday reunion) and more to do with his execution. Krisha’s decade-long absence from her family’s lives is due in large part to her addictions and penchant for self-destructive behaviour, and Shults lets the film’s form act as a gateway into his lead character’s anxious perspective. Using quick cuts, whirling camera movements, an abrasive score (courtesy of Brian McOmber), shifting aspect ratios, and plenty of other tricks, the film becomes a cacophony that reflects Krisha’s immense, self-imposed stress. Despite the invite from her sister Robyn (Robyn Fairchild, Shults’ mother), Krisha senses the anger and resentment brewing just underneath her relatives’ friendly demeanor. She expects every interaction with one of her family members to turn confrontational at any second.

But how can Krisha work as an entrance into its protagonist’s mind when there’s no proper context for it? The bulk of Krisha’s concerns come from the fear of her family calling out her poor behaviour over the years, yet Shults cares little about establishing his other characters’ relationships to her. Beyond a basic establishing of her past issues and the uncomfortable nature of the reunion, Shults doesn’t bother trying to convey a full understanding of what brought Krisha and her family to their current emotional states. That makes the inevitable sour turn of events, culminating in Krisha’s relapse, unearned; her downward spiral feels manufactured for maximum melodrama, and her relatives the pawns designed to carry the story to its emotionally charged destination.

So if we want to find a different filmmaker to compare Shults to, one that helps explain his sensibilities rather than the conditions of his production, we just have to look north. Much like Canadian director Xavier Dolan’s work—more specifically Mommy and Tom at the Farm—Shults shows an interest in emotional intensity for its own sake. They prefer to let the visceral qualities of shouting matches and familial angst compensate for the lack of any weight behind these intense feelings, all while wrapping it up in superfluous or ineffective formal quirks that amplify the content, instead of complementing or supporting it. Granted, Shults’ approach is an effective one, even if it’s transparent; Fairchild gives a great performance, and there’s something inherently involving about watching this family fall apart. But it only works up to a certain point. As Krisha keeps going, it’s obvious that its director only knows how to operate in loud, shrill tones, and what the film amounts to is a fireworks show: loud, short bursts of excitement that fade fast and get old quick. It doesn’t come as a surprise when the film ends during its most heated moment, cutting off mid-scream to a dedication before the credits start rolling. With Krisha, Shults shows that he knows how to get people’s attention—figuring out what to do with it is another story altogether.

If young adults were in the practice of playing dress-up as a way of acting out their interpretation of older adult behavior the way children do, it might look exactly like Backgammon, director Francisco Orvañanos’ warm looking and utterly lacking first film. Filled with all the moodiness of a high school theater production and with far less substance, this film about a group of college-ish aged upper-class white folks spending a weekend away at a mansion quickly unravels into a bizarre psychological charade. In its depiction of Lucian (Noah Silver), the charmed college student eager to accept his college buddy’s invitation to his parent’s east coast home, we’re meant to find the face of reason amidst bourgeois drama, but no one acts as irrationally as Lucian as his buddy’s sister Miranda (Brittany Allen) and her snobbish painter boyfriend Gerald (Alex Beh) alienate the remaining guests to the point of departure. Lucian’s decision to stay, beyond rational explanation, is only one of the many mismatched puzzle pieces that make up this confusing novella-inspired film (based on R.B. Russell’s Bloody Baudelaire).

As if in a contest for who can be the most irrational prick of the bunch, the small cast of Backgammon trade unwitty witticisms while having inexplicable access to a huge mansion of which Miranda and Gerald speak as though it’s their own. While downing an unending supply of wine and quoting Baudelaire, Gerald continuously puts down his girlfriend and supposed artistic muse saying such things as “Aren’t all the lovers of great men parasites?” Doing her best impression of a manic mysterious bundle of kittenish mannerisms, Miranda acts offended but broken. Gerald challenges Lucian to a game of cards, which he promptly loses, the winnings of which are all his paintings. Things escalate and Gerald ends up leaving over the dispute and Miranda’s sudden decision to give him the boot. Conveniently, Lucian’s college buddy Andrew (Christian Alexander) decides to head back to school with hardly a single scene under his belt, and to his (not enough) dismay, Lucian’s girlfriend Beth also leaves.

Lucian stays, lured in by Miranda’s particular brand of crazy, and the two of them are soon freaked out as Gerald’s paintings start to change and noises in the house lead them to believe Gerald may not have left after all. If only the supposed suspense inherent in such a scenario were at all utilized. Rather than draw out the suspense by having our characters behave accordingly, Lucian and Miranda have a series of backward conversations about nothing, drink a ton of alcohol and reveal their nonsensical insecurities. Most of this through long quiet scenes with non-conversations where one sentence is rarely followed up with another relating to it. Miranda is a flighty depressive toddler-like host to Lucian’s unbelievable infatuation. The film eventually realizes it should probably move toward some reveal and then beams like a five-year-old as it holds up its finger-painting-level shocker, which, if not predictable, is just plain yawn worthy.

Simon Coull’s cinematography is undeserved, all warm lighting and pore-revealing close-ups, and the camera’s fluid movements combined with the glacial storyline only make it more sleep-inducing. Orvañanos’ film debut needs about four more drafts and a lighter directorial touch. Unfortunately, bizarre does not always equal suspenseful, and as one of the foremost symbolists, one can assume Baudelaire would find the lack of meaningful expression in the film—other than moments where he himself is being quoted—to be quite mundane.

In the constant upswing that is the age of digital innovation, there’s hardly a technological advancement portrayed on film that doesn’t seem moments from reality. Benjamin Dickinson’s Creative Control feels so near to today’s level of digital immersion, one has to wonder if some tech company isn’t using him to sneak-peak their product. Creative Control’s five-minutes-from-now future depicts a black and white filmed Brooklyn and the creative professionals who occupy it. The film follows David (Benjamin Dickinson also plays lead), a marketing professional pitching a new client on how to release their product. The product is Augmenta, a pair of glasses—hipster in design—that bring the virtual world and the real world together allowing a person to be almost constantly plugged in. In this near-future phones look like iPhones but see-through, finger movements across a desktop work in lieu of keyboards, and with the glasses on one could technically be working on as many things at once as they want.

Creative Control’s focus is oddly far less on technology and more on the enhanced ways technology allows an already emotionally unintelligent and self-absorbed yuppie to spiral further into self-destructive tendencies. Unfortunately, the crystallized mechanics of this classic music dubbed, slow-motion filled revery reduce down to beautiful packaging on a boring operating system.

Dickinson gently pokes fun at the creative class of New York City with his film’s opening. David helps his boss who can’t figure out his phone as they wait for their new clients then delivers a cocky modern pitch to Augmenta’s creator Gabe (Jake Lodwick, the real-life creator of Vimeo) suggesting they use a technologically-hip and out of the box artist to use the glasses to create his art, giving the product some needed street-cred. The techno-artist in question is Reggie Watts (playing a stylized version of himself and by far the film’s strongest comedic relief) and his out there, existential, video-making is an edgy risk. David’s risk is a success, the client approves and he gets his own pair of Augmenta glasses, he texts his girlfriend about his victory. His girlfriend, Juliette (Nora Zehetner), is a yoga instructor and her personality would appear in stark contrast to David’s, all naturalistic and socially minded, spending her weekends at hippie communes teaching yoga. But as the film continues it’s clear they are both consumers of modern popular theologies, he gets lost in his technology, she looks for escape in something resembling mindfulness, both accomodated by contemporary entitlement.

David’s best friend is Wim (Dan Gill), a modern asshole photographer surrounded by models and unabashed in his infidelities. His girlfriend, Sophie (Alexia Rasmussen), is another struggling artist, flirty and cute. David’s interest in her is obvious from the start, especially as he proceeds to find her a job at his company. She’s the first face his pair of Augmenta glasses see and David starts to use the glasses to create a virtual version of her. One night after a work event hosted by Reggie and fueled by psychedelic drugs, David walks Sophie home and ends up kissing her. They continue to flirt at the office. He and Juliette have a fight one evening, each taking jabs at the others values and judging their varied consumption of the mumbo-jumbo they’ve bought into. Juliette worries about the materials used to create Augmenta and the social conscience of the company. David criticizes her lack of a real job and constant need to focus on the world’s problems without offering solutions. He moves into a hotel and almost immediately tries to get Sophie to join him. She won’t, and his obsession with her grows and his virtual version of her gets more and more lifelike. Her digital avatar is a fine piece of special effects, distinctive from the rest of David’s world by being the only thing of color in the film.

From here relationship issues and career problems gather and gather crushing down on David’s growing obsessiveness and inability to focus on real life. Unfortunately, the more interesting angle would be to blame Augmenta and the virtual escape David uses it for, except that everything that ends up pushing David to his ho-hum conclusion is entirely to do with douche-y things he was likely to do anyway. From the film’s start, his inappropriate interest in Sophie is evident and there isn’t a single scene showcasing David being anything but a horrible boyfriend. It’s nice to know that even in this near-future the emotionally stunted and self-involved get their self-inflicted due. But the complete miss on an opportunity to delve into how virtual technology could create new possibilities, even new possibilities for douchebaggery, is just too transparent here. Like buying a huge chandelier and putting it in the guest bathroom.

Adam Newport-Berra’s cinematography is flawless, possibly even to the point of accenting the film’s story flaws. Depth of field can be made with a camera, depth of story cannot. The special effects blend seamlessly and are both subtle and enviable, this isn’t a future that is all that fear-inducing, it’s just close enough to the next step in technology some might find themselves wondering when we’ll get to try these things out for ourselves. Every other scene seems to include slow motion and classical music, a ploy that at first gives the movie an abstract sort of gravitas and then quickly becomes a worn out gimmick, though if it’s meant to accentuate David’s ridiculousness it’s not entirely unsuccessful.

It’s obvious that several of the film’s characters aren’t played by experienced actors such as Vice’s Gavin MacInnes as David’s boss, or Himanshu “Heems” Suri as David’s co-worker Reny, and even though Reggie Watts often plays some version of himself, even he could have gone bigger, though I will say they do bring a strange sort of natural element that feels weird enough to fit in. Dan Gill’s Wim is the most engaging to watch, owning his asshole-ish nature and being the most realistic in his use of the technology surrounding him. In one scene he sends David a video of himself having sex with Sophie, a natural sort of evolutionary upgrade on the classic dick pic that is both hilarious and ringing with truth. Nora Zehetner is well cast with her naively large eyes and sweet disposition, but Juliette is the most cartoonish of all the characters, given almost no realistic motivation for why she’d even be with a man like David or how it is she ends up on the path she takes in the film. It rather feels like another portrayal of a woman driven entirely by the men surrounding her.

In the end, Creative Control feels like a product of the introspective creative types it thinks its analyzing and breaking down. Unlike Spike Jonze’s Her, which also proffered a world where the technology feels imminent but with possible outcomes not yet explored, Creative Control neglects its primary plot device for its characters. Which wouldn’t be so bad, except that it’s not doing anything original with those characters. High-strung creative narcissists are gonna be self-destructive unless stopped by something, and Dickinson gives us nothing but the inevitable. Which leaves us with a sharp-looking future projection of people we already know and hate.

In his latest movie, Knight of Cups, Terrence Malick asks us to join him, for the third time in a row, on a journey through the meandering thoughts of people lost in life, confessing their innermost moral quandaries to the cosmos as they stumble and crawl across god’s green earth and bask in heavenly sunlight. This time, the setting is Los Angeles, photographed in all its concrete, Art-Deco grandeur by trusted Malick collaborator (and Oscar darling) Emmanuel Lubezki. We follow and listen in on the thoughts of fading movie star Rick (Christian Bale) and, occasionally, his famous friends, as Malick lays out another unbearably thin narrative that’s as deviously frustrating as a 500-piece puzzle with 450 pieces missing. The eminently respected auteur clearly has a firm grip on the art of filmmaking—at his best, he’s one of the greats—but with his work becoming increasingly nebulous and less inviting to audiences, it’s come to the point where patience for his vagaries grows dangerously thin.

In an almost wordless onscreen performance (we hear his voice, but mostly in the form of narration), Bale drifts down the streets of L.A., occasionally jumping in thought to memories from Las Vegas, Century City and Santa Monica. Rick is in a perpetual state of punch-drunk spiritual crisis, surrounded by gorgeous women who glom onto his status, wealth and handsome looks until his emotional ineptness becomes too much to bear, at which point they make way for the next batch of girls to grab at his pants.

Rick’s fleeting romantic partners are played by a dizzying crowd of famous faces: Cate Blanchett, Natalie Portman, Imogen Poots, Teresa Palmer, Freida Pinto, Isabel Lucas and more can now add a Malick film to their resume. The roles are thin—Blanchett plays his ex-wife, Portman plays a fling—but isn’t every role thin in a Malick movie these days? Antonio Banderas makes an appearance a Hollywood playboy who throws a swanky house party littered with real-life celebrities playing themselves (“Look! It’s Joe Manganiello! Nick Kroll! Danny Strong! Wait…Danny Strong? Huh?”). Banderas takes over narration duties for a bit, spouting twisted, misogynist philosophy. “Women are like flavors,” he says in his sumptuous Spanish accent. “Sometimes you want raspberry, but then you get tired of it and you want strawberry.”

Malick does a good job of laying out the monstrous, indulgent allure of showbiz that pulled Rick in and broke him down into the wandering, pulp of a man he is. He’s become a phony, just like all the other soul-sapped leeches overpopulating the trashy town that bred them (to be clear, Angelenos, I mean Tinseltown, or the idea of it, not L.A.). Similarly swallowed by the city is Rick’s brother (Wes Bently), a non-famous drifter whose short temper is inherited from his and Rick’s late father. The particulars of the family drama (and, in fact, most of the particulars of Ricks life) are left for us to imagine on our own, but the quality of Bale and Bentley’s performances helps to form some semblance of an emotional arc.

Some (this writer included) would consider it a duty of a true movie lover to meet the filmmaker halfway when a film’s concepts or ideas are challenging or obscure. But with Malick’s recent work, it feels like he’s not meeting us halfway. We can only give so much of ourselves over to him before his movies start to feel like tedious chores. What’s so tragic about this is that, on a cinematic level, he’s phenomenal: he and Lubezki’s imagery is sweeping, evocative and immaculately conceived. Some moments—like a ground-level shot of Bale taking a knee on the concrete as an earthquake shakes the buildings and people around him—are so exquisite you could cry. But without a deeper sense of cohesion, these cinematic feats start to feel hollow as they pile on top of each other for two hours straight. As with Malick’s last movie, To The Wonder, Knight of Cups topples over, leaving us to sift through a mess of pretty pictures in a desperate search of some morsel of meaning. Like his characters, maybe it’s time for us to wake the hell up.

Crass, crude, foul-mouthed comedies have been all the rage at the movies for some time now, with the trendiest comedians from any given year dropping F-bombs, and spouting off rapid-fire fraternity jokes in their (almost always nudity-obsessed) star vehicles. Wet Hot American Summer and The State co-creator Michael Showalter‘s latest offering, Hello, My Name Is Doris, is the perfect antidote to the unending strain of Apatow offshoots: It balances classy, screwball comedy, bone-deep drama, and old-fashioned romance with the finesse of an Olympic gymnast. For once, it’s a rom-com with aims of enchanting and disarming us rather than grossing us out of our minds.

The film’s greatest boon is its star, Sally Field, an actor of age who puts on a performance so range-y, powerful and tender that it all but wipes today’s young, sparkling starlets from memory. She plays Doris, a sixtysomething recluse who’s lived in her mother’s cluttered house in Staten Island her whole life. Doris falls into lonely despair when her mother passes away but thankfully has her job as a paper pusher to keep her busy during the day. She’s the only person over 40 at her company though her role as office outcast could be more attributed to her cat-lady eccentricities (cat-eye glasses, headscarves, wooly knits and all).

Hope of getting Doris unstuck from her rut arrives in the form of her company’s new art director, a strapping, decades-younger Los Angeles transplant amusingly named John Fremont (New Girl‘s Max Greenfield). On several occasions, we get lost with Doris in fantasy as she daydreams about John confessing his love for her in front of their colleagues and hooking up with him in the breakroom. Field is ungodly adorable as she fumbles and fawns, and Greenfield does a good job of keeping us in suspense as to whether or not Doris has got a shot at John’s heart.

With encouragement from her best (only) friend, Roz (Tyne Daly)—who takes her to a life-altering lecture by motivational speaker Willy Williams (Peter Gallagher)—Doris decides it’s time to make a change and begins fashioning herself to John’s interests (facilitated by Roz’s granddaughter, who schools her on the art of Facebook stalking), making a concerted, somewhat creepy effort to cougar her way into John’s arms. Suddenly, she’s clumsily throwing around millennial slang, rocking neon yellow outfits and going to indie electro-pop shows headlined by John’s favorite band, Baby Goya and the Nuclear Winters (where the two “coincidentally” bump into each other).

Just as a tight friendship starts to form between them and the thought of romance doesn’t seem so inconceivable, John meets another woman, bringing Doris’ dreams crashing down. In a drunken fit of desperation, she sabotages John’s new relationship (via a lovelorn timeline post from her fake Facebook account), a plan that naturally backfires and leads to even more heartbreak. Showalter and co-writer Laura Terruso—who directed the short the movie is based on as a student of Showalter’s at New York University—hit every romantic, comedic, and dramatic beat so well that the movie transcends genre. This makes for such an enjoyable experience because, instead of trying to predict where the story’s going, we’re allowed to let go of preconception and go wherever the emotions may take us. Every laugh, every heartbreak, every moment feels sincere, not hokey or contrived. Nothing’s cheap; everything’s earned. The movie’s liberating in that way.

Field is so talented it’s scary. It should go without saying—she’s a two-time Oscar winner, after all—but the sad reality is that female actors over 50 are typically relegated to secondary, tertiary, often motherly roles. Her career, tragically, supports that narrative. But that’s why Hello, My Name Is Doris is such a gift; in all her glory, we get to see Field showcase her unparalleled mastery of physical comedy (watching Doris quiver and drool as John pumps up her deflated gym-ball office chair is insanely funny) as well as her earth-shattering dramatic chops. In the movie’s most powerful, unsettling scene, Doris hops up onto her couch, screaming at her brother (Stephen Root) to leave her house as she tearfully refuses to clear out the piles of old magazines and expired food her mother left behind. It’s scenes like this that reveal the psychological complexity bubbling beneath Doris’ cartoonish exterior. Such a wonderfully weird, layered character is only safe in the hands of an actor of Field’s caliber.

Five years after nabbing the Palme d’Or for his 2010 feature, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Thai filmmaker Apichatpong “Joe” Weerasethakul, has crafted perhaps his most intimate work in over a decade. Instead of enchanting his audience with surrealist imagery, Joe chooses to mystify us by employing tools as transparent as implication and conversation. But he remains a master of controlling the frame, of capturing the unadulterated sounds of nature’s pumping heart, and he deliberately pulls us into a trance, into a world that exists aesthetically between sleep and dreams, but textually between history and the present moment. Bucolic environments throughout the film are observed in their most silent states, yet the sounds that remain despite the emptiness are amplified. Joe navigates spaces that initially appear slight, but focuses on them so intimately that they become wondrous.

Like fellow East Asian filmmaker Tsai Ming-Liang, Joe constructs his takes and their geometry with obsessive deliberation. What sets the two filmmakers apart, at least in terms of what’s visually obvious, is that Joe shoots the majority of his films outdoors, while Tsai’s meditative tone poems are generally consigned to dark interiors. Nature has a constant presence in Cemetery of Splendour. The environments feel sentient, and when the human characters walk through or interact with them, the visible gestures carry the weight of dialogue even though no words are actually spoken. The goal of many filmmakers is to find material worth observing; Joe believes all material is worth observing, and he proves it.

Cemetery of Splendour is set in its director’s hometown of Khon Kaen and stars his frequent collaborator Jenjira Pongpas, whose character, apparently mirroring her director, returns to her childhood home as an adult. She seeks out the school she attended growing up only to find it’s now a makeshift hospital designed to treat a company of soldiers suffering from a mysterious sleeping sickness. The location’s design is immaculate, conflating cloistered objects from its distant past with therapeutic technology that wouldn’t look awry in a modern science fiction film. Enamored by the events taking place in her prior schoolhouse, Jenjira begins tending to a young soldier named Itt (Banlop Lomnoi, co-star of Joe’s Tropical Malady). Itt occasionally breaks through into the waking world, but unless speaking through a telepathic woman named Keng (Jarinpattra Rueangram), he remains trapped in an unyielding slumber.

As the story progresses, we learn that the schoolyard turned hospital was built on a cemetery of kings, and that the restless spirits of these kings feed on the energy of these soldiers, ensnaring them in their own subconscious. Jenjira and the other characters occupying the present slowly begin to comprehend what exactly is going on, and as they do, history’s voice only grows louder. A pair of goddess statues take human form and begin to converse with Jenjira, telling her stories as though she were their contemporary. Viewing the film through western eyes, I can only assume the enigma of its mythology is exacerbated by cultural removal. But even taking this into account, I hesitate to wonder whether the extent of its message has failed to transcend that regional barrier. What Joe has to say seems like something people from all cultures could identify with.

The material in Cemetery of Splendour, while initially alien, is unpacked with grace and explicability. As ancient spirits contact those currently occupying physical bodies, a revelation about the confluence of souls begins to present itself. The high levels of cultural specificity the material appears to impose gets decimated by the universality of the ideology it harbors. Even referring to Joe’s philosophy as ideological seems reductive. He is merely enthralled by the relationships between conscious minds. It doesn’t matter that a hospital has been erected atop a cemetery, just like it doesn’t matter whether clouds look over a river or an ocean sits above the sky. All that matters is that these bodies and the minds that make them unique are in constant dialogue. Forgotten kings can chat with and advise millennial nurses and soldiers, because why wouldn’t they? Every tree, river, animal, and being that ever was and ever will be must rely on one another with the utmost compassion. Otherwise, how could we even bear to live?

It always feels important to rediscover an established filmmaker’s earliest work. There’s a unique artistic pleasure in dissecting the roots, looking for the under-developed thematic, narrative or formalistic signs of eventual greatness—almost as if we are over-analyzing a childhood to reconcile why someone became a serial killer. With its re-release at the IFC Center in New York on Friday, March 11th, our eyes fix on Kelly Reichardt’s River of Grass. It’s difficult to find reviews of the film from its premiere at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival and its subsequent limited theatrical release, but by all accounts, it received solid buzz considering it was a debut film. River of Grass was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance when the festival was at the height of its grassroots independent glory. Interestingly, Tom Noonan’s directorial debut What Happened Was (a film by a notable filmmaker that has been similarly forgotten) won the prize, which competed in a lineup that included Clerks, Spanking the Monkey and Hoop Dreams—three films that cemented the cultural importance of Sundance at the time. Twelve years after River of Grass, Reichardt made her breakout film Old Joy and has been on an indie cred tear ever since.

River of Grass stars Lisa Bowman as Cozy, a bored wife and mother, stuck in a boring life with a boring family in a boring community. Restless, she decides to hit the bar one night, abandoning her motherly responsibilities in the process. She meets Lee Ray (Larry Fessenden), a young slacker who has recently come into the possession of a gun. They connect, leave the bar together and eventually get into some trouble because of that loaded gun. Cozy and Lee Ray are now tied together by murder, a bond which Cozy notes is stronger than the bond of marriage. The two leads give very fine, understated performances, with Bowman particularly good in the weirder and quieter moments. Fessenden, in one of his earliest performance, brings energy to the film.

The film is very much in line with the 1990s Sundance indie from which it came. The offbeat characters, loose narrative, crime elements and hushed voice-over are all trademarks of its time, which gives the film a bit of a time capsule feeling. It also has an up-front comedic sense that we don’t associate with most of Reichardt’s films, but was definitely a part of indie cinema at the time. From a recurring joke with a profane punchline and weird character moments, the film is consistently funny. Sometimes it’s absurd too, like when Cozy and Lee Roy are on the lam only to be revealed they are in the same city as where they started. It’s the standard couple-on-the-run plot through the ’90s slacker sensibility. They see themselves as dangerous bandits but are ultimately too chickenshit to run through a toll stop. When they do eventually try to leave southern Florida, they fail in about the most pathetic way possible. Even Cozy’s monotone voice-over becomes humorous in its super serious pseudo-philosophy: Cozy’s realization of “If we weren’t killers, we weren’t anything,” for example.

For Reichardt, River of Grass is very much in line with her look at small communities. The film’s title comes from a Native nickname for the Everglades, the Florida swampland only miles outside of Miami with the complete opposite aesthetic. Instead of the bright fluorescent lights, beaches and nightclubs, the “River of Grass” is rural with miles of flat land dissected by lonely highways. The inhabitants are working-class and semi-transient, similar to their Northwest counterparts in Wendy and Lucy and Old Joy.

At less than 80 minutes, the film reveals itself as more of a slice-of-life than it seemed. This is perhaps what makes River of Grass most like its auteur’s work. All of Reichardt’s films, no matter how profound, emotionally or thematically rich, are very much a moment in their characters’ lives. Like Meek’s Cutoff, River of Grass ends with a particular sense of dread, but just open-ended enough not to pin down. Certainly, Reichardt could have expanded Cozy and Lee Ray’s life, added more debauchery or heightened the stakes of their criminal fall-out, but she chose to keep the narrative shaggy and simple—sure, the ultra-strapped indie budget probably had a practical effect on the film’s length, but there is the beginning of a narrative line here.

I don’t know why River of Grass didn’t immediately achieve a cult reception similar to Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, Clerks or other films similar in their time and space, but thankfully Kelly Reichardt persevered, allowing you to take a look back to over-analyze or simply discover the roots of one of today’s most important filmmakers. It shouldn’t be forgotten, however, that River of Grass is a very good debut in its own right. The film is often funny, often elusive, and very confident in its style and narrative presentation.

First-time feature director Dan Trachtenberg milks a simple, succulent premise for everything it’s worth in 10 Cloverfield Lane, a quasi-sequel to 2008’s found-footage urban thriller Cloverfield. Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays our resourceful, sharp-minded hero, who, after a wicked car crash, wakes up trapped in a subterranean survival bunker with a lumbering, creepy captor (John Goodman) who claims the outside world has been reduced to a wartorn, uninhabitable wasteland. It’s a powder keg of a movie with an old-school approach to storytelling that’s interested not in philosophy or meaning, but simply in the events unfolding right in front of our eyes. It’s a story that asks what (the fuck) is happening rather than why things are happening, and that makes it less complicated and more streamlined than the typical, weighty, modern-day thriller.

The first two acts are equal parts mystery and suspense, with the finale bursting at the seams with surprises and edge-of-your-seat thrills and chills. The script, by Whiplash director Damien Chazelle and newcomers Matthew Stuecken and Josh Campbell, is a solid chamber mystery that doesn’t push any boundaries but is the perfect support system for Trachtenberg and the actors to make the movie special with what they each bring to the table. High tension runs throughout the movie’s runtime (not an easy feat), and that’s a product of the performances, visual style, and pulse-pounding orchestral score by Bear McCreary. It’s a harmonious popcorn-movie affair, with nary a weak link in sight.

In a tearful hurry, aspiring fashion designer Michelle packs some light bags and peels off in her car, fleeing from a failing relationship. Night falls, and, distracted by her beau lighting up her cell phone, she flies off the road. The shock of the crash is unnervingly concussive, images of a tumbling Winstead and roaring sounds of broken glass (mixed almost painfully loud) cut violently into the film’s opening credits. Immediately, we get a taste for Trachtenberg’s punchy, mischievous style.

Michelle (Winstead) wakes up in a windowless room that would feel more like a prison cell were it not for the life-supporting amenities wrapped around her right leg (a knee brace) and stuck in her left arm (a flowing IV). Suddenly, the heavy metal door clanks open and in walks Howard (Goodman, having so much fun being a total creep), a nutty survivalist who claims there’s been a disastrous attack above ground that’s wiped everyone and everything Michelle knows into oblivion. What’s worse, he informs her that the air outside has been rendered unbreathable. Bottom line: for the foreseeable future, Howard’s bunker is her world.

Howard says he found Michelle in the wreckage of her accident and took her to his shelter, saving her from most certain doom. But there’s no way this ex-Navy weirdo is telling the whole truth, right? Every sentence that comes out of his mouth is either off-putting or suspicious, and he even suggests that Martians could very well be behind the attacks. He might as well have “UNRELIABLE” tattooed across his massive belly (right underneath another tattoo that reads “THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE!”).

Our instincts tell us that this guy is a full-on serial killer/rapist who’s lying about everything, but everything gets thrown off balance when Michelle discovers a third bunkmate, Emmitt (John Gallagher Jr.), who vouches for everything Howard says despite the grisly lout beating the shit out of him for knocking over a shelf full of food. The plot is almost solely driven by the questions that naturally arise from Howard’s deceitful air (What are his true motivations? Has the world really gone to hell like he says?), and in this respect Goodman works wonders with his performance. He’s terrifying alright, but there’s a sadness underneath the surface that gives him dimension and keeps us on our toes. Michelle’s mind always seems to be on the go, her eyes taking in the details of her environment, searching for a potential tool she can use to get her out of whatever pickle she’s in. It’s a thoughtful performance by Winstead, who makes sure Michelle is the farthest thing from a damsel in distress. The actors make their characters’ mental and emotional underpinnings as interesting as any explosion of violence or plot twist, resulting in a more humanistic, tender film than one might expect.

It’s difficult to convey just how intense 10 Cloverfield Lane gets without venturing into spoiler territory. (What’s interesting to note, however, is that Trachtenberg’s career really began to build traction after he released a short film based on the video game Portal; that game’s narrative has more than a few things in common with 10 Cloverfield Lane‘s, which I found intriguing.) The revelations and twists that pile on in the latter half are delightful, not so much because they work on the page, but rather because they arrive so perfectly, bathed in suspense and terror and wackiness and all the things you’d find in the best episodes of The Twilight Zone. If there’s a downside to the lingering questions being answered it’s that the answers we get pale in comparison to the air of mystery they smash apart.

Now, the elephant in the room: How, exactly, is 10 Cloverfield Lane tied to Cloverfield? The surprise won’t be revealed here (the project was overseen by the Mystery Man himself, JJ Abrams, after all), but what I will say is that most of the pleasures found in Trachtenberg’s film have nothing to do with the found-footage original, with which it has almost nothing in common. In fact, this movie is significantly better than its predecessor, so it’s probably best to leave any expectations the Cloverfield brand may conjure in your mind at the theater door.

There are many stories a filmmaker could tell about the lives of Palestinians under occupation. Despite the news stories we may hear in the press, in the Western world we are so entirely disconnected from their life experiences that any insight is not only helpful but necessary. We need to hear their voices and, at the very least, witness their experiences, even if many of these are beyond our understanding. Speed Sisters provides such an educational insight without compromising its identity as a wholesome celebration of its subjects, a testament to both the subjects and to director/producer Amber Fares.

A Lebanese-Canadian woman who was raised in Northern Alberta, Fares travelled to the Middle East to better understand her heritage; it was this journey that led her to Palestine’s Speed Sisters, the first all-women race car driving team in the Middle East. We are introduced to five women, each with different backgrounds, different talents, and most importantly, different reasons for racing. One of the biggest strengths of this documentary is that it allows each of these women to accurately represent themselves—they are not forced into boxes or censored to fit the personality we might believe a female racer should have. They also have varying financial situations, which only serves to emphasise their single common trait: a dedication to racing. This is reinforced by the decision to include scenes from the women’s daily lives and interviews with their families. One of the most promising racers, Marah, is made all the more sympathetic through childhood stories and words of support by Khaled, her father and biggest fan.

Naturally, as explained by their manager Maysoon, the running of a female racing team in a country under occupation is not without its difficulties. While many of the local men state they are now used to seeing the women race, on the track there are still some clear prejudices to be tolerated; Maysoon herself admits to frequently diminishing her authority in order to make other men feel in charge. Because of a lack of provided training grounds, the team must train next to an Israeli detention site, which comes with its own hazards. This is all without even mentioning the multiple Israeli checkpoints the drivers must frequently pass through, and only a few of them have passes to do so. None of these women are willing to let this hold them back, however, and find their own ways to pursue their dreams. Mona, who races mostly for the fun of it, doesn’t want to let her personal life fall by the wayside. Noor, the wild drifter with the personality (and hair) to match, learns new techniques and pushes herself at every race. But Betty, who is determined to be the fastest woman on the track while maintaining her femininity off it, turns out to be Marah’s biggest competition within the group.

Speed Sisters is everything we would enjoy in a fast-paced racing film, along with the edge of a realistic political commentary and the introspection of a personal adventure. Perhaps its biggest aid in succeeding with such a high standard is its pacing—both Fares and editor Rabab Haj Yahya know exactly when to switch between fast-paced races, establishing shots of Palestinian life, and sit down interviews, never allowing one aspect to dominate too much screen time. Paired with a largely Middle Eastern soundtrack including Palestinian hip-hop and other tracks from the region’s indie music scenes, we are easily drawn into a world of which, in reality, we know nothing of. Yet Fares applies a simple but true formula to this film: when a narrative is so specific it cannot be anything but authentic, it becomes universal.

It would be difficult to improve upon the director’s own words when it comes to this documentary. It provides such a fascinating perspective, and each driver brings her own honest approach to both the track and to life. “Each one in her own way took me on a ride through Palestine that I will never forget,” Fares says. “They taught me to push boundaries, while still respecting your community. They taught me about resistance, about not giving up and what it means to stay true to your dreams despite endless obstacles.” This is exactly what Speed Sisters is about.

Amidst a busy week of caucuses and Presidential debates, America receives another blunt force reminder that lest we ever lose sight of our god-given kick-assness there will always be an action film depicting our sheer superhuman patriotic determination to take down all terrorists who threaten us.

This reminder comes in the form of London Has Fallen, the fast-paced follow-up to 2013’s Olympus Has Fallen. Though, while the inclination of action films isn’t necessarily toward truthfulness—and moviegoers’ patriotism not to be taken for granted—London Has Fallen puts American exceptionalism on so high a pedestal it’s practically the stuff of fairy tales. Audiences looking for explosions and quippy wisecracks won’t be let down, but this film will not be winning us points with our allies anytime soon. As a depiction of not only how two Americans (one of them the President) can take on a major terrorist cell, but how much more competently they do it without the help of the government officials of the country they are located in, London Has Fallen is a cartoonish action flick cashing in on the attachments its characters built in the previous film and layering on American bravado at the expense of all other nations.

Directed by Babak Najafi, an Iranian-Swedish filmmaker without much to his name, the film starts at a large wedding party in Pakistan. We meet Aamir Barkawi (Alon Moni Aboutboul), an arms dealer who advises his eldest son, who has recently offed one of their competitors, not to forget to take out their enemy’s family as well. Clearly this guy holds grudges. Next minute a drone attacks the wedding. Two years later, back in America, President Benjamin Asher (Aaron Eckhart) is two years into his second term and now very close with his Head Secret Service Agent, Mike Banning (Gerard Butler doing his best to stifle that Scottish accent), who saved his ass in the last film. Mike’s expecting a baby with wife Leah (Rhada Mitchell) and contemplating his retirement.

The unexpected death of the British Prime Minister urges the President to quickly fly off to London to attend the funeral. Banning and Secret Service Director Lynne Jacobs (Angela Bassett reprising her role) don’t like the unknowns involved in last-minute travel, but Banning’s the best of the best, and he accompanies the President to the UK. Those who’ve seen the last film (or even the trailer) will easily guess where the story heads. Barkawi has picked his moment to exact revenge for the drone attack that killed his daughter. One by one he picks off the world’s leaders as they arrive in London, destroying much of the city’s historical landmarks in the process.

His minions appear from the crowds in such high numbers it would indicate almost no one seen thus far in London is actually a citizen. The police aren’t who they seem. Motorcyclists emerge to chase down the President as Mike rushes him back to the helicopter. They aren’t in the helicopters long when missiles down them. The death toll and destruction is close to comic-book movie status. As London goes on lockdown, Mike and President Asher make their way through the streets—Mike’s apparent built-in GPS guiding them—eventually connecting with an MI6 agent Jacquelin (Charlotte Riley) who suspects a mole (there’s always a mole). Banning and President Asher continue to defeat the odds for the rest of the film.

Butler and Eckhart do have a sort of chemistry, the kind I imagine frat boys everywhere have, and watching them run around together keeps up the energy of the film. Butler’s double chin might indicate his skill-levels in sleep deprived continuous fighting shouldn’t quite be what they are in the film, but his extreme kills hold a certain satisfaction that allows one to forgive his appearance.

The film’s real faults are unsurprising. In a world where terrorism is so very real, one might think Hollywood would veer away from the hyperbolic terrorism oft depicted in action films. Whereas fairy tales use unrealistic monsters to make everyday life seem safer, these sorts of action films are starting to feel almost insensitive to the realities of the world. Barkawi is possibly the most successful terrorist ever, his recruitment efforts being apparently so amazing there is never a corner Banning runs around where he isn’t met with a ceaseless mass of terrorist drones attacking him.

Like in the first film, at one point Mike yells out “RPG,” which for the uninitiated stands for “rocket propelled grenade,” though for this weapons-illiterate viewer I’d just have soon thought he was proclaiming his entrance into a “role playing game.” The camera follows like a first-person shooter for much of the action, bullets whizzing by, explosions happening casually.

The British government and intelligence are depicted as barely capable, not only being completely oblivious beforehand that an attack is being planned, but consistently being told by the American government officials back in the U.S. what the sitch is. And as much as EVERYONE likes to see Morgan Freeman in governmental positions (here he’s now the Vice President), the whole suits-in-the-situation-room film tactic for solving major global crises just doesn’t hold up anymore.

Many could find themselves enjoying London Has Fallen, but one has to wonder if they should. By taking out other world leaders, Barkawi insinuates they are the U.S.’s “family,” a fair depiction of U.S. allies, but the casualness with which they are killed and the disrespect paid to Britain plays into an oft-used tone for action films: America is the best. Just as Mike Banning asks his MI6 friend at one point in the film about civilian losses and she remarks they are unfortunately high, as though she’s remarking on a price increase on her favorite shampoo, so is it impossible to have any real feeling for the film or its outcome. There’s nothing less patriotic than desensitizing terrorism and in an age of globalization, London Has Fallen feels stale and outdated.

I find myself drawn to films with ambitious timelines—those that span not weeks or months or even years, but decades—and over the past few years, there have been some terrific Asian films that have been so ambitious; Kongkiat Khomsiri’s The Gangster, taking place in the 1950s and 1960s; Jing Wong’s The Last Tycoon, spanning from the 1910s to the 1940s; and, to a lesser extent, Choi Dong-hoon’s Assassination, which ranges from the early 1910s to the late 1940s. This year, another decades-spanning entry arrives from Asia: Mountains May Depart, an ambitious Chinese drama from legendary filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke.

And Mountains May Depart isn’t just ambitious in terms of the timeline it travels and the arcs its characters take; it’s ambitious in how it’s presented by writer/director Jia. Rather than offer a traditional three-act, 131-minute film that spans 25+ years, Jia divides the film into three independent yet critically interconnected parts.

The first part opens in 1999 and covers about a 7-year period (other than the title card revealing the year, no other date information is available, so guessing needs to be done based on other clues). Tao (Zhao Tao), Zhang (Zhang Yi), and Liangzi (Liang Jin Dong) are the three players in the film’s love triangle that begins here, as China and the rest of the world are on the brink of a new millennium. Zhang’s businessman-on-the-verge-of-wealth and Liangzi’s miner-on-the-verge-of-unemployment represent the growing economic divide in the country, with Tao torn between the traditions of the old (Liangzi) and the excitement of the new (Zhang). Even the hostility the men have for one another seem to reflect a have vs. have-not mentality. Jia’s lingering, observational directorial style flourishes here.

Tao remains reluctant about which man she prefers, but coal mine worker Liangzi is no match for rich businessman Zhang, and eventually the man with the money gets the girl (and goes so far as to buy the coal mine and fire Liangzi). Tao and Zhang eventually marry and have a son, but all is not sunshine and roses. The second part opens in 2014. Tao and Zhang are divorced with the latter having won custody of their son Dollar.

The second part opens in 2014.  Tao and Zhang are divorced with the latter having won custody of their son, Dollar. Liangzi, now married and with a child of his own, suffers from cancer, the byproduct of a lifetime of breathing coal dust. When a family emergency arises, Zhang flies Dollar to be with his mother, but the young boy has no real maternal connection to her. It’s during this part that the film begins to unravel a little. The 1999 section was drenched in rich, meaningful drama. In the 2014 chapter, the tenor shifts to something more melodramatic with the presentation of Tao’s seemingly endless trouble with men. One former love has divorced her, another former love is dying, her son is a stranger to her, and then there is that family emergency. Tack on Zhang’s plan to westernize his and his son’s names and move to Australia to make even more money (a plan overheard by Tao while Dollar is Skyping with his stepmom) and it starts to become too much. Tao’s moments with Liangzi are divine, and her struggle to connect with her son is real, but the periphery begins to intrude.

The final section, which takes place in 2025, finds Dollar as an English-speaking college student with a fractured relationship with his father, almost no memory of his mother, and a blossoming romance with someone his mother’s age (Sylvia Chang). This section struggles throughout its duration, partly because of how Dollar’s relationship with his father strains credulity. It isn’t that the conflict between upstart sons and failed fathers isn’t possible, it’s that despite living together for Dollar’s entire life, the son has picked up no Chinese and the father knows no English (and nothing is suggested to indicate a refusal to speak the languages on either part). That Zhang has a gun fetish to the tune of handguns and ammunition just lying around the house feels inserted for shock value, and Dollar’s attraction to a mother-figure is terribly cliché. It’s the shortest segment of the three, but it’s the last one, and it doesn’t close the film well at all.

Jia also takes an artistic chance with this film. The 1999 segment is shot in an aspect ratio of 1.37:1, the 2014 segment widens to 1.85:1, and the 2025 piece opens even wider with 2.35:1.  It feels like it’s trying to be some kind of visual commentary on past/present/future, but aspect ratios alone simply can’t do that, especially when the period of time presented is only 26 modern years. The aesthetic of Nelson Lik-wai Yu’s cinematography from section to section is terrific—a muted past, a rich present, a shallow future—but the presentation itself does nothing for the film.

The core cast, however, is solid. Zhang plays the budding entrepreneur with the right amount of swagger, and Liang is excellent as the blue-collar hero with hope for romance. But this film belongs to Zhao Tao, and it’s a better film for having her in it. Her range and nuance are really something, whether it’s playing the love-torn ingenue, the regretful divorcee faced with the mortality of a past love, or the mother who is ultimately childless in everything but name. It’s impossible not to look at her and feel everything she’s feeling.

By establishing a love triangle and injecting conflict via the socio-economic divide between its two male protagonists, and then using that to represent the growing chasm between the old China settled in the east and the new China running towards the west, Jia Zhang-Ke opens his story with great strength. But the inflamed melodrama that dominates the tale as time marches towards the future only weakens the film, creating a desire to return to the better past.

There are more worries that come with parenting than there’s space here to list, but one worth mentioning involves babysitters. A child is precious, so the care for that child must be handed to someone whose trust is irrefutable. A trustworthy sitter is a valuable commodity and can mean a stress-free (and well-deserved) night out for parents. A new sitter, though, is a different story. A new sitter invites questions, worries, and doubts until they can prove their worth. These are the sorts of doubts are at the center of Emelie, an effective thriller that taps into the fears of parents and children about strange sitters.

Dan and Joyce Thompson (Chris Beetem and Susan Pourfar) plan a night out without their three kids to celebrate their wedding anniversary. When their usual sitter can’t make it, they hire her friend, Anna. At first, Anna is everything the kids could want in a sitter because she lets them do whatever they please. But as the night progresses, Anna’s behavior grows darker. 11-year-old Jacob (Joshua Rush) learns this mysterious new sitter’s name isn’t actually Anna, but rather Emelie (Sarah Bolger). Once Emelie’s identity is compromised, her behavior grows even darker.

After a harrowing opening (the film’s one true, and earned, jump scare moment) that allows Emelie to assume the role of Anna, first-time feature writer/director Michael Thelin settles into an unsurprising, if not mostly predictable, first-act groove. He presents the serenity of suburbia to establish the juxtaposed backdrop of the impending terror. He portrays the chaos found in a house where parents scramble to get ready so they don’t miss their reservation while trying to wrangle their three young ones. While driving to the restaurant, natural parental worrying settles in but ultimately passes. As for that sitter, she curries favor with kids immediately by allowing them total freedom. This is where it gets interesting.

For the two younger kids it’s all about junk food and playtime, but for Jacob, Emelie is both attractive and a temporary mother-figure he wants to please. Emelie senses both of these things and exploits the former when, in a stunning scene, she asks Jacob to fetch her a tampon…while she’s on the toilet and he’s in the bathroom with her. This is the first in a collection of lapel-grabbing scenes that move the story away from that familiar groove while avoiding expected psycho-sitter moments.

Thelin draws Emelie as wickedly subversive and passive-aggressive in her cruelty to the children. Rather than overtly frighten them or physically abuse them, Emelie instead exposes them to things that are varying degrees of traumatic, including putting one child’s pet hamster into the tank of another child’s pet snake. Emelie is rich with other similar moments, which aren’t so much scary as they are discomforting.

Hampering the film, however, is the inclusion of a mysterious man spying on the parents while Emelie is watching the children, which stops the film in its tracks every time Thelin focuses on this subplot. Seeing the parents enjoying themselves while their children are going through this traumatic night is unnecessary; the addition of the spy tries to force some greater sense of doom on the evening and it never quite works.

The other big detriment to Emelie is its lack of momentum. While it fits the traditional three-act structure, Emelie never turns up the intensity. The film is essentially a collection of moments that never build up to something greater, but it’s a solid B-movie that Thelin doesn’t try to oversell. He makes some interesting creative choices that mostly work, like his creation of the title character and (especially) the decision to avoid turning the story into a straight cat-and-mouser. This is a taut thriller that finds its greatest effectiveness in its discomforting moments.

The story of British ski jumper Michael “Eddie” Edwards is of the classic underdog variety: In the 1988 Winter Olympic games in Calgary, he inspired people around the world with his bright personality and infectious enthusiasm, becoming the first ski jumper to represent Great Britain at the games. Funny thing is, Eddie lost. He lost BAD and in spectacular fashion. In both the 70m and 90m events he came in dead last, failing utterly and completely by most competitive standards. Nonetheless, the guy garnered millions of fans simply because he was happy (almost hilariously happy) to be there and do his absolute best.

What Dexter Fletcher‘s Eddie The Eagle gets right is its willingness to poke fun at Eddie, played here by Kingsman: The Secret Service‘s Taron Egerton. Too often movies of its ilk take their subject too seriously, in turn making the story feel schmaltzy, pruned and disingenuous. Fletcher’s film takes several liberties with Eddie’s journey, most notably inserting a fictional trainer (Hugh Jackman). This is easy to swallow: Historical accuracy will never be the most important aspect of telling someone’s life story. Capturing and paying respect to the person’s spirit and reflecting the true value of their accomplishments? That’s everything.

It’s the essence we’re after. In the case of Eddie, his essence is an ability to find pride, joy, and positivity in the face of adversity, derision, and even failure. When he was eliminated from Britain’s downhill ski team, he opted to take up the even more dangerous discipline of ski jumping instead of giving up. When he jumped a comparatively short distance than his competitors at the games, he celebrated and played to the cameras and excited crowds, simply happy to live his dreams. That’s his legacy, funny and inspiring at the same time, and that’s precisely how the movie feels.

Egerton—unrecognizable from his character in Kingsman, donning Edwards’ signature thick glasses, thick mustache and awkward posture—exudes the unlikely Olympian’s plucky positivity without being a caricature. When Eddie’s blue-collar dad (Keith Allen) pulls up to a bus stop to find his son packed and ready to leave home in pursuit of his Olympic dream, he barks at him to get in the car. “Have you ever had a dream?” Eddie asks, to which his father defiantly barks, “To be a plasterer! Let’s go home.” With his chin held determinedly high, Eddie says with compassion, “Bye, dad.”

When Eddie arrives in Germany to train for Olympic qualification, he meets a drunk ex-jumper, Bronson Peary (Jackman), who reluctantly (after relentless pestering) agrees to train young Eddie to land jumps instead of breaking his neck. The juxtaposition of the grizzled veteran and the clumsy rookie is good fun and would have worked better with a few tweaks to Jackman’s character or even a different casting choice. The Austrailian actor simply looks too put together and dashing to be a convincing drunken mess, and the alcoholism angle screenwriters Sean Macaulay and Simon Kelton go with feels unneeded, a futile attempt at making Bronson look like a loser. The actors do have chemistry, though, and Jackman’s pure gold in a scene that sees him illustrate the art of a takeoff via a feigned orgasm á la When Harry Met Sally. The moment is so absurd (especially in the family-movie context) that you can’t help but laugh at how much fun the movie’s having.

With the help of Bronson, Eddie finally makes it to the Winter Olympics in Calgary (despite dastardly attempts by the British Olympic Committee to block his participation, mostly because he’s goofy looking) where he at first enjoys his sudden stardom but then is reminded by coach Bronson to take himself more seriously and put forth his best effort despite the fact that he’s been ski jumping for a fraction of the time his competitors have. To the shock of everyone watching his Olympic escapades, Eddie vows to compete in the potentially deadly 90m jump, which leads us directly into the movie’s obligatory “He did it! He did it!” crescendo. The rousing finale’s done excellently though a random subplot involving Bronson’s old mentor (Christopher Walken) deflates the excitement for an excruciating few moments. There are no revolutionary changes made to the underdog formula, but the movie is special in that it celebrates the pride one finds in the simple act of participation.

Ski jumping, as it turns out, is one of the most cinematic of sports: Watching a human being soar through the icy air with long, slender skis stuck to his feet is an awe-inspiring sight, and Fletcher gets a lot of mileage out of a sport that pretty much looks the same every time (the variable being whether the poor guy eats snow or not; we see both successful and failed landings), using CGI stylishly and tastefully and giving us a terrifying sense of how goddamn high these athletes actually go. Looking down from the top of the 90m jump is bloodcurdlingly scary, and Fletcher makes sure to drive home just how crazy Eddie is to take up such a dangerous sport with such little experience. Once Eddie’s in flight, however, Fletcher has fun with interesting angles and brisk editing that, at its best, is exhilarating.

Most of Eddie the Eagle‘s success can be attributed to young Mr. Egerton. He makes us laugh at Eddie without making him clownish, and he makes us care for him without being corny. It’s a spot-on performance that sets the pace for everything else in the film, and he should be proud of the fact that, in this instance, he acts circles around the infinitely less memorable Jackman, a bonafide screen veteran. The gap in tone and timing and attitude between this role and Egerton’s turn in Kingsman is cavernous, and he makes the jump effortlessly (apologies for the totally-intentional pun).

As is the case with Quentin Tarantino‘s The Hateful Eight, you’ll find no heroes in John Hillcoat‘s likewise numerically titled Triple 9, a solid, well-acted crime-thriller in which nearly all of its dozen-or-so main characters carry a badge, though about half of them are crooked. These slimeballs use their position in law enforcement as a guise for a big-time heist operation; their non-criminal counterparts on the force are bent on smoking out who’s behind the bank robberies as the perps hide in plain sight just one desk over. The “good cops” aren’t as straight-laced as you’d imagine, however: Policing the rough Atlanta streets keeps their skin and wits tough and their scary obsession with putting the heist-pullers away could put innocent people in danger.

By all accounts, it was Hillcoat’s name that first compelled the stacked, A-list ensemble to flock to the project, and it was the complex, unpredictable, multi-protag script that got them to stay. Each talent—Chiwetel Ejiofor, Kate Winslet, Casey Affleck, Woody Harrelson, Anthony Mackie, and the list goes on—makes a big impression; this is an ensemble piece through and through. But the egalitarian approach to the ensemble doesn’t work as well as it does in Hateful Eight or even Tom McCarthy’s Spotlight because the characters’ murky motivations, combined with the dizzying, often disorganized plot, make the experience as a whole a little hard to follow. There’s too much to keep track of, too little to latch onto.

A team of trained professionals led by Michael (Ejiofor) pulls off a bank robbery in the heart of Atlanta. They’re working (reluctantly) for Russian mob boss Irna (Winslet), who’s tasked them not with bringing her bags of loot but with retrieving a safety deposit box she needs to free her husband from prison. Jorge (Clifton Collins Jr., terrific as usual) and Marcus (Mackie) currently work as cops and Michael and Russel (Norman Reedus) are ex-Special Forces. These four are cool as cucumbers but Russel’s strung-out younger brother, Gabe (Aaron Paul) nearly causes the caper to go South. Going forward, as they resume their lives post-heist, the sloppy Gabe will more than likely become a liability and the rest of the team knows it.

Draped in woefully mismatched, fake-fancy garb, Irna is a welcome change from the familiar crime boss archetype, at least in tone and, of course, gender. Considering this role and other, villainous turn in the Divergent series, it seems the Oscar winner’s developing a taste for the wicked. She’s really good at it: The blood boils when we learn Irna’s holding Michael’s son—who also happens to be her own nephew (Gal Gadot plays his mom)—captive, blackmailing him to reassemble his team and carry out yet another risky operation, breaking into a Homeland Security facility of all places. To pull it off, the team resorts to using a “triple-nine” (code for “officer down”), distracting local law enforcement as they snatch Irna’s precious cargo in the shadows.

They need a good (unsuspecting) cop to be the “triple-nine” and Marcus nominates his new partner Chris (Affleck), who’s just transferred from another division. The new guy has just been branded a walking dead man by his own partner. One of the many x-factors in the scheme is Chris’ uncle (Harrelson) is a detective on the force himself and is leading a tireless investigation on Michael’s undercover gang. When the shit hits the fan and Chris sits in Marcus’ crosshairs, it’s amid a tornado of unexpected betrayals, murders and changes of heart that change the complexion of the “triple-9” altogether.

The plot’s too intricate and the dialogue is too expository to give the character work the clear focus it deserves. The performers are terrific and enrich their characters even when their screen time is woefully limited but one can’t help but wonder how much smoother the movie would flow with less attention dedicated to the plot. There’s no central character, after all, so every moment the actors get is incredibly precious. Fortunately, the actors make the best of their constraints, with each of their characters ultimately sticking in your mind in one way or another. None of them (besides Winslet) are playing against-type, so they all seem comfortable in their roles, which works greatly in the movie’s favor.

Aside from the acting, the movie’s greatest strength is the action sequences which, despite being preposterously elaborate and chaotic are presented with great care. The action is surprisingly easy to follow, and Hillcoat’s gift is that his set pieces, as they move briskly along through interiors and exteriors and different neighborhoods, simultaneously immerse us in the gritty surroundings and thrill us with expertly staged gunfights, foot-chases and fisticuffs. As far as the action is concerned, the presentation is slick, slick, slick. If only the narrative would take a few steps back and let the human drama and gunfire take more of the spotlight, Triple 9 could have been tremendous.

There’s a difference between “simple” and “simplistic” storytelling, and The Nightingale is a film that walks a fine line between the two terms. Director Philippe Muyl relies on an unfussy narrative, familiar character dynamics and placid visuals to make the sentiment of his tale resonate. The film is old-fashioned and contains a fair amount of charm, but it takes no risks (neither in the film’s aesthetic or its plot complications). Themes of reconciliation, youthful optimism and multigenerational bridge-building mosey on through, their potency limited by a lack of conflict and a penchant for easy answers.

Set in modern day China, The Nightingale finds a family suffering from disconnection. A married couple (portrayed by Xiaoran Li and Hao Qin) and their young daughter, Ren Xing (Xin Yi Yang), are living in a cold, sterile apartment in the city. The parents are preoccupied with their busy professions and the girl seems to be more endeared to the bright screen of her iPad than anything else. When a pair of important business trips send each of the parents away, the mother has no choice but to leave her daughter with her grandfather (Baotian Li). He lives a quiet life on the other side of town and has his own voyage in the works. The destination is his childhood village—a place nestled far away, deep in the Chinese countryside. A wealth of memories, both joyous and sad, await him there and whether the temperamental Ren Xing likes it or not (spoiler alert: she doesn’t), she’s coming along for the ride.

The bulk of the film follows the travels and interactions of this girl and her doting grandfather. Right away, it’s shown that he won’t get through to her easily. Ren Xing huffs about, making up complaints, willfully disobeying her grandfather and spurning any of his attempts to pick her brain. She’s clearly very independent, but her antics are unreasonable at times. Of course, the early friction transparently sets the relationship up for a tender reversal, as the more time the two spend in the countryside and amongst the smiling villagers, the more they bond and the better they understand each other. At the center of this is the titular nightingale that the grandfather carries around in a cage. Its meaning is gradually revealed and the bird eventually comes to be the film’s unifying emotional symbol.

From these descriptions, one might envision a gently affecting tale with low stakes and the potential for a hugely poignant takeaway. It is indeed gentle and the stakes are definitely low, but the execution is bland and conventional. The look of The Nightingale isn’t quite televisual, but the lighting and camerawork are so disappointingly unexpressive and flat. Even the sections in the countryside are—with all the gorgeous landscapes that are at the director’s disposal—generically “pretty” in the way the spaces are captured. Muyl is after a relaxed pace and ponderous tone here, but the imagery fails to provoke any thought.

As far as subtext goes, there’s plenty, but the motifs and messages are obvious. All throughout The Nightingale, there’s a running theme of dichotomies, the most prominent one being the unceasing movement and chaos of the city and the serene wisdom of the country. There’s something to be said about the divide between these two realms, but the film doesn’t do the topic justice, approaching it with a lack of nuance. The sprawling metropolis is repeatedly established with what appears to be slight variations of the same shot of sped-up traffic. By the third or fourth instance of this, we get idea. Meanwhile, the countryside is presented as a picture of paradise—accented by the perpetual laugh of children and shimmering, imperfect vistas.

This is where that “simplistic” sensibility comes in. The story is very straightforward and for a while, the absence of big, game-changing events is kind of nice. Baotian Li contributes a lot with his sweetly sympathetic performance and the sauntering nature of the tale is pleasant enough. But at some point, I began to hunger for something a little more substantial. Every little obstacle that comes up for the characters is very quickly dismissed or assuaged, and each beat of the characters’ individual developments falls into place, unearned. The countryside works like a magical sedative on Ren Xing’s sour mood and technological enslavement, and a previously strained relationship between the grandfather and the girl’s dad is quickly mended.

I’m assuming that The Nightingale’s target audience is children and easy-to-please families, as more cynical or discerning viewers may feel patronized by the easy sentiment and cookie-cutter storytelling. At the same time, there’s an oddly undercooked divorce subplot in the film that doesn’t fit the otherwise buoyant tone and feels out-of-place each time it’s brought up. Maybe this part is meant for adults seeking greater dramatic weight, but it isn’t thought out well enough to properly satisfy those needs, so I’m not sure what to make of it.

With all this negativity, it needs to be reinforced that The Nightingale is entirely harmless entertainment with, at the very least, a good heart and a nice message. It may be a fine choice for a casual afternoon viewing, but you probably won’t remember it the next day.