Cinema’s glitziest showcase kicks off this week with a slew of new movies from some of the greatest directors in the world. Here’s a guide to what to keep an eye out for.

The Cannes Film Festival is known for bringing a parade of celebrities to the south of France every May. But it's also considered one of the most important events for movie lovers around the world, showcasing new work from established and upcoming directors that we'll spend the rest of the year talking about.

Here's a look at more than two dozen films from this year's fest and its side programs that you'll want to look out for.

The New Gothic Dramas

Elle Fanning plays a would-be model who, like a lot of showbiz aspirants, heads to Los Angeles in (1) The Neon Demon (pictured). But, because we're talking about the new film from Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn, a man who takes his style with a hefty dose of darkness and vice versa, what follows is not a story about working as a waitress while waiting for a big break. Instead, it's a glittery nightmare in which people want to drain our heroine of her youth. An early trailer, which features bloody mouths and declarations of being dangerous, is entrancing, with Christina Hendricks, Jena Malone, and Keanu Reeves playing backup.

But The Neon Demon may not be as lush as (2) The Handmaiden, the latest from Oldboy's Park Chan-wook, which looks just as feverishly beautiful with all sorts of period trappings. The drama is set in Japan-occupied 1930s Korea, where a young woman (Kim Tae-Ri) takes a job at a country estate as part of scheme to help a con man marry the lady of the house, until everything overheats. Here's a rhythmic teaser filled with intrigue that suggests that in a competition between these two features, we all win.

Amazon Studios

The True Stories

(3) Loving (pictured) wins the prize for film most likely to garner Oscar talk at Cannes. It stars Joel Edgerton and Ruth Negga as Richard and Mildred Loving, who were arrested and charged with violating Virginia's anti-miscegenation statutes in 1958. The Supreme Court case they brought about struck down laws prohibiting interracial marriage, making for a story with more than enough power to fuel a movie. But Loving is promising beyond the weight of its story; it's written and directed by Jeff Nichols, of Midnight Special and Take Shelter, who seems capable of making this a good movie in addition to being an important one.

Over in the Directors' Fortnight, a program that runs parallel to Cannes, Gael García Bernal plays a police inspector hunting Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (Luis Gnecco) in Pablo Larrain's (4) Neruda. It focuses on the Nobel laureate in the late '40s, at a time when he was a fugitive after speaking out against the right-wing regime. Larrain's not one to let a biopic just be a biopic, and Neruda reportedly has a solid film noir streak.

Meanwhile, (5) Hands of Stone focuses on the relationship between boxer Roberto Durán (Édgar Ramírez) and his trainer Ray Arcel (Robert De Niro), but its supporting roles are what's really eye-catching — especially Usher as Durán's famous opponent over multiple fights, Sugar Ray Leonard.

Focus Features

Love in Extreme Circumstances

Orphan Black's Tatiana Maslany heads north for Kim Nguyen's chilly Directors' Fortnight romance (6) Two Lovers and a Bear. She falls for Dane DeHaan in a small town of around 200 near the North Pole until the past comes calling.

And it's in war-ravaged Liberia where Javier Bardem and Charlize Theron stage their love story in (7) The Last Face (pictured). She's the director of an international aid agency and he's a doctor, though a behind-the-scenes relationship has just as much dramatic potential — the movie's directed by Sean Penn, Theron's former fiancé. Either way, the cast is terrific, with Blue Is the Warmest Color's Adèle Exarchopoulos, Jared Harris, and Jean Reno in supporting roles.

River Road Entertainment

View Entire List ›

Jennifer Lawrence and Oscar Isaac in X-Men: Apocalypse.

Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation

X-Men: Apocalypse gives you a glimpse of Oscar Isaac, bare-chested, bald, and beautiful, in its opening flashback in Egypt in 3600 BCE.

It's a tease. A minute later, the blue powers of its title villain, né En Sabah Nur, seep inside of him and take him over as part of a consciousness-transferring, body-snatching procedure, and Isaac spends the rest of the movie encased in blue makeup and bewildering motivations as he seeks to remake the world and reappoint himself as its god.

Isaac isn't the only big name to have been woven into the franchise — Apocalypse, like the two previous movies, flounders at giving Jennifer Lawrence (way more famous now than when she appeared in 2011's X-Men: First Class) more non-blue screen time and a place of prominence. But Isaac's appearance in the film seems a particular waste after he proved himself so resoundingly last year as both an actor and a heartthrob. It's not just that you can barely see Isaac; it's that Apocalypse is such an incredible letdown as a foe, with his fixation on being worshipped, the amount of time he spends recruiting an entourage, and, frankly, the micromanaging attention he gives his henchmen's various new looks.

Michael Fassbender

Alan Markfield / 20th Century Fox

For an ancient antagonist reaching back to the dawn of time — the first mutant! The baddest bad to have ever badded! — Apocalypse is neither frightening nor memorable, aside from the way he personally applies the facial decal on one of his four followers. After emerging in 1983 following millennia of being buried underground, Apocalypse catches up on the current status of the planet by absorbing it through a television. "Learrrning," he groans, like a very drunk Leeloo from The Fifth Element. Getting to the "war part," he likes it, and he decides unworthy humans have been in charge for too long and it's time for him to put mutants back on top. He turns people into sand. He's camp, but the rest of the movie isn't — the rest of the movie tries to parcel out earnest angst to its many, many characters, leaning on recognition from past X-Men installments to give them a wholeness that the film doesn't have time to fill out itself.

The biggest recipient is Magneto (Michael Fassbender), who's gone to ground since Days of Future Past, hiding in Eastern Europe, married with a daughter and a factory job. That life is taken from him, abruptly and awfully, in what is essentially a police shooting after he outs himself as a mutant by saving someone at work. It's one of the few instances of regular ol' humanity in the movie, and it's only in the context of a character careening back to wanting to destroy it. Fassbender is the tormented heart of the X-Men prequels, imbuing his character with soulful tragedy (and still giving the best "I'm using my superpowers" grimace in the business), but he struggles to bring freshness to Magneto's latest cycle of destroy/remorse in this sequel, even when he levels Auschwitz with new, Apocalypse-issued strength. It's a scene that should be audacious, but instead is a shrug, the wreckage spiraling prettily into the air — his powers are bigger, but not more meaningful.

Sophie Turner, Kodi Smit-McPhee, and Tye Sheridan.

20th Century Fox

Apocalypse director Bryan Singer's always had a way with the beats between the action, the ones that made mutantism such an all-purpose stand-in for the targets of intolerance — Iceman's "coming out" to his parents in X2; Rogue's fear that her own body and sexuality were deadly in the X-Men world, when her first kiss sent someone into a coma; Mystique spitting about how "people like you are the reason I was afraid to go to school as a child"; Magneto's powers rumbling to life in that Nazi concentration camp. But in Apocalypse, the "you're with us or against us" of it all is as abstract as that scene of Magneto vowing a new genocide while obliterating the site of a past one. The baby mutants — like Jean Grey (Sophie Turner), Cyclops (Tye Sheridan), and Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee) — have little interaction with the outside world after their introductions. In the big finish, we're given flashes of some worried faces in a war room to provide a reminder of the mostly offscreen stakes of the battle.

Apocalypse focuses on mutant-on-mutant action, with Beast (Nicholas Hoult), Quicksilver (Evan Peters, once again getting the best scene in the movie), Mystique (Lawrence, looking uncharacteristically at sea), and Xavier (James McAvoy) on one side and Apocalypse and his horsemen Angel (Ben Hardy), Storm (Alexandra Shipp), Psylocke (Olivia Munn, weakest of the bunch), and Magneto on the other. But Apocalypse is so silly, and his actions are so lacking the pained resonance of past movies' clashes — that fundamental schism over what's best for mutantkind — that it hardly matters. They fight, and some change their mind, and for some, it wasn't clear why they were fighting in the first place. Like Oscar Isaac in that first scene, Apocalypse loses its humanity early on, and never figures out what to replace it with.

George Clooney and Julia Roberts in Money Monster.

Atsushi Nishijima / Sony Pictures Entertainment

The best scene in Money Monster involves Molly (Emily Meade), the pregnant girlfriend of Kyle Budwell (Jack O'Connell), a working stiff who's reached his breaking point after losing his savings in a bad investment. Now he's taken the finance news show of the title, a riff on Jim Cramer's Mad Money, hostage.

Kyle is holding a gun, he's put an explosive vest on host Lee Gates (George Clooney), and he's insisted that the show continue to broadcast live while he demands answers as to how the company Lee told his viewers to put their money in lost $800 million overnight. Yes, he's mad as hell, and he's not going to take it anymore.

The cops outside track down Molly, who's just gotten home from work, and they bring her in to try to talk Kyle down — standard hostage movie stuff, in which a woman weeps while begging her man to think of her, think of their child. Only in Money Monster, the scene doesn't go as expected at all, because once she's linked in, Molly proceeds to give Kyle a darkly hilarious reaming over his last stand histrionics, snarling, "You are so fucking stupid. You have always been such a fucking failure." After she questions his manhood, Molly drops the mic and leaves her significant other to extract himself from the precarious position he's put himself in. It's a long-in-coming, deeply satisfying twist on a teary cliché.

Jack O'Connell

Atsushi Nishijima / Sony Pictures Entertainment

Money Monster, Jodie Foster's fourth film as a director, is never as interesting as it is in that moment. For the most part, it feels airlifted in from the last decade, not a Network update for the Occupy age so much as a sibling to Foster-led thrillers like Flightplan and Panic Room with ambitions of relevance but few distinguishing characteristics. It takes aim at the 24-hour news cycle that encourages Lee to dole out a daily stock tip without bothering to ask questions. "We don't do gotcha journalism here — hell, we don't do journalism, period," Money Monster's director Patty (Julia Roberts) drawls to spokesperson Diane Lester (Outlander's Caitriona Balfe) in an effort to reassure her that an interview will go according to the talking points she provided.

It also takes a swat at finance ethics as represented by Walt Camby (Dominic West), head of the high-frequency trading company Diane represents and Lee recommended, and at amateur investors swayed by easy promises of big investments rather than researching where they're putting their money. It's not pointed enough to give a good skewering to any of these parties, not evil execubot Walt or poor, dumb Kyle, whose willingness to proclaim that the system is "rigged" is fed by his desire to clear his name. Money Monster comes closest with Lee, who fancies himself more of a celebrity than a newscaster, but there's devastating evidence that proves just how little the public cares about him when he tries to motivate the masses.

Dominic West and Caitriona Balfe.

Atsushi Nishijima / Sony Pictures Entertainment

Where Money Monster does more than go down slick and easy and fade fast is in the way it slyly undermines the trio of men in its spotlight — Lee, Kyle, and Walt, all guided by ego and all ending up looking foolish for it, while women like Patty and Diane prop them up or attempt to, eventually growing tired of cleaning up their messes. Patty, exhausted by Lee's preening and the show's lack of substance, is on the verge of heading to a new job, while Diane starts to wonder what, exactly, she's defending as the company she works for is scrutinized. And Molly does her walking away during the movie.

Money Monster suggests that the need to prove oneself a big man fuels the flawed system its characters are a part of, and that this is something its female characters come to understand and grow exasperated by. It's only too bad the movie isn't about them, though being sensible is a lot less dramatic than arriving with a bomb and a gun to take a TV studio hostage.

Kristen Stewart and Jesse Eisenberg in Café Society.

Amazon Studios

Woody Allen's Café Society had its premiere as the opening-night film at Cannes on May 11.

It's the reason discussions have reignited over accusations that Allen sexually abused his daughter Dylan Farrow when she was 7 years old, though the movie itself has gotten lost in the conflagration. The furor started with a Hollywood Reporter cover story in which — as has almost uniformly been the case in the rare occasions Allen chooses to do interviews — he was not asked about the allegations. He did, however, manage to describe his marriage to Soon-Yi Previn in terms which made him sound like he was patting himself on the back for "saving" an adopted child from another country, rather than discussing his spouse.

A week later, Allen's son Ronan Farrow penned a searing rebuttal in the same outlet, writing that the interview was, to him, "a sterling example of how not to talk about sexual assault." He reprimanded the media for choosing not to jeopardize their access or ruffle feathers by asking Allen anything that would make the director feel uncomfortable, calling stars out for continuing to work with him, and calling Amazon out for making multiple deals with Allen, including one for the rights to Café Society.

Steve Carell

Amazon Studios

Farrow predicted that when Allen and his cast rolled up to the press conference for the new film, they could "trust that the press won't ask them the tough questions. It's not the time, it's not the place, it's just not done." And he was right, though at a press luncheon today, reporters did ask if he'd read Farrow's piece, and he repeated lines he's used before about never reading his own press — including, apparently, a piece by his own child. It was, incidentally, an event from which THR's reporters had been banned by Allen's publicist, proving another of Farrow's points almost too perfectly, and illustrating the protective armor Allen had set up for himself.

It's all enough to blot out any movie, and Café Society is all too blot-out-able, a low-impact bildungsroman starring an Allen-impersonating Jesse Eisenberg as Bobby, a young man from the Bronx who, in the 1930s, leaves home and heads to Hollywood to hit up his uncle Phil (Steve Carell) for a job. Bobby falls in love with Phil's assistant Vonnie (Kristen Stewart), not realizing that she's been dating the married Phil on the sly and will eventually be forced to choose between the two men. Disillusioned with Los Angeles and heartbroken, Bobby heads back to New York to run a nightclub with his gangster brother (Corey Stoll) and to encounter a new romantic prospect (Blake Lively).

It's a film that covers several years and relationships but comes across like a rambling anecdote being told by someone who keeps skipping over the interesting parts. Over a montage, a narrator (Allen) tells us that Bobby and Vonnie fall in love; later, he'll tell us that Bobby met a lot of people and learned a lot of lessons working in the club. If that's not the stuff of the story — the parts that are important to see unfold — then what is? Well, mostly how a young man becomes a slightly older man, and learns that time passes, and people change, and that he shouldn't be a dick. The love story is secondary to what Bobby takes from it, as are his experiences in L.A., which he grows sick of in the space of an edit.

Blake Lively

Amazon Studios

As a movie, it's harmless, though it recycles plenty of standard Allen tics: neurotic hero (there's a painful scene in which Bobby hires and then refuses an escort played by Anna Camp), a younger woman with an older man, lightweight philosophical musings, and nostalgia so thick it gives everything a golden glow. It evaporates upon contact, this melancholy doodle of a movie, its jokes barely jokes. Its only memorable quality is a performance from Stewart so present it almost throws the movie off-balance, suggesting more complexity to her character than seems to have been on the page.

Café Society is Allen's 12th at Cannes, and the festival seems to be on board for as long as he keeps making movies. This year, though, his place of prominence has a particular sting, because this film is clearly meant to be a bit of escapist relief, a pleasant trifle to kick things off before heavier fare (like the three-hour Romanian drama that followed it at the festival). But for plenty of filmgoers, there's nothing about Allen that can ever be a light diversion, not anymore. He casts too large a shadow over his own work to be ignored.

The BFG.

Disney

Roald Dahl's novels have sharp edges that tend to get filed away when they're made into movies, seemingly out of a misguided idea that children can't handle a little darkness.

On the pages of James and the Giant Peach, for instance, Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker get squashed to death by the titular peach as it rolls down the hill toward the sea; the main character in The Witches is never turned from a mouse back into a boy; and in The BFG, the title character's brethren go out every night and snatch people out of their beds to eat them. But that's largely (heh) abstracted from Steven Spielberg's new adaptation of Dahl's 1982 children's book.

Dahl's BFG isn't just clear about the people-eating, it's filled with irresistibly groanworthy gags about how the natives of various countries taste — Turks are reminiscent of turkey, Swedes have a "Sweden sour taste," and everyone from Greece is safe on account of their greasy flavor. Spielberg's movie vaguely suggests the whole human-hunting thing is a recent development for giants and arranges for the bulk of them to ultimately regret their "cannybull" ways. (Honest question: If a giant's clearly not human, is that accusation fair?)

The Big Friendly Giant of the movie is, as he is in the book, the veggie-munching, malapropism-prone runt of a group of man-gobbling giants. He's played with a twinkle and motion capture technology by Bridge of Spies star Mark Rylance, and he's an overall softer, less odd, easier to take version of the towering character than the unpredictable, shouty one in the book, who feels more like an unstable but kindhearted uncle. He still swivels his big ears, this BFG, but Sophie (Ruby Barnhill), the plucky orphan he snatches when she spots him and whom he quickly befriends, doesn't do any riding in them.

Barnhill as Sophie.

Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

The result is a movie that's comfortable, but also as soporific as a warm, stuffy room. The BFG isn't a book in which all that much happens to begin with, and whittling away some of the weirder and grimmer bits means more time to have to fill with awe. Spielberg whisks some lovely images together to portray the land of the giants, including the den hidden behind a waterfall that the BFG has filled with dreams in bottles like multicolored fireflies, and the way his oversized comrades (played by Bill Hader and Jemaine Clement, among others) use grassy sod as their blankets. But the movie presumes a sense of wonder more often than it actually generates one, from Sophie's trip with the BFG to Dream Country, to the implementation of the pair's plan to enlist the help of the queen (Penelope Wilton, entertainingly proper in the face of a surprising visitor) to get rid of the other giants.

The BFG was written by Melissa Mathison, who died last year, and who wrote the screenplay for Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, one of the greatest children's movies of all time. In the relationship between Sophie and the BFG, there are echoes of Elliott's friendship with E.T., but there's little of the emotional depth. The movie's got more in common with Spielberg's most recent The Adventures of Tintin, in which the technology also dazzled and the end result also felt a bit hollow.

The BFG creates a cozy '80s England, a sun-dappled giants' otherworld, and a looming, lovable goliath with the expressiveness of a recent Oscar winner, and yet it lacks the soul of Quentin Blake's simple, charmingly squiggly original drawings. Sharp edges may not be safe, but they prevent something from slipping through the fingers the way The BFG does as soon as it's over.

Ryan Gosling and Russell Crowe in The Nice Guys.

Warner Bros.

At one point during The Nice Guys, Holland March (Ryan Gosling) says that he thinks he might be invincible. "It's the only thing that makes sense," he shouts.

March, a grieving widower with a teenage daughter, is certainly not invulnerable. By the time that scene comes around, the seedy private eye has already gashed open a wrist and almost bled out; had an arm broken by his future partner, a professional bruiser named Jackson Healy (Russell Crowe); fallen off of multiple buildings; and been shot at often and with great enthusiasm. The steady-to-sloppy buzz he maintains throughout the movie likely helps to dull the physical pain. March is a live-action cartoon of a man living and repeatedly nearly dying in 1977 Los Angeles. His finest moment, involving a tall building and a swimming pool, is right out of the Wile E. Coyote handbook, only with more splatter. Turns out goofy is a good look for Gosling.

It's not like the actor hasn't been funny before, even though his career's been heavy with roles of meme-worthy sad-eye seriousness. In Crazy, Stupid, Love and The Big Short, he played amusing variations on the same sort of preening dirtbag: one with a squishy center, and the other happily heartless (he also gives good Drunk History). But the comedy of his characters in those films stemmed from their swaggering douchiness, their ease with their own dominance in their gym-toned bods and pricey suits.

Warner Bros.

For March, on the other hand, it's been a long time since he was on top of his game. He wakes up in his bathtub and makes a living squeezing old ladies for extra fees for jobs that will never go anywhere. When he tries to flirt, it goes disastrously. He's never going to look like hell, because he looks like Ryan Gosling, but he does the best he can to come close. He's a pratfalling, polyester-clad disaster, and, playing off Crowe's violent-minded straight man, Gosling comes across as a man freed, double-taking and tumbling head over heels down a hill and floundering to hold a gun on someone while sitting on the can. There's nothing cool about him.

But there is plenty of cool in The Nice Guys, the third film helmed by Shane Black, who got his start writing wisecracking action classics like Lethal Weapon and Last Action Hero before getting into directing himself. The movie is a featherweight take on the kind of conspiracy-oriented mysteries Los Angeles is so well suited for, from Chinatown to Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Crowe's Healy resembles a funnier, extralegal version of the character he played in the 1997 neo-noir L.A. Confidential, and the actor even reunited with co-star Kim Basinger, who plays a Department of Justice big shot who hires March and Healy to find her errant daughter Amelia (Margaret Qualley).

Warner Bros.

Then there are porn producers and film projectionists, anti-smog demonstrators and Matt Bomer as an assassin with a haircut out of The Waltons. And there's Angourie Rice, a delight as March's precocious13-year-old girl-detective daughter Holly, who helps out her father and his new buddy. The two men bicker and flounder their way through the narrative, which includes an attempt to make the world a better place with — of all things — a movie. Like Quentin Tarantino incorporating cinema into his Inglourious Basterds plot, filmmaking is woven into the DNA of the story, which, like a lot of noirs (neo and otherwise), is more about the journey than how well the pieces fit together. The Nice Guys' take on this device is not as heavy as, say, a storyline to murder Hitler; in the same way, it's never as smart as the other films it gestures toward. Lines like "Marriage is buying a house for someone you hate" come out sounding cleverer than they actually are — but it crackles nevertheless, and in Gosling's pairing with the laconic Crowe, it finds a genuinely pleasurable pair of losers trying hard to eke out a win.

Elle Fanning in The Neon Demon.

Broad Green Pictures

The Neon Demon opens with a gorgeous, disturbing shot of Elle Fanning posing like a high-fashion murder mannequin, selling sex and violence as if the two have interchangeable appeal — her face covered in gem decals and her body in blood as she's sprawled over a chaise like she's just had her throat slit. The Handmaiden is a lesbian romance whose main characters control the narrative except when they have sumptuously filmed intercourse, at which point the perspective retreats to the ideal distance from which to leer as they 69. And Elle starts with its heroine getting raped, and then becomes a revenge story of sorts, but not before the victim forms a relationship with her attacker that should launch a million fiery think pieces.

Behold the problematic faves of this year's Cannes Film Festival — movies that are deftly made, headily stylish, and cracklingly clever, and that nevertheless require a "but..." But it's about a character who sleeps with her rapist. But it's incredibly male-gaze-y. But it's populated with women who literally devour each other while trying to be the fairest one of all.

Cannes has been home to plenty of controversial and outrageous movies. Just last year, Gaspar Noé offered formalwear-clad audiences unsimulated sex and an ejaculation right at the camera, all in 3D. But The Neon Demon, The Handmaiden, and Elle aren't controversial, not in bomb-throwing ways that aim to make people walk out of the theater. Their asterisks are as worth exploring as all the things they do well.

The Neon Demon.

Broad Green

Take The Neon Demon, the latest from Drive's Nicolas Winding Refn, a director who wears his many fetishes on his sleeve, and who's consumed with highly stylized, electro-scored fables about anguished men. This new one is actually about a woman, or rather a teenage girl named Jesse (Fanning), who was orphaned at 16 and has newly arrived in a dreamlike L.A., with aims of making it big in modeling. She has drifted into a dark industry comedy by way of Dario Argento, a syrupy world where identically long-legged women strut in lingerie for higher-ups who evaluate them with the cool eyes of a gambler considering horseflesh, and where women are also regularly criticized or fired in front of rooms full of people — just business, you know. But Jesse is different as she strolls into agency representation, a shoot with famous photographers, and a gig with an established designer. Everyone looks at Jesse with a hunger that's not quite lust, as if yearning to suck the dewy youth, the newness out of her bones.

The Neon Demon is a toxic fairy tale, but Refn is too in love with its toxicity for anything as prosaic as a critique. Everyone in it has been warped, like cutthroat models Sarah (Abbey Lee) and Gigi (Bella Heathcote), who've internalized the brisk cruelty of the industry rather than built up defenses against it, interested only in attacking rivals rather than uniting against the people treating them as discardable.

The movie is a bloody-mawed catfight on hallucinogens, but the visual splendor doesn't change the fact that the film barely has characters. Instead, it has shadow figures in the dark, like Jena Malone's motherly-predatory makeup artist Ruby, or Desmond Harrington's aloof-predatory photog Jack, or Keanu Reeves, who's much fun as the sleazy-predatory owner of the motel in which Jesse stays. Jesse herself is an enigma, green but aware of and ever more confident in her own power. Refn creates a seductively surreal version of hyper-competitive showbiz, but he can't get inside his heroine's head and find the emotional core that his teary men always have, no matter how heightened their environments. It's not the sexualized violence or the woman-on-woman viciousness that's the film's weakness — it's the distance.

Kim Min-hee and Kim Tae-ri in The Handmaiden.

Amazon Studios

The Handmaiden has no trouble getting inside its main characters' heads. The film, directed by Oldboy provocateur Park Chan-wook, spends most of its runtime there, with Sook-hee (Kim Tae Ri) and Hideko (Kim Min-hee) narrating large sections from their own distinctively prickly points of view. Sook-hee is a thief masquerading as a meek lady's maid in order to help a con man in his scheme to marry a rich noblewoman. That noblewoman would be Hideko, who looks like a porcelain doll but who's harboring some very dark depths. Most of the movie is set in the labyrinthine of the half-British, half-Japanese mansion in which Hideko lives with her uncle, observing as desire builds between the two women, simmering over baths and scenes of one dressing the other.

The Handmaiden is based on Sarah Waters' 2002 novel Fingersmith, with the action transposed from Victorian England to Japan-occupied Korea in the 1930s. Fans of the book will likely find the film maddening in how it whips between being guided by its characters' growing attachment and gawking at it. It's not the sex itself, it's the way it's filmed, like it's an act the characters are performing for the camera rather than each other — one late explicit scene is the most hilariously gratuitous part of a largely unnecessary coda.

But The Handmaiden is sexy and twisty and so compelling despite this, lodging itself in the points of view of two women who are constantly underestimated by the men around them, and who learn to take advantage of how they're misjudged. With intrigue that includes the staged reading of erotica, you could argue that Sook-hee and Hideko end up reclaiming acts originally described for the enjoyment of men for themselves — if the enjoyment of men didn't seem so important in how they're portrayed.

Isabelle Huppert in Elle.

Sony Pictures Classics

The heroine of Elle, however, has no patience whatsoever for those who'd underestimate her. Her name is Michelle (played by the ferocious Isabelle Huppert) and she is the witheringly, fabulously unsentimental CEO of a video game company. Elle — which is directed by returnee from Hollywood Paul Verhoeven (of Total Recall, Showgirls and, more recently, Black Book) — is essentially a startlingly enjoyable character study with an extraordinarily difficult starting point. It opens with Michelle getting raped by a man in a ski mask who broke into her house, and who leaves her, bleeding, on the floor. Rather than call the cops, with whom she has a bad history, she cleans herself up, orders delivery, has her doofus son over for dinner, all the while turning the experience over in her mind, indulging in fantasies in which she beats her attacker's head in with an ashtray.

The assault isn't dismissed or made light of, despite Michelle's cool customer display. Rather, it's how Elle introduces itself as a film about what happens when you don't have the reactions people consider to be normal, an aspect of Michelle's life since she was a child. She isn't dead inside or unaffected, she simply has no interest in fitting herself to others' expectations of appropriate behavior — something that's also true in regard to her son's disastrous relationship, her elderly mother's disastrous relationship, as well as the programmers at her company who loathe and fear her. Unsure of how to tell those closest to her about what happened, she shruggingly informs them over dinner, and the way their shocked silence is interrupted by the waiter popping champagne is the kind of dark joke Elle specializes in.

The dearth of fucks Michelle has to give about the feelings of others is a sort of superpower, and Huppert's desert-worthy aridness and impeccable timing make this character one of her most enjoyable roles. Elle stumbles, but doesn't quite fumble the ball, when Michelle figures out the identity of her attacker, and makes some decisions that aren't unconventional so much as opaque. There's a difference between psychological complexity and having your otherwise smart cookie of a main character do things that put herself in danger, and Elle wades into territory in which the two get muddied.

The Neon Demon, The Handmaiden, and Elle are, after all, movies from button-pushing directors whose aims aren't always precise, even if their filmmaking is superbly on point. And I had the most fun arguing over Elle at this year's festival, an event that sometimes felt like it uses its art-for-art's-sake standing as a shield against such conversations. Movies don't exist in a vacuum, even at Cannes, but discussing their flaws also shouldn't mean they're dismissed.

From blockbuster directors to ones behind earnest indie dramas, here’s a list of famous and not-yet-famous names. It’s hardly complete, but it’s a place to start if you’re interested in Asian-American talent behind the camera.

Gregg Araki

Araki, who is Japanese-American, is a pioneer of the New Queer Cinema movement of the '90s. He really established his career on the provocations of his "teen apocalypse trilogy," a trio of movies from the '90s about sex, violence, and alienation featuring increasingly famous and soon-to-be-famous casts, including Rose McGowan (who's spoken about her experiences shooting The Doom Generation), Johnathon Schaech, Heather Graham, Christina Applegate, Ryan Phillippe, and Kathleen Robertson. Since, he's expanded into an examination of the dynamics of a "throuple" (Splendor), a drama about the effects of sexual abuse on a pair of young men (Mysterious Skin), a combination college/end of the world movie (Kaboom), and a thriller and coming-of-age story starring Shailene Woodley (White Bird in a Blizzard).

Where to start: It may not be obviously representative of his career as a whole, but Araki's 2007 Smiley Face is the best damn pot comedy ever made, and features Anna Faris in her funniest film role.

Smiley Face: First Look International

Jon M. Chu

Was Chu's finest moment when he documented Justin Bieber's then-iconic bowl cut being shaken out in luxuriant 3D slow motion in 2011's Justin Bieber: Never Say Never? Or when he sent Moose (Adam G. Sevani) and Camille (Alyson Stoner) shuffling delightfully down the sidewalk to a remixed Frank Sinatra in 2010's Step Up 3D? Chu's ascendance to big-studio director has been tied to music and dance since his creation of web series The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers. Now the Taiwanese-American filmmaker is trying to bring the same sense of spectacle to magician heist sequels Now You See Me 2 and 3, and after that, he's been in talks to take on the adaptation of Kevin Kwan's best-selling 2013 novel Crazy Rich Asians, having promised on Twitter that there will be "amazing Asian actors cast in EVERY SINGLE ROLE."

Where to start: Chu's Step Up franchise contributions — he did 2: The Streets and 3D — are a good time, with or without Channing Tatum.

Step Up 3D: Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

Destin Daniel Cretton

Cretton, who is half Japanese, made his feature debut with I Am Not a Hipster, a film about a talented and troubled indie musician living in San Diego, which is not nearly as obnoxious as its title might have you expect. But it's the 2013 feature Short Term 12 — which the filmmaker adapted from a short film he'd made a few years before — that drew a great amount of attention, thanks to fantastic performances and a deftly drawn story about a group home that offers deep empathy to all of its characters. Next up, Cretton's due to reunite with his Short Term 12 star Brie Larson for The Glass Castle, an adaptation of Jeannette Walls’ memoir.

Where to start: Short Term 12 showcases Cretton's eye for talent. In addition to standout acting from Larson (who went on to win an Oscar three years later), the film shines a light on pre–Brooklyn Nine-Nine Stephanie Beatriz, pre–Mr. Robot Rami Malek, and Keith Stanfield in his first feature role.

Short Term 12: Cinedigm

Cary Joji Fukunaga

The Oakland-born, half-Japanese director made his feature debut in Spanish with Sin Nombre, a drama about a Honduran girl (Paulina Gaitán) and a Mexican gang member (Edgar Flores) attempting a dangerous border crossing into the U.S. Fukunaga continued to roam the earth in subsequent films, to England for Jane Eyre with Mia Wasikowska and Michael Fassbender; and to Africa for child soldier story Beasts of No Nation, with Idris Elba and newcomer Abraham Attah. But Fukunaga made the biggest splash of his career so far on TV, directing every episode of Season 1 of True Detective, creating the show's distinctively cinematic look (and rocking some serious man bun while promoting it), and then wisely hopping off before Season 2.

Where to start: Beasts of No Nation, which Fukunaga also shot, turns the visual lushness he brought to True Detective into a dreamlike haze in order to represent how a young boy surrenders to the unanchored, violent life he's been forced into.

Beasts of No Nation: Netflix

View Entire List ›

Emilia Clarke and Sam Claflin in Me Before You.

Alex Bailey / Warner Bros.

Me Before You is another love story overshadowed by death. Here, a young woman named Louisa (Emilia Clarke), who goes by Lou, falls for Will (Sam Claflin), the man she's been hired to keep company, whose accident two years earlier made him quadriplegic. Louisa and Will are older than the teen couples in The Fault in Our Stars and If I Stay — she's in her mid-twenties, and he's in his early thirties — but the film is very much a continuation of the recent resurgence in teary romances, in which hearts are more stalwart than the bodies in which they reside, and love collides with mortality so hard that whole forests' worth of tissue aren't enough to dry the audience's eyes.

The difference is — and it's quite a difference — Will isn't dying like Fault in Our Stars' Hazel or A Walk to Remember's Jamie; Will wants to die. He has decided to end his life, and it's only because he made a deal with his parents (Charles Dance and Janet McTeer) to hold off for six months that he hasn't yet follow through with his plan to travel to Switzerland, where assisted suicide is legal. Louisa unknowingly arrives during this period, desperate for a new job after having been laid off by the café where she worked for six years. She steps into Will's world after he's put a time limit on it, when he's testy and depressive, waiting in frustration. As he thaws to her bubbly charms (she is, he notes distastefully upon meeting her, "chatty," a quality he comes to appreciate), and as feelings well up between them, she becomes determined to prove to him that life is worth living — especially when it's with her.

Clarke in Me Before You.

Alex Bailey / Warner Bros.

Honestly? Fuck this whole concept.

Me Before You, which Thea Sharrock directed and Jojo Moyes adapted from her 2012 novel, never reconciles its hanky-wringing aims with the fact that its tragic male lead always has the option of choosing to live. Will's no longer the dashing, athletic finance bro living with his beautiful girlfriend (Vanessa Kirby) in a spacious loft that we get a glimpse of in the film's opening minutes. He relies on a wheelchair and the help of his two caregivers, Lou and occupational therapist Nathan (Steve Peacocke), who takes care of the physical aspects Lou isn't responsible for. He can no longer climb mountains or ski down them or anything close, and he's susceptible to pneumonia. But Me Before You makes it clear that it's not the difficulty of Will's new life that's the real problem — he admits that he could still have a good life — but that he can't reconcile what he lost. He was the shiny, bright master of the universe once, and now he's dependent on others, and because of it thinks he'd be better off dead.

It's a point of view that anyone actually living with a serious disability and, in all likelihood, without the resources to have one's stables converted into sleek, wheelchair-friendly living quarters, will undoubtably find enraging. But it's also a galling thing to underlie a romance, despite Claflin doing his best to sell Will as a Byronic hero slowly softening to the warmth of his working-class companion. Me Before You has an old-fashioned center, a romance in which a moody aristocrat's heart is captured by an unsophisticated young woman, whom he raises up with his attentions. Lou's family is loving but poor, sharing an overstuffed but lively house, while Will's is wealthy, repressed, and literally owns a castle. Lou favors quirky sweaters and colorful tights, and talks self-deprecatingly about the patrician blondes Will's used to in a way that might have more zing if she weren't herself played by an actor famous for the role of a platinum-maned queen. Will broadens Lou's horizons with foreign films and stories about Paris, reconnecting with the world through her experiences. Or at least that's Lou's hope.

Chaflin in Me Before You.

Alex Bailey / Warner Bros.

Of course, they fall in love, sometimes sweetly, especially in the enchanting scene in which Lou accompanies Will to his ex's wedding, and they spin together on the dance floor, Lou perched on Will's lap. Then everything crumbles to pieces when the movie returns to its emotional blackmailing premise, in which Will has to decide if he's going to stick with his resolution, and if so, how Lou will react. This being a tearjerker, you can guess what his choice is, but that doesn't make it any less brutally manipulative of a development, especially given the way Will's death wish is positioned as a result of depression. A drama in which everyone, lips trembling, approves of an able-bodied person's desire for suicide would be obviously repellent, but in Me Before You, a man's suicidal ideation is treated as tragic but understandable, his disability making his life less worth saving.

Isn't that romantic? No, it's really not.

Warcraft

Universal Pictures

Warcraft feels like a bad date both parties are desperately trying to make the best of, smiling brightly through every lull in conversation and pretending an awkward hug was the totally optimal way to say good night. Movies being made from popular video game properties is a setup that, on paper, makes sense, but in practice turns out to be a chemistry-free matchmaking of talent, material, and form. There's a decades-long tradition of mediocre-to-atrocious versions of this, and Warcraft isn't the feature that's going to change that.

But it really seems like it should have been. Director Duncan Jones, who also wrote the screenplay with Charles Leavitt, pursued the long-in-the-works adaptation of the Blizzard video game series after Sam Raimi, who was originally attached, left. Jones, whose previous films include the lowish-budget breakout Moon and the Jake Gyllenhaal thriller Source Code, is a gamer himself. More importantly, he's an endearingly open and unabashed geek, the kind who'd treat a saga about warring orcs and humans, mages in high towers, and a green-glowing death magic called "the Fel" with all seriousness and no hint of nose-holding. If anyone could make a decent movie out of Warcraft's past-its-prime high fantasy universe, it should be Jones, an ideal banner-carrier for Hollywood's melding with Comic-Con culture.

Warcraft isn't decent. It isn't awful, either, though that would honestly be preferable — the sort of distinctive kamikaze train wreck whose spirit you admire. Instead, it comes across as a series of impersonal compromises made by talented people who've resigned themselves to the fact that major movies these days are more brand product than cinema.

Universal Pictures

It racks up its victories in what it doesn't do. It doesn't makes the clash between the humans of Azeroth and the orcs arriving through a mystical portal into a simplistic battle of good and bad guys. It doesn't use its main female character, the half-orc Garona (Paula Patton, emoting impressively around fang-y prosthetics), as an ornament or a damseled plot device. It doesn't allow all of its many characters to live to the end, which offers room for a few surprises.

But it also doesn't provide the audience with any reason to care about its central conflict or the reasons behind it. It attempts to pack two realms' worth of world building in along the sides of a full-speed-ahead story that kicks off with the invasion. The film begins with an orc chieftain named Durotan (performed via motion capture by Toby Kebbell) and his pregnant mate Draka (Anna Galvin) joining a war party that promptly charges through a portal opened by the life-force-hoovering orc Gul'dan (Daniel Wu), a warlock who is intent on leaving the clan's dying land behind and conquering a new one.

The humans — repped primarily by smirky warrior Anduin Lothar (Travis Fimmel, opting for an utterly bonkers spectrum of accents), King Llane Wrynn (Dominic Cooper), and Lady Taria (Ruth Negga) — notice that mysterious forces have been wiping out local villages and garrisons. Fledgling mage Khadgar (Ben Schnetzer) insists it's time to call on Medivh (Ben Foster, easily the most giggle-inducing part of the cast), the kingdom's powerful, reclusive Guardian. By the time Durotan begins to question Gul'dan and the locale into which he's leading the orcs, Lothar and Khadgar have begun to suspect someone on their side has gone dark as well. If this sounds like a lot to absorb, it is.

Universal Pictures

Jones' previous movies were character-driven, despite their high-concept sci-fi nature. Moon was carried by the weight of Sam Rockwell's performance as a man slowly realizing the extent to which he's become a disposable cog in a ruthless corporate machine. Source Code did the same thing with Jake Gyllenhaal's soldier who is turned into an unwilling experimental recruit, desperately trying to will himself a way out of two seemingly dead-end realities. But Warcraft feels like it's battling with time (and itself) to establish its characters as anything other than fodder for its numbing fantasy melees.

An underdeveloped thread involving Lothar's young soldier son Clearly Doomed — er, Callan (Burkely Duffield) — is laughably predictable. The hint of romance between Lothar and Garona is allotted a minute during which the actors appear to be considering whether kissing each other is even possible when tusks are involved. Schnetzer, who's much better in the upcoming hazing drama Goat, is inert as a baby magician who goes from thinking he knows what's really happening to knowing he knows what's really happening. Foster is introduced doing some less-than-stately shirtless clay sculpting and only gets more ridiculous and incomprehensible from there.

It's only Garona, presented as a half-human, half-orc version of the "tragic mulatto," who manages heartfelt drama in being forced to choose between the clan who has alternately despised, enslaved, and protected her and the humans whom she doesn't know or trust. Patton works twice as hard as the rest of the cast to sell the character's pain and confusion, and through her you can glimpse the potential Jones must have seen in the film as a whole. But she's the strength in what's otherwise a centerless garble of orc-on-human skirmishes, orc-on-orc showdowns, betrayals, overload of mythology, and sequel seeding.

Universal Pictures

Warcraft treats its material with deep solemnity, but never makes the case for why it deserves such regard, why a movie version of this material means anything other than ditching gameplay in order to focus on a setting and characters that, in the context of the big screen, just feel like diluted Tolkien swirled with a little Game of Thrones. Warcraft isn't the first great video game movie, but it's one that makes you wonder what the point of such adaptations is in the first place, when they end up flattening so much of what makes gameplay appealing. What's left is something that doesn't seem like it needs to exist, or even really wants to — it's two hours' worth of a movie that's simply waiting for the right moment to ask for the check and head home.

Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, Kristen Wiig, and Leslie Jones in Ghostbusters.

Hopper Stone / Columbia Pictures

With all love and respect for 1984’s Ghostbusters, the worst parts of the all-female reboot are ones in which the new film stops to pay obeisance to the old one — familiar faces trotted out for pause-for-applause cameos, labored business involving the logo. Like Star Wars: The Force Awakens, 2016’s Ghostbusters is a movie both boosted by nostalgia and constrained by it, retracing the steps of its predecessor like someone who bursts onto a dance floor ready to show off slick new moves, only to get railroaded into doing the Macarena.

It’s an obligation that’s best exemplified in a scene in which three of the main characters get squashed under an inflatable Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. There’s a spectral parade, and a set of malicious floats (it’s a long story), and boom! Down they go under the pillowy heft of the delicious, sailor-hatted destroyer of worlds. The camera cuts to the trio as shot from below as they try to talk, their faces contorted into Picasso portraits from being pressed against the ground. It’s a funny visual, and Ghostbusters is a funny movie, centered on four comedic performances too strong to pick a standout. But there’s a pointedness to the moment that isn’t accidental: The new characters are literally crushed under the weight of a holdover from the original film.

Hopper Stone / Columbia Pictures

Remaking this beloved film with women as leads is an act revolutionary enough to attract the ire of legions of Ghostbros insisting that the very concept will warp time and space to retroactively ruin their childhoods. But it’s also, you know, remaking a beloved film, one of Hollywood’s least revolutionary habits. Director Paul Feig and co-writer Katie Dippold sometimes seem caught between nodding to the past and rolling their eyes at the haters, when the gesture they really want to make is to flip the bird to everyone.

There is, in fact, a masterful sequence of sustained, creative bird-flipping in Ghostbusters, but it’s one that physicists Abby Yates (Melissa McCarthy) and Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig) and engineer Jillian Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon, playing what’s truly a human comic strip character) are on the receiving end of. The three get kicked to the curb by a sketchy scientific institute — and only after Erin has already been given the boot from her respectable gig at Columbia University. They have to set up shop above a Chinese restaurant — considering Tribeca firehouses command an outrageous price in rent these days — and hire a handsome idiot named Kevin (Chris Hemsworth, delightful) to serve as their absolutely terrible receptionist. In order to complete the team, they link up with MTA employee and NYC history buff Patty Tolan, played by Leslie Jones, who does a lot to fill out a character who could have benefited from a little more distance from the tired trope of the street-smart black person. And throughout their easygoing, enjoyable rollick through a contemporary New York (which looks suspiciously like Boston), and their budding business as busters of ghosts, they’re given continual grief by other humans. As Abby informs the movie’s villain, pasty hotel janitor Rowan (Neil Casey), “People dump on us pretty much all the time.”

Columbia Pictures

The ‘80s Ghostbusters montaged their way to a fame that included Time magazine covers and sexual favors from incorporeal groupies; these new Ghostbusters are debunked on NY1, publicly disavowed by the privately grateful mayor (Andy Garcia), and their videos sneered at as fakes on YouTube. When Abby notes it’s best to never read the comments, she might as well be talking about the response to the trailer of the very movie she’s starring in. The toxic pre-lash to this Ghostbusters has seeped into the plot, and especially into Rowan, an aggrieved internet-troll type who wants to “cleanse” the world as revenge for perceived mistreatment and gives himself pep talks in the mirror about how “You have been bullied your entire life — now you will be the bully!” Rather than empathize with the similarly maligned Ghostbusters, Rowan resents them, repurposes their research to empower his rage, and then makes them his new targets.

Within the inescapable structure of rescuing New York from spirits, ghostly possessions, and Rowan’s dastardly plan, the new Ghostbusters reveals itself to be a movie about learning to let go of the need for outside approval — something Erin, who has a long history of being doubted, struggles with the most. It’s a more radical shift than the gender-swapping, leaving the original film’s “we told you so” triumphs behind for the more touching, less fist-pumping “who cares what they think” realizations.

Jones, McCarthy, McKinnon, and Wiig are so good together — and in ways that are distinctively theirs and not recycled from the past — that their message of not giving a damn resonates better than the movie’s underwhelming climax. Saving the world and reliving memories of the older film isn’t the interesting part of Ghostbusters. The interesting part is in how these characters bounce off of one another along the way, these brilliant, awkward, hilarious women who come to find they need affirmation only from one another. It's a sight that’s worth all the nasty comment sections the internet has to offer.

Emma Roberts in Nerve.

Niko Tavernise / Lionsgate

The original Bourne trilogy (let’s not speak of the regrettable attempt at passing the torch from Matt Damon to Jeremy Renner in The Bourne Supremacy) was made up of movies that were bruisingly, brilliantly precise in their action and less so in terms of the relevance they flirted with. Their paranoia, cynicism, and grim envisioning of murders being committed in the name of national security felt timely without offering direct correlations, and were ultimately more about setting a dark tone than making an incisive comment.

But of all the indignities Damon’s title character, dug out of retirement after nine years, has to suffer in the disappointing Jason Bourne, the worst is how out-of-touch the new conspiracy he unravels feels, particularly when compared with fellow recent release Nerve. A romantic thriller about an iPhone game from Catfish directors Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman, Nerve is sharper and smarter about surveillance and social media than the latest installment of the spy franchise. Which might be less surprising if Jason Bourne weren’t so concerned with both topics, which are revealed to be integral to the CIA’s latest nefarious black ops program.

After years of operations with tasteful furniture-line names like Treadstone and Blackbriar, the CIA has focused its attention on something more practical and less overtly murder-y called Iron Hand, which is connected to a Google/Facebook-like company run by Aaron Kalloor (Riz Ahmed). Despite the ominous label, Iron Hand turns out to be a lot less dramatic than the previous Bourne initiatives, in which handsome men were expertly trained, lightly brainwashed, and then positioned as sleeper agent assassins around the world.

Jason Bourne compensates for its lack of urgency by stretching for greater relevance, with Silicon Valley dealings, a Julian Assange stand-in, and anti-austerity riots. But it just comes across as naive. Its version of the CIA, dominated by a crusty member of the old guard (Tommy Lee Jones) and a steely representative of the new (Alicia Vikander), is prepared to kill to cover up the fact that it’s demanding backdoor access to a widely used social media application — inexplicable given that the FBI and Apple have been having a similar battle out in the open for a while now. The Bourne movies have always existed in a world in constant surveillance, the reach of which has grown in each installment, and yet this latest film has more optimistic ideas about expectations of privacy than the average internet denizen.

Matt Damon in Jason Bourne.

Universal Pictures

Infinitely more on point is the way shy Staten Island high school senior Vee (Emma Roberts) impulsively signs away her life when registering for the title game in Nerve. It’s a 24-hour P2P game in which participants choose to be either players or watchers, the latter paying for the privilege of following the adventures of the former, who document themselves taking on a series of user-generated dares for money. The app pulls together information from each player’s internet footprint to make the dares more personal, which is how Vee is made to go up against her more outgoing bestie Sydney (Emily Meade). Arriving in theaters less than a month after millions of people gave away full access to their Google accounts in order to sign up for Pokémon Go, Nerve’s capturing of the blitheness with which its participants surrender their personal info for a chance at internet fame feels all too accurate.

Naturally, it all goes to hell, the consequences catching up with Vee in an over-the-top finale. But before that, Nerve is a dizzyingly of-the-moment good time, a dystopian meet-cute in present-day New York. There are benefits to having the attention of anonymous all-seeing eyes, which, for Vee, means getting teamed up with dreamboat Ian (Dave Franco) for dares that lead to dashing through a department store in skivvies and attempting a risky stunt on a motorcycle. The better the two do, the more they're watched, their conversations broadcast live, their locations mapped, watchers filming them on the street as they pass by. But Nerve has a sense of the sadism online mobs are capable of as well — as more players drop out and the stakes grow higher, the dares escalate too. Soon, it’s clear that for the watchers, seeing someone get hurt or killed is just as exciting as seeing them succeed.

Dave Franco and Roberts in Nerve.

Niko Tavernise / Lionsgate

Nerve’s ending doesn’t work because it uses hacking as a deus ex machina, and also because it tries to come up with a scenario in which an anonymous internet crowd feels chastised and shamed, something the real world has yet to manage. But its fictional game is eerily plausible, as are the liberties its players allow it.

What Nerve gets that Jason Bourne doesn’t is that privacy doesn’t need to be stolen from people. We surrender degrees of it all the time, for something as silly as a social media game that gives us the attention of strangers online. And it’s not that we’re not aware of the consequences; we just don’t think they’ll ever matter to us — until they do.

From a bittersweet drama to a difficult documentary about sex offenders, these are the under-the-radar films worth seeking out this month. Because, you know, there’s more to movies than blockbusters.

Don't Think Twice

Don't Think Twice is Mike Birbiglia's second venture as a director, and it's really one of the best and most heartachey films about comedians ever made. The showbiz world is one Birbiglia knows well — he's a stand-up comedian himself, and his autobiographical 2012 directorial debut Sleepwalk With Me dealt in part with learning to open up on stage. Don't Think Twice is about an improv troupe called the Commune that's New York famous, and that's served as a launching pad for members to go on to bigger things, like Weekend Live, a thinly disguised stand-in for SNL. But when the theater they've performed at for years is sold, the six members of the Commune have to figure out not only if they want to keep the group going, but if they want to keep struggling in this career path in general.

Among the film's lovable collection of comedic performers is Birbiglia himself as the group's why-am-I-not-famous-yet die-hard, Chris Gethard, Kate Micucci, and Tami Sagher. But it's Keegan-Michael Key and Gillian Jacobs who steal the show. The two play a couple whose relationship stretches and shows signs of stress after one of them gets a big break, providing a reminder that success isn't a guarantee of happiness, and that celebrity isn't everyone's end goal. Don't Think Twice is a movie about funny people, but it's ultimately a drama, one about accepting that people don't always achieve their grandest dreams, and that it's possible to accept that and go on to be just fine.

How to see it: Don't Think Twice is now playing in theaters in limited release — you can check locations here.

The Film Arcade

Gleason

There is a scene in the documentary Gleason in which its subject, pro footballer–turned–ALS spokesperson Steve Gleason, talks about the unexpected path his life took five years ago when he was diagnosed with the disease around the time his wife, Michel, became pregnant with their child, Rivers. "People will say, 'Oh, it's such a sad tragic story.' It is sad, so they're right, but it's not all sad. I think there's more in my future than in my past. I believe my future is bigger than my past — so that's uplifting, that's inspiring."

Gleason, which is directed by Clay Tweel, is, without question, a four-hanky weepie that follows the former New Orleans Saints player and his family as they adjust to a degenerative disorder that gradually takes away Gleason's ability to walk, to move, and to speak. But it's not a film that wallows in misery — instead, it's infused with that combination of tragedy and uplift that he speaks of, as he fights through increasingly difficult circumstances to record videos for his son, to bring resources to others with ALS, to reconcile with the father he's sometimes at odds with, and to spend time with the wife who's tirelessly at his side. The film is an earthy, lovely, and, yes, inspiring ode to soaking up the life you're given.

How to see it: Gleason is now playing in limited release — check out a list of theaters here.

Open Road Films

Mountains May Depart

Mountains May Depart takes place over three time periods — two in China, in 1999 and 2014, and one in a just slightly sci-fi Australia in 2025. With each time period, the horizons expand, the aspect ratio widening as the characters rush toward the promise of tomorrow, and with each time period, those characters seem more lost, more distant from a sense of identity and belonging. Mountains May Depart is the latest and maybe the finest work from Sixth Generation Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhangke, the foremost chronicler of his country's explosive growth and globalization, and of the people left swirling in the wake of all this change.

The new movie is about Tao (played by a luminous Zhao Tao, who's also Jia's wife), a girl from Fenyang trying to choose between the romantic attentions of her two best male friends. But it's also about how one of those men becomes an ultimately miserable member of China's nouveau riche while the other struggles as a migrant worker. And then it's about Tao's son, growing up abroad with all the advantages she wished for him and none of the connection, a young man adrift without a country. Mountains May Depart is a supremely bittersweet film about Chinese diaspora and about generations being flung, with all the best intentions, toward the future like lonely satellites. Also worth noting: This movie's spectacular use of a Pet Shop Boys song.

How to see it: Mountains May Depart is available on DVD, Blu-ray, and for digital rental and purchase. It's also now streaming on Netflix.

Kino Lorber

Pervert Park

Pervert Park is a documentary that offers no answers, but poses some incredibly challenging questions. It was filmed at a Florida trailer park that's home to more than 100 sex offenders, which was started by the mother of a sex offender after her son had trouble finding a place to go, seeing as it's illegal for anyone convicted to live within 1,000 feet of a place in which children gather, including schools, playground, and day care centers. The film features interview after extremely troubling interview with the park's heavily monitored residents, who've effectively been permanently branded as outcasts and monsters.

Aside from the college student who was caught in an internet sting, there's no question about the crimes the documentary's subjects have committed, crimes they relay in frank (and triggering) detail. But the perpetrators are often victims of childhood sexual abuse themselves, part of a self-perpetuating cycle that's difficult to grapple with. Directors Frida Barkfors and Lasse Barkfors are Swedish and Danish, respectively, and bring a measured outsider's eye to a tough topic, treating their subjects with empathy while never flinching from the terrible realities of what they did to end up where they are.

How to see it: An hour-length version of Pervert Park is streaming on PBS's POV Films site.

The Film Sales Company

View Entire List ›

Adam B. Vary / BuzzFeed News; Saldana: Paramount Pictures; Smith: Warner Bros. Pictures; Isaac: 20th Century Fox; Depp: Disney; Efron: Universal Pictures; Independence Day: 20th Century Fox

In the Age of No New Ideas, the term “sequel” has expanded in spirit, becoming a catchall for anything that isn’t original — which is to say, almost everything given a big summer release. It’s the same reason that “sequel,” for some, is also a handy shorthand term when talking about Hollywood’s perceived creative bankruptcy, in which intellectual property is stretched out and then recycled over and over until, like well-chewed gum, all its flavor is gone. Too many sequels, the argument goes, not enough fresh conceits.

But guess what: The greatest goddamn movie of last year, George Miller’s scorcher Mad Max: Fury Road, was a sequel, and one that jolted to life a series that had lain dormant for three long decades. Magic Mike XXL was warmer, shaggier, and better than the first film. Mission: Impossible — Rogue Nation was evidence that, against all odds, Tom Cruise’s 19-year-old action franchise was actually improving as it went along. They weren’t all winners, but last year’s array of sequels offered hope that, if studios were really only going to greenlight (at minimum) nominally familiar properties from now on, filmmakers could still find a way to make exciting, vital mainstream movies.

And then this summer came along, and it all went to hell.

Weekend after weekend, a sad parade of films adorned with numbers and colons tried to win over audiences. And weekend after weekend, people instead went, Nah, gonna look for Pokémon, or No thanks, gotta catch up on Stranger Things, or even You know, I think I’d rather watch the world burn down in real time on cable news. In a strange box office paradox, overall grosses are slightly up from last summer; and yet, other than genuine, mega-grossing blockbusters Finding Dory and Captain America: Civil War, every single franchise movie launched this summer was either a box office disappointment (X-Men: Apocalypse, Star Trek Beyond) or an outright flop (Independence Day: Resurgence, Now You See Me 2). Heck, even the less-than-immaculately conceived remake of the 1959 biblical epic Ben-Hur left the risible impression that, if the box office was righteous (it was not), our hero and his wayward brother could have conceivably returned for another spin in the arena.

Adam B. Vary / BuzzFeed News

These are movies that are supposed to have their runaway success built in. It’s the whole reason why studios have spent obscene amounts of money developing well-known properties into reliable movie franchises — and at the expense of investing in original filmmaking.

This summer, that practice has reached a particularly cheerless zenith. Of the top 30 films at the domestic box office this season, the majority have been sequels and their ilk: prequels, reboots, remakes, and the newest addition to the studio portfolio, extensions of an ongoing cinematic universe. Sequels have featured prominently during the summer for decades, but this level of marketplace saturation is something quite new, leaving the season with the feeling that all we get to consume now are lukewarm leftovers scrounged up from the back corner of the freezer.

The sequel isn’t going away. Which is fine. The problem’s not that there are too many sequels, just so many bad ones. So the real question is: Can sequels — and, by extension, blockbusters — be saved? From the ash heap of this dismal summer, here are a few lessons that can be scavenged for how Hollywood can make summer movies satisfying again.

Johnny Depp and Mia Wasikowska in Disney's Alice Through the Looking Glass.

Peter Mountain / Disney

1. Make Sequels That Have a Reason to Exist

The key difference between this summer’s big releases and last summer’s is not that so many recent sequels were unasked for by audiences, but that the people involved in making them seemed unsure as to why they should exist. Alice Through the Looking Glass, the extravagantly lackluster sequel to Tim Burton’s 2010 Alice in Wonderland, was a movie based on the plot point that...the Mad Hatter had become depressed. Also, something or other about how defying the entrenched gender norms of your era is just a question of trying a little harder.

Alice Through the Looking Glass wasn’t made because its predecessor created a world so overflowing with great ideas that it was begging for a revisit; it was commissioned because of the first film’s box office haul. That general feeling of directionlessness was in every element of the film, including how Mia Wasikowska and Johnny Depp reprised their roles with all the engagement of two people who only looked at the script for the first time on the way to set. It wasn’t even bad so much as it was $170 million worth of movie that was barely there, a feature with so little momentum it seemed to struggle to fill enough time to roll credits. When a film can barely bring itself to show up, how can audiences be expected to?

Matt Damon in Jason Bourne.

Jasin Boland / Universal Pictures

And that why are we here again? sensibility was all over this summer’s sequels. Neighbors was a pleasantly funny comedy, but its concept wasn’t nearly good enough to support a second attempt so soon after the first. Jason Bourne yanked its title character out of his off-the-grid retirement for crummy additional backstory — it should have ended with a brutal shaky-cam facepalm instead of a showdown in Vegas. Now You See Me 2? Independence Day: Resurgence? Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows? These would-be franchises overstayed their welcome in just two installments because there was so little in the way of anticipation or content to base these sequels on (aside from the idea that people paid to see the first film and so must want more, right?). The tail-end of August promises Mechanic: Resurrection, a follow-up to a 2011 Jason Statham action movie that most people probably don’t even remember; if the pattern holds, those same people sure as hell aren’t turning up to see its sequel.

These were products reverse engineered on the basis of box office numbers and stars, with the hope that the rest of the moviemaking equation would fill out somewhere along the way. Not only did these films fail to bring something new to the table, they seemed to have lost track of what was appealing about the originals in the first place.

Tye Sheridan, Nicholas Hoult, Evan Peters, Jennifer Lawrence, and Sophie Turner in X-Men: Apocalypse.

Alan Markfield / 20th Century Fox

2. Make Sequels That Can Stand on Their Own as Movies

Our current bout of sequelitis germinated ’round the time Marvel Studios began making a fuck ton of money stringing together a series of individual superhero franchises into a cohesive cinematic universe. You can imagine studio executives throughout Los Angeles collectively blinking at their May 2012 box office reports and thinking, Wait, you…you can do that?

It’s how we ended up with a movie like X-Men: Apocalypse, which presumes audiences have entered the theater deeply familiar with the previous eleventy X-Men movies stretching across two decades and at least two space-time continuums. The movie barely has a starting point, and instead does a check-in with more than a dozen disparate characters, like the opening episodes of a Game of Thrones season. And (spoiler alert, kinda) the film’s conclusion — bizarrely tidy after a global cataclysm — leaves just enough dangling plot strands for our next symposium with the uncanny X-Men. When factoring in 2017’s third Wolverine sequel and the long-delayed Gambit spin-off, it’s no wonder that one of the delights of February’s Deadpool was how it tugged so gleefully at the ragged threads that barely tie this franchise together.

Chris Pine in Star Trek Beyond.

Kimberley French / Paramount Pictures

Star Trek Beyond at least worked as a coherent film, but Captain Kirk’s cheeky joke in the opening monologue — that life on the Enterprise had started to feel “episodic” — proved all too prophetic. Screenwriters Simon Pegg and Doug Jung crafted a story that spent so much time evoking the scrappy rhythms of the original TV series that, despite director Justin Lin’s visual pyrotechnics, the film lost its way as cinema. The dialed-down stakes and shallow character arcs only reinforced how Star Trek works best when it’s on TV.

Look, Marvel Studios has certainly made its fair share of turkeys, too — even Captain America: Civil War, a billion-dollar sensation, was the company’s most TV-like movie yet. Marvel’s underlying success, however, is rooted in how its best films are able to carve out a unique space within its larger universe — they work as movies first, and as chapters in a larger story second. It’s a crucial step that other Hollywood studios have neglected at their peril.

Margot Robbie, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, Karen Fukuhara, Joel Kinnaman, Will Smith, and Jai Courtney in Suicide Squad.

Warner Bros. Pictures

3. Hire Directors Who Know What They’re Doing, And Let Them Do It

A few years ago, studios started snapping up smaller-time filmmakers in earnest to direct tentpole pictures. Marc Webb went from winsome non-rom-com (500) Days of Summer to The Amazing Spider-Man; Rupert Wyatt made the leap from prison break drama The Escapist to Rise of the Planet of the Apes; Gareth Edwards went from the $500,000 creature feature Monsters to the $160 million one Godzilla; and Colin Trevorrow leveled up from the indie Safety Not Guaranteed to the gargantuan Jurassic World. In theory, it was exciting: Promising newcomers with fresh eyes and different sensibilities were being brought in from outside the system and allowed to play in the industry’s biggest sandboxes (even if, in practice, the directors being given these daring think-outside-the-box chances were almost uniformly thirty- and fortysomething white men).

Director David Ayer and Will Smith on the set of Suicide Squad.

Clay Enos / Warner Bros. Pictures

But handing a franchise to a less-established filmmaker is also turning out to be a method by which studios maintain control of a high-priced, high-stakes project. These are hires that executives feel comfortable with bowling over and outvoting without hesitation. Consider Suicide Squad, which may not have been quite as ridiculously mauled by studio intervention as last year’s Fantastic Four, but was still a disastrous collision of tones, cuts, and directions which broadcasted its reportedly rushed and troubled production loud and clear. It had no author, or way too many, but what ended up on screen wasn’t David Ayer’s vision, whatever that was.

Why the hell was Ayer — maker of gritty dramas about men being men together — picked for a project that prominently featured women and, above all, was strenuously promised to be fun? Suicide Squad’s problems were woven in from the beginning, and then compounded by studio second-guessing. Pricey pictures are never going to be totally hands-off affairs, but if studios can’t trust the directors they hire to steer films they want, what’s left is a future of garbled fare assembled by a committee desperately guessing at what people want. You can let your test screening audience write your movie, but there are no guarantees they’ll turn up to see it.

Travis Fimmel in Warcraft.

Legendary Pictures

4. Stop Treating Movies Like Expensive TV Pilots

This summer wasn’t just a cavalcade of ill-fated sequels, of course. There were also movies that were born from the simple boardroom pitch, “Hey, what if we started a brand-new movie franchise out of [insert decades-old pop culture franchise here]?”

Warcraft, based on the massively popular video game series launched in the 1990s, was clearly designed to spawn a sweeping new fantasy saga, one in which Paula Patton sports tusks. The producers behind the all-female Ghostbusters reboot, meanwhile, made no secret of their desire for the film to launch an “endless” string of ghostbusting movies. And had The Legend of Tarzan (conservatively, the 50th film about the vine-swinging ape-man) been a runaway hit, there’s no doubt Warner Bros. would have conscripted Alexander Skarsgård and Alexander Skarsgård’s abs for many more rumbles in the jungle.

Leslie Jones, Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, and Kate McKinnon in Ghostbusters.

Hopper Stone / Columbia Pictures

Each of these films has its charms, but even before they arrived in theaters, their respective studios’ eagerness for them to be simply the first in a multipart franchise sapped them of any real urgency. They dared audiences to make the films popular only so we could get even more “it’s the same, but different, just not too different!” retreads. (The efforts of MRA trolls to undermine Ghostbusters ultimately didn’t harm the film’s box office longevity nearly as much as its near-constant references to the 1984 original did.)

And repackaging old franchises is only getting more popular with studios. In 2017 alone, we’re supposed to get brand-new movie versions of King Kong, King Arthur, Power Rangers, Ghost in the Shell, Smurfs, Barbie, CHiPs, Baywatch, Spider-Man, Jumanji, and The Six Million Dollar Man (inflation-adjusted to The Six Billion Dollar Man). Each of these movies could potentially be good, of course, but they were greenlit because they might (re)launch a movie franchise.

As Hollywood has painfully learned this summer, however: Just because the same careworn tentpoles are erected year after year doesn’t mean people will keep coming to the circus.

From pure imagination to exhilarating eccentricity, here are the scenes that made us fall in love with Gene Wilder, who died Monday at 83.

When he needed all the help he could get in Blazing Saddles

Gene Wilder spilled out of a top bunk and into the most lovable of sidekick roles in Blazing Saddles. As recovering drunk Jim, aka the Waco Kid, Wilder and Cleavon Little’s Sheriff Bart had the perfect comedy bromance, grounded in the shared recognition that they were clearly the two smartest characters in Mel Brooks’ Western satire. Jim played the amused witness to Bart’s impeccable cool, not just a loyal partner in crime but an appreciative audience stand-in — few actors could do quietly entertained as well as Wilder. He gets some good moments in, but none as instantly endearing as that bit in which Jim meets Bart while swinging from his prison bed, responding to Bart’s query of “Need any help?” with “Oh, all I can get.” It’s not just an answer, it’s a life motto. —Alison Willmore

Warner Bros.

When he terrified everyone on the paddleboat in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory

The charming eccentricities Wilder brought to playing the titular world-renowned candy tycoon in this musical adaptation of Roald Dahl’s beloved novel start with his very first scene: Wonka greets the five children who have won his global contest with a cane, only to reveal with a sudden somersault that he never needed it in the first place. Wilder once said he came up with the bit so that the audience would never know whether he was lying or telling the truth, and the moment does indeed set up the character to be something of a slippery trickster.

And yet nothing quite prepares those children — or the audience — for what happens when Wonka takes them on a paddleboat ride through his factory. They enter a dark tunnel and the score turns ominous. His passengers’ panic grows, but Wonka keeps barking “faster!” to his Oompa Loompas as psychedelic lights swirl madly across his face and terrifying images flash on the walls. Then Wonka begins to sing: “There’s no earthly way of knowing / which direction we are going…” Wilder begins the song in an eerie minor-key lilt, slowly building in intensity until, by the end, he’s screaming at everyone like a deranged maniac. The sequence ends abruptly, and everyone sets off for the next misadventure, but the thrilling, unhinged hysteria of Wilder’s performance lingers — not just for the rest of the film, but in the imagination of just about everyone who saw it, for the rest of their lives. —Adam B. Vary

Warner Bros.

When he was hysterical and wet in The Producers

Gene Wilder’s manic energy made would-be producer Leo Bloom almost unbearably neurotic. In his funniest scene in The Producers, he tells Max (Zero Mostel), “I’m hysterical! I’m having hysterics! I’m hysterical!” Max’s logical solution is to throw water on Leo, at which point he responds, “I’m wet! I’m wet! I’m hysterical and I’m wet!” Max slaps him. Now? “I’m in pain! And I’m wet! And I’m still hysterical!” It’s a brilliantly funny performance, made all the more so by the fact that Wilder never decreases in intensity. As frustrating as it is for Max, it’s delightful for the audience. —Louis Peitzman

MGM

When he tapped his way through "Puttin' on the Ritz" in Young Frankenstein

Wilder often cited Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein as his favorite gig, and the work shows. In this monster movie spoof rich with bawdy puns, vaudeville, and cheap thrills, Wilder as Frahnken-steen went visibly and comedically toe-to-toe with co-stars like Madeline Kahn and Marty Feldman, refreshing through some of Hollywood’s favorite tropes with delectable humor. For example, when he and his monster (Peter Boyle) traipse through an old dance routine as proof that he could bring the undead to life. Wilder, straight-faced and lithe, sweetly croons “Puttin’ on the Ritz” as he tees up the song’s refrain for his creature’s moan. They look so pleased. And who wouldn’t be? It was the perfect gag on the whole. —Katie Hasty

20th Century Fox

View Entire List ›

Desde a pura imaginação até a excentricidade divertida, estas são as cenas que nos deixaram apaixonados por Gene Wilder, que morreu na segunda-feira (29) aos 83 anos.

Quando ele precisava de toda a ajuda que pudesse conseguir em "Banzé no Oeste"

Nesta cena de "Banzé no Oeste", Gene Wilder acaba de cair da parte de cima de um beliche da prisão.

Jim/Waco Kid (Wilder) e o xerife Bart (Cleavon Little) são as estrelas de uma comédia bromance perfeita, baseada no reconhecimento unânime de que eles eram os dois personagens mais inteligentes na sátira do Velho Oeste de Mel Brooks.

Wilder tem ótimos momentos no filme, mas nenhum tão cativante como o instante em que Bart conhece Jim, que está balançando de sua cama na prisão. Bart pergunta: "Precisa de ajuda?", ao que Wilder responde: "Ah, toda que eu puder conseguir".

Não é apenas uma resposta, é um lema de vida.

– Alison Willmore

Warner Bros.

Quando ele aterrorizou todo mundo no pedalinho em "A Fantástica Fábrica de Chocolate"

As excentricidades de Wilder como o magnata dos doces nesta adaptação musical do romance de Roald Dahl começam já na sua primeira cena: Wonka cumprimenta as cinco crianças que ganharam o concurso mundial com uma bengala, apenas para revelar com um súbita cambalhota que ele nunca precisou dela.

Wilder disse uma vez que ele montou o personagem de modo que o público nunca saberia se ele estava mentindo ou dizendo a verdade. A cena de fato, definiu o personagem como uma espécie de malandro.

E, no entanto, nada prepara as crianças — ou o público — para o que acontece quando Wonka as leva em um passeio de pedalinho através de sua fábrica. Elas entram em um túnel escuro e a trilha sonora torna-se ameaçadora. O pânico de seus passageiros cresce, mas Wonka continua gritando "mais rápido!" ao seu Oompa Loompas enquanto luzes psicodélicas giram loucamente em seu rosto e imagens aterrorizantes piscam nas paredes.

Então Wonka começa a cantar: "There’s no earthly way of knowing / which direction we are going…". Wilder começa a música em uma cadência estranha em tom menor, aumentando lentamente em intensidade, até que, no final, ele está gritando com todo mundo como um maníaco.

A sequência termina abruptamente, e todo mundo parte para a próxima desventura, mas a histeria desequilibrada da performance de Wilder permanece — não apenas para o resto do filme, mas na imaginação de quase todo mundo que a assistiu, para o resto de suas vidas.

— Adam B. Vary

Warner Bros.

Quando ele ficou histérico em "Primavera Para Hitler"

A energia maníaca de Gene Wilder deixou o aspirante a produtor Leo Bloom quase que insuportavelmente neurótico.

Em sua cena mais engraçada em "Primavera Para Hitler", ele diz a Max (Zero Mostel), "Eu sou histérico! Eu estou ficando histérico! Eu estou histérico!".

A solução lógica de Max é jogar água em Leo, no momento em que ele responde: "Eu estou molhado! Eu estou molhado! Estou histérico e estou molhado!".

Max lhe dá um tapa. Agora? "Estou com dor! E estou molhado! E ainda estou histérico!".

É uma performance muito engraçada, já que Wilder nunca diminui sua intensidade.

— Louis Peitzman

MGM

Quando ele sapateou em "O Jovem Frankenstein"

Wilder frequentemente citava "O Jovem Frankenstein", de Mel Brooks, como seu trabalho favorito.

Nesta rica paródia de filme de monstro com trocadilhos obscenos, vaudeville e emoções baratas, Wilder como Frahnken-steen contracenou com coestrelas como Madeline Kahn e Marty Feldman, renovando alguns dos temas favoritos de Hollywood com seu delicioso humor.

Por exemplo, quando ele e seu monstro (Peter Boyle) sapateiam como prova de que ele poderia trazer os mortos-vivos para a vida. Wilder, sério e ágil, docemente canta "Puttin 'on the Ritz" enquanto ele prepara o refrão da música para o gemido da sua criatura. Eles parecem muito felizes. E quem não estaria? Foi a sintonia perfeita.

— Katie Hasty

20th Century Fox

View Entire List ›

Here are some under-the-radar blockbuster alternatives that are all worthy of your time.

Der Bunker

We've all been there: You rent a room based on an ad promising a lake view, only to discover upon arrival that it's actually a windowless hovel in a remote bunker inhabited by a disturbing Lynchian family of three. Der Bunker, the directorial debut of Nikias Chryssos, is a heady dose of weirdness set almost entirely in the underground dwelling of the title, a place done up in the kind of mishmash vintage decor of people who haven't been keeping abreast of the times. The renter in question, who's never called anything other than "the student," is played by Pit Bukowski, and the fact that he stays after seeing his proposed lodging is a sign that he's just as off-kilter as his new roomies.

They're quite a bunch — the mother (Oona von Maydell) is convinced her leg is possessed by an alien visitor named Heinrich who sometimes weighs in with advice; the father (David Scheller) insists their child is going to be president of the United States, and won't hear otherwise; and then there's Klaus (Daniel Fripan), who claims to be 8 years old (Fripan's in his thirties) and is still being breastfed. Der Bunker would be an adequate piece of WTF-ery regardless of whether it added up to more. But it also works as a nightmare version of overprotective parenting. Klaus faces impossible expectations and extreme coddling at the same time, literally sheltered from the world in a surreal perma-childhood.

How to see it: Der Bunker is available on DVD and Blu-ray, and for digital rental/purchase via Vimeo.

Artsploitation

Hell or High Water

The best role Chris Pine has ever played is as Toby Howard, the divorced dad making a go of bank robbing in David Mackenzie's West Texas thriller Hell or High Water. Turns out, high school A-lister gone to seed is a good look for Pine, an actor who's game if not always that memorable in more traditional leading man roles. He makes all kind of sense as a guy whose life has failed to turn out as well as he once might have expected. Toby was the good kid, while his brother Tanner (Ben Foster) was the troublemaker, fresh out of jail when the film begins. Yet they've ended up in the same place, broke and desperate, taking big risks to try to salvage something so that Toby's two sons don't end up in the same grinding poverty in which he finds himself stuck.

Mackenzie, whose last film was the terrific Jack O'Connell prison drama Starred Up, is Scottish, and his screenwriter, Taylor Sheridan, is Texan; together, they create a portrait of an economically demolished area that feels lived in and allegorical all at once. Sheridan, an actor who made the shift to screenwriter with Sicario, fills out the space between tense bank robberies with chewy dialogue between the brothers and between Jeff Bridges and Gil Birmingham as the lawmen tracking the Howards down. Hell or High Water is the only wider release of the summer to touch on the white working-class despair that's become such a strong force in the current election, but it's also just tremendously entertaining, a cops and robbers story with no good guys or bad guys, a bunch of characters trying to get by.

How to see it: Hell of High Water expands to 900 theaters nationwide this week — search the list here.

Lorey Sebastian / CBS Films

Little Men

Filmmaker Ira Sachs' last movie Love Is Strange was a bright, sunny Manhattan horror story about how little time it takes for a longtime couple (John Lithgow and Alfred Molina) to go from stable homeowners to couch-surfers, testing the patience of friends, family, and each other after the loss of a job. Sachs' new feature, Little Men, is about a younger relationship being tested by the relentless forces of New York real estate — Jake (Theo Taplitz) and Tony (Michael Barbieri), teens whose friendship buds in the face of growing tension between their parents over the Brooklyn building they share.

Little Men is a discreetly barbed film about gentrification. Nestled within the initially polite — and later not-so-polite — negotiations between grown-ups Brian (Greg Kinnear), Kathy (Jennifer Ehle), and Leonor (Paulina García) are all sorts of issues of race, class, and family ties. But it's also a story about the moment in which awareness of those and other dividing lines start encroaching on childhood. Jake and Tony enjoy the simple, easy rapport of two kids who just really like hanging out, but they're not going to stay children for much longer. The looming shadow of high school hangs over the connection between the introverted, possibly gay Jake and the pint-size swaggerer Tony, and they seem destined to be divided by social pressure no matter what their parents do. The fragility of their connection makes it all the more touching.

How to see it: Little Men is now playing in limited release — check out a list of locations here.

Eric McNatt / Magnolia Pictures

Morris From America

Thirteen-year-old Morris (Markees Christmas) is chunky, and boyish, and black, and American, facts that make him multiple times an outcast among his fellow teens in Heidelberg, Germany, where he now lives with his widowed father Curtis (Craig Robinson). The two are, as his dad ruefully observes, "the only brothers" in the quaint but far from diverse town, something Morris is reminded of by the unabashed, oblivious questions he gets about whether he's well-endowed, or good at basketball, or the owner of some pot that was found in the youth center. In between German lessons with his tutor Inka (Carla Juri), Morris writes hip-hop lyrics bragging about sexual feats he most definitely has not achieved.

When he's befriended by the pretty, bored Katrin (Lina Keller) — at least at first for novelty value — heartbreak looms on the horizon for Morris. But Morris From America, directed by This Is Martin Bonner's Chad Hartigan, isn't interested in the expected beats, instead following Morris through a stage of growing up that's painful, poignant, and sweet. It's a movie that's especially strong when it comes to its father-son relationship, which is tested, at times, by the fact that Morris and Curtis have been left with each other as their default best friend.

How to see it: Morris From America is now in select theaters and is also available for digital rental/purchase.

A24

View Entire List ›

Fresh from the Toronto International Film Festival and headed to a theater near you, here are the films to look out for (in addition to the already much-discussed Manchester by the Sea and The Birth of a Nation).

Arrival

Unless it somehow gets shown up by the upcoming Chris Pratt–Jennifer Lawrence film Passengers, Arrival is this season's smartest sci-fi offering. It's a first-contact saga based on a short story by Ted Chiang and directed by Sicario's Denis Villeneuve, whose next project is the Blade Runner sequel, which is currently in production. Arrival manages to be a thriller about communication; Amy Adams stars as Dr. Louise Banks, a linguist brought in by the military to figure out a way to talk with octopoid aliens and to learn what they want. But it's also an eerily convincing film about our fear of the unknown and the other. Its opening sequences, in which 12 spaceships suddenly appear in different spots around the globe, recall the shocky trauma of the days following 9/11.

There's wonder in Arrival, but there's dread as well — not just of the mysterious visitors, who are genuinely otherworldly in their look and their thought process, but of the many forces in the US and international governments that are very ready to escalate to war. Arrival's ultimate combining of Louise's personal story with that of the aliens comes across as underdeveloped, but there's no denying Villeneuve's craft. This is one of the most deftly made movies of the year, sci-fi or otherwise.

When's it coming out? Nov. 11

Paramount Pictures

Nocturnal Animals

This fall brings not one but two Amy Adams movies — and while Arrival may show her delicately channeling different stages of discovery, hope, and grief, Nocturnal Animals absolutely features fiercer outfits. It's the second film from designer Tom Ford, who's managed to turn the airless impeccability of his 2009 debut A Single Man into a feature here rather than a bug. Adams plays Susan Morrow, a Los Angeles gallery owner whose life is sleek and empty — her husband (Armie Hammer) is distant, and her work is meaningless. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Susan's ex-spouse Edward Sheffield, seen both in flashbacks to their youthful marriage and in scenes from the novel he sends her, in which he's a stand-in for the main character, a man whose wife and daughter are abducted after a chance run-in on the road at night in West Texas.

It's surely one of the most lavishly envisioned exorcising-the-ex stories ever, though its sense of pettiness takes a while to come through as it skips between ghoulish depictions of swank LA life and Susan's gritty envisionings of Edward's book. It's gorgeously trashy, and at various times Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Michael Shannon, Laura Linney, and Jena Malone show up for smaller roles and they all damn near walk away with the movie.

When's it coming out? Dec. 9

Focus Features

The Edge of Seventeen

Hailee Steinfeld plays a teenager of almost unbearably authentic shittiness in the brutal and rather brilliant dramedy The Edge of Seventeen. Her character Nadine Byrd is a high school junior whose life has, for years, revolved around her best and only friend Krista (Haley Lu Richardson), until Krista throws everything into turmoil by falling for Nadine's forever flawless older brother Darian (Blake Jenner). Smart, self-pitying, melodramatic, and moody, Nadine is a dead-on encapsulation of adolescent angst, and her sense of betrayal brought on by her bestie's romance is both perfectly awful and perfectly understandable, even when it leaves her alone and unhappy.

Kelly Fremon Craig, who wrote and directed The Edge of Seventeen, is frighteningly good at portraying what it's like to be so stuck in your own personal misery that you can't see how much of it is self-inflicted, or how terribly it's leading you to treat other people. And while Steinfeld's easily the film's MVP, Woody Harrelson deserves a shout-out as Nadine's wry confidant of a teacher, as does Hayden Szeto as Erwin, a classmate whose crush on Nadine leaves him batted around horrendously.

When's it coming out? Nov. 18

STX Entertainment

Things to Come

2016 is truly a 🔥 year for Isabelle Huppert. In addition to her role in Elle (your newest problematic fave) as a rape victim whose path toward recovery includes sleeping with her attacker, Huppert stars in another singular part in Things to Come. Directed by Eden's Mia Hansen-Løve, Things to Come is the story of Nathalie, a philosophy professor whose marriage ends and whose publishing career falls abruptly apart, leaving her at loose ends, for the first time in her life, at middle age.

Huppert navigates Nathalie's often unwelcome freedom with raw openness as well as an especially Gallic equanimity — the laugh she lets out when, after a particularly dark moment, she passes her ex-husband and his new lover on the street is particularly wonderful, as is her loaded friendship with her earnest anarchist protégé (Roman Kolinka). Huppert is the frostily fabulous redheaded queen of French cinema — long may she reign.

When's it coming out? Dec. 2

Sundance Selects

View Entire List ›

Emily Blunt in The Girl on the Train.

Barry Wetcher / Universal Pictures

The Girl on the Train is centered on the hamlet surrounding the Ardsley-on-Hudson station, a white picket blur of domestic anxiety. The village is perched prettily on the edge of the river and handily on New York's Metro-North railway line. It's the kind of community where residents are able to keep their city jobs without doing city living — good schools, houses with yards, easy commutes, an old-school oasis of upper middle classdom that, for each of the movie’s three female leads, becomes layered with a different sort of dread.

For Megan (Haley Bennett), Ardsley-on-Hudson is a “baby factory” to which she’s been consigned against her wishes by her husband Scott (Luke Evans), who hopes a job as a nanny will finally lead her to wanting a family of their own. She prowls restlessly along her back porch like a caged lynx and fills in the rest of her time with pilates and therapy.

For Anna (Rebecca Ferguson), it’s an all-organic-Pinterest-perfect mold into which she has to fit herself. But the new mom worries she’s part of a repeating pattern for her spouse, who bumped her up from “other woman” to wife.

And for Rachel Watson (Emily Blunt), it’s a fuzzily-remembered paradise from which she’s been cast out for being a destructive drunk struggling to come to terms with the fact that she can’t conceive.

Two years after her divorce from Tom (Justin Theroux), the alcoholic, broken-hearted, thirtysomething “girl” of the title is still clinging to the ruins of her marriage, calling her ex, crashing in a friend’s spare room, and taking the train into the city each day to preserve the pretense that she wasn’t fired from her job months ago. When Rachel passes Ardsley-on-Hudson, she presses herself against the window in order to look into the house shared by Megan and Scott, about whom she’s concocted wistful fantasies of homey joy based only on passing glances. She tries and fails to not look at the place a few doors down that was hers before Tom left her for Anna — fresher, less damaged, more fertile.

Rebecca Ferguson in The Girl on the Train.

Barry Wetcher / Universal Pictures

The Girl on the Train is an adaptation of Paula Hawkins’ best-selling novel, directed by Tate Taylor, a man responsible for the feature-length facepalm that is The Help and the weirdly great James Brown biopic Get on Up. But The Girl on the Train is not weirdly great, or even good, though it doesn’t really aim to be, positioning itself unabashedly as a knock-off Gone Girl, around to mop up fans looking for more by the way of a missing woman (Megan), an unreliable narrator (the blackout-prone Rachel), and scandal-tinged tragedy erupting in a small town. Where Gone Girl crackled with nastiness, The Girl on the Train manages, at its best, a low murmur.

As a Hitchcockian thriller in which Rachel struggles through alcohol-muddled memories in an attempt to find out if she witnessed or was maybe even responsible for Megan’s disappearance, The Girl on the Train is unbearably slack. It indulges in a long, languid setup before setting its story into motion; but once it does, possible leads — Scott is revealed to be controlling and emotionally abusive, Megan's shrink (Édgar Ramírez) may have been sleeping with his patient, and Rachel turns out to indulge in some vividly homicidal fantasies — bubble up without urgency. Even the climactic reveal is short on fire, like a afternoon klatch everyone’s perturbed to find turning bloody.

And yet, there’s something hard to shake about The Girl on the Train’s dark fantasia of damaging internalized feminine expectations, traces of which linger long after the plot has made its last twist. There’s a villain here, but that's much less interesting than the characters' self-inflicted misery, which stems from feelings of inadequacy, from failure for not living up to phantom standards of being a wife and a mother, from not wanting to, or from being willing to make bleak compromises within to maintain that perfect exterior.

Luke Evans and Haley Bennett in The Girl on the Train.

Barry Wetcher / Universal Pictures

As Tom, Theroux does little to sell himself as the object of multiple characters’ desires and desperation. He’s central, but at the same time, he’s a trench-and-tie wearing blank, the handsome provider arriving home at the end of the workday to the family he’s tucked away in Westchester. He’s the embodiment of a goal each of the three women have accepted as a pursuit — the home in the country, shopping at the farmers market, cuddling in front of the firepit at night, the eventual baby — only to find it’s not guaranteed to amount to a happy ending, no matter how nice it looks from outside.

So ingrained are these images that, more often than not, it’s the women who end up policing each other in The Girl on the Train’s scenically oppressive exurban community. Megan gets glares from other wives in town for being too ripe, not adequately matronly. Anna, a stay-at-home mom who employs Megan as a nanny seemingly to get a little space and avoid being alone at home with the baby all day, snaps defensively that “there’s no job more important than raising a child.” And Rachel rattles between self-loathing and rage, castigating herself for her all perceived failings, infertility among them, then giving into monologues about bashing Anna’s head in.

Blunt, doing work that's considerably better than the movie she's starring in, turns her character into an unforgettably sodden mess who treats herself like someone who has no worth out outside of her marriage, trapped in a disastrous cycle of drunken outbursts, regret, and drinking more to forget. She stares and stares at Ardsley-on-Hudson from behind the glass of the window, trying to wish herself back, imagining others basking in a bliss that’s actually a mirage. But she’d do better to ride that train somewhere far away.

LINK: How "The Girl On The Train" Was Changed To Become A Movie

LINK: “The Girl On The Train” And The Allure Of Women’s Rage

Ben Affleck and Anna Kendrick in The Accountant.

Chuck Zlotnick / Warner Bros.

There’s a stand-up bit Ricky Gervais does about volunteering to take his neighbor’s autistic son out for the day as an act of celeb munificence. He tells the grateful, teary woman he’s bringing her child to the zoo, but, as soon as she’s out of sight, he steers his charge to a casino instead and tries to take advantage of the card-counting virtuosity he’s convinced the boy must have, thanks to Rain Man. The punchline is that Gervais finds himself down a few thousand pounds almost immediately, because despite what Dustin Hoffman's Ray has etched in pop cultural memory, having autism is no guarantee of being a savant.

It’s an idea that movies still find seductive, though, a way of simplifying a spectrum of experiences into a trade-off — neurotypicality in exchange for selective genius.

That holds true for The Accountant, the new movie in which Ben Affleck plays a man named Christian Wolff whose self-described high-functioning autism is tantamount to a special power, making him not just a better mathematician but a better killing machine. Chris can take out a host of mobsters using their own weapons against them, and get you a decent tax write-off on your home business. He can process 15 years' worth of corporate account ledgers in a single night, without the need for a computer. He also shoots a mean sniper rifle, and offers terse recommendations for more appropriate ammo to a man whose gun he takes.

Affleck in The Accountant.

Chuck Zlotnick / Warner Bros.

Affleck generally and thankfully sticks to underplaying Chris, who, when the film begins, is hiding his illicit business behind a strip mall front in a small Illinois town. The actor squeezes his brawny bod into conservative businesswear, donning a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, and stopping just short of eye contact with his co-stars, including Anna Kendrick and Jon Bernthal. Chris lives alone, subjecting himself to a round of sensory overload each night as practice before allowing himself access to a space he’s more comfortable in. He does the books for all sorts of nefarious organizations, he has a mysterious handler helping him out on the phone, and he's possibly secretly fighting for the forces of good, despite coming across as the financial equivalent of a high-end assassin. He is, essentially, an autistic superhero, one whose uniform of choice is a staid suit.

The Accountant, which is directed by Miracle’s Gavin O'Connor and written by The Judge’s Bill Dubuque, reveals its backstory in slow, looping coils, as if in hopes that will hide how little sense it makes when straightened out. It’s the kind of movie in which, for instance, J.K. Simmons blackmails a fellow Treasury agent (Cynthia Addai-Robinson) into helping him with something he could have just asked her to do, as part of a storyline that’s largely unnecessary anyway. The Accountant is also, begrudgingly, a pretty good time, especially once its solemnity gives way to its kitschy ode to familial pain, a story about a father who is determined to help his son learn to fight back against a world that won’t always understand him, rather than try to find his place in it.

Kendrick and Affleck in The Accountant.

Chuck Zlotnick / Warner Bros.

O'Connor’s best movie is 2011’s Warrior, in which Joel Edgerton and Tom Hardy are brothers brawling out their displaced rage and childhood resentment in an MMA cage while their estranged drunk of a dad (Nick Nolte) plays coach. It's a symphony of manly angst, years of pent-up rage and love channeled entirely through fists to the face, and The Accountant’s best moments recall it, especially in the flashbacks to Chris’s stern but well-intentioned father insisting his child toughen up rather than receive treatment to help him adjust. “The world,” he barks, “is not a sensory-friendly place.” Instead of working with a therapist, Chris (alongside his brother) is taught martial arts and is prompted to beat up bullies. He learns to self-soothe by muttering the nursery rhyme “Solomon Grundy” to himself in times of stress. He loses a father figure, and for added tragedy, acquires and then loses a second one.

The result is that, as an adult, Chris is lonely and isolated and possessed of a poetically bleak life (e.g., he owns a single set of silverware). But then, what superhero isn’t? As The Accountant winds its way through some plot in which Chris is hired to find who’s stealing money from a company owned by John Lithgow, what’s striking about this mostly silly film is how neatly Chris fits into a tradition of self-appointed screen vigilantes, caped or otherwise — the fact that the actor playing him is also our current Batman just underscores the similarity.

For years, action movies have been romanticizing characters who are hyper-focused, who find solace in routines, and who have difficulty making personal connections. It’s not the savant syndrome that’s The Accountant’s bright idea, it’s having a hero with autism in the first place, taking decades of stale clichés, tilting them on their side, and making us reconsider what they mean and what they can encompass.