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As much as I would love to equivocate about the film’s reification of gender (yes, the robots have genders, even though the closest they desire to sexual contact is hand-holding) or its satirical barbs at the overstimulated, grotesquely obese humans who lazily populate the spaceship Axiom, a Guy Debord hell of flashing screens and corporate fascism, I find it hard to do so. Its successes are simply too overwhelming.

Carell’s Smart is an intelligence analyst with a scrupulous and pedantic work ethic, and the movie even has the chutzpah to suggest that Smart’s overthinking and overanalysis, while tedious to comedic effect, is still a preferable alternative to the underthinking and underanalysis rampant in the other agencies.

By her own account, The Last Mistress is Catherine Breillat’s most accessible film, the only one that doesn’t set out to break any taboos. But I have to respectfully disagree with her assertion, even though it comes from the queen of on-screen female sexuality herself.

Let’s not kid ourselves: all this talk of the film’s relentless attention to the cosmetic is a constructive way of saying it barely has a blessed idea in its head. The film’s body fixation is blatantly presented yet completely unexplored, too busy ogling both actual and computer-generated figures to consider the implications of its slavish gaze.

Shyamalan’s failings here aren’t in his concept but in his execution; it’s not necessarily laughable stuff, but Shyamalan is on such unsure footing in how to present such indeterminate information to the audience with a straight face that he falls back on hoary horror imagery and pathetic stabs at deflating humor. The Happening may be as earnest as his earlier films, but it’s the first one that feels borderline disinterested.

Kino Delirium, indeed—as with all Maddin (excluding, perhaps, the blessedly brief The Heart of the World), all declarations of extremity are cozily couched in quotation marks. Is the enthusiastic embrace of each new offering partially due to the fact that one need never risk being moved? Maddin might be or might have been a wild man in his much publicized private life, but any grand passion in his films is pitched solely in the key of twee.

A common criticism of the series has been its tendency to depict women as behaving “like gay men.” The charge is troubling not least for its reification of stereotypes of gay male promiscuity but also for its subtle assertion that ideal femininity doesn't square with unbridled sexual desire. The argument rests on the problematic assertion that women simply "aren't that way"—a suggestion that is both insulting and absurd.

Harmony, whose new film is about celebrity impersonators, closely studied the second half of Herzog’s career, when mystery gave way to Werner Herzog’s Believe it Or Not.

The "film versus digital" hand-wringing, of the object (the tangible, analog, 35mm filmstrip) opposed to the algorithmic concept (the data file, an intangible string of digits) is a monster indigenous to Southern California. The apparent contest between them is an ahistoric myth. In the grand scheme, the romance of photochemistry in moving images ended long ago.

Spectacle has always been a driver for the art form, but the breathlessness in the face of it has most often come from the tension at having the unimaginable made visible by human hands (and the possibility that all might go awry). This physicality around effects work is in danger of disappearing.