by Matt Levine

​In a political climate where scientific facts are often dismissed in favor of bipartisan vitriol, fantasy movies about noble scientists preventing the end of the world have suddenly become chic. Last year’s Tomorrowland envisioned an alternate universe where scientists are jettisoned to start fresh, escaping the greed and political turmoil that have almost guaranteed the earth’s destruction. This year, it’s the French animated fantasy April and the Extraordinary World that depicts a dystopian planet stuck in the Dark Ages after the twentieth century’s greatest scientists go missing. Surprisingly morbid yet consistently exciting, April and the Extraordinary World offers a somewhat tepid indictment of man’s petty quests for power, but the real thrills are provided by gorgeous animation and a unique steampunk setting that resembles Mad Max transplanted to fin de siècle France.

by Matt Levine

​My Golden Days ends with a freeze-frame even more powerful than the one that closes François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959): youth interrupted at the peak of its hopefulness, as though the characters happened to look life in its eyes and were stopped in their tracks. French artworks have a long history of bottling the bittersweet brevity of youth, from writers such as Marcel Proust and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to filmmakers like Truffaut and Louis Malle. It’s a difficult balance, evoking both the joy and the sadness of being young, its sense of infinite expectancy and lurking fatalism. At its best, this focus on youth seems to convey, in a few short hours or several hundred pages, the electricity of being alive.

by Matt Levine

by Jeremy Meckler

by Benjamin Voigt

A loose, episodic account of the Internet’s incursions into our public and private lives, Werner Herzog’s latest documentary is an exercise in breathlessness. Like much of his recent work, Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World is essentially expository, even if it’s more interested in eccentricity and excitement than information. Indeed, the film begins in the birthplace of the Internet, a drab UCLA computer lab, but quickly departs for stranger shores, exploring subjects ranging from online harassment to artificial intelligence to Internet connectivity on Mars.

by Peter Valelly

In his latest opus, veteran oddball filmmaker Peter Greenaway brings his ornate, grotesque, and visually immaculate style to bear on a particular and peculiar chapter in the life of Soviet ur-auteur Sergei Eisenstein. As its title suggests, Eiseinstein in Guanajuato follows the iconic filmmaker during an extended stay in Mexico. In the early 1930s, Eisenstein arrived in Guanajuato seeking to create an epic film chronicling Mexican history and politics, sponsored financially by left-wing muckraking American novelist Upton Sinclair. The project never quite came together, but not before Eisenstein blew through his budget shooting dozens of miles of film—all while allegedly undergoing a sexual awakening thanks to an affair with Jorge Palomino y Cañedo, a young academic who had been appointed his guide to Mexico.

by Joseph Houlihan

Kaili Blues, the first feature film by director Bi Gan set in the southern Chinese province of Guizhou, offers a vivid and dreamlike meditation.
 
It begins with the text of the Diamond Sutra, a central sutra for Mahayana Buddhists, emphasizing non-attachment and the world as illusion. This sutra especially empowers the persistent interrogation of human laws, and perceptions of reality. The plot follows a doctor at a small clinic, as he navigates the relationship with his brother and nephew, and the persistence of loss surrounding parents.

by Jeremy Meckler

by Peter Valelly

Directed by André Turpin, who has also served as a cinematographer for queer Québécois filmmaking wunderkind Xavier Dolan, among others, Endorphine is a masterclass in style in search of a stronger foundation of substance to ground itself in.
 
Stripped down to its most straightforward thread of plot—something along the lines of: “a teenage girl grapples with the trauma of witnessing her mother’s murder”--Endorphine might not sound like a film that would turn out to be a mindbending meditation on the nature of time, the permeability of reality, and the power of the unconscious mind. But that’s exactly what the film becomes over the course of its lean 83-minute runtime. Slowly and fitfully at first, the film veers into choppy narrative digressions and strange loops. Then, around the halfway mark, the story leaps ahead into the abstract while still remaining just barely tethered to its emotional core.

by Jeremy Meckler

Athina Rachel Tsangari takes the fragility of masculinity as her focus in Chevalier, a brief, sardonic drama that seems to cut to the quick of ego-driven machismo as a competition among a group of men gets out of hand. The group—a hodgepodge of family and work acquaintances—is on a vacation together, spearfishing and relaxing on a rented yacht. As a way to pass the time, they devise a game called chevalier, in which they each make up some contest in which all the others must compete for points. The one with the most points at the end of the trip is awarded a chevalier ring to prove that they are the “best in general.”