This Cannes selection, which is playing here for a bulimically slim run, is also the first fiction film directed by Loznitsa, a documentarian who hails from either Belarus or Ukraine. (Sources differ on this, probably due to the dissolution of the Soviet Bloc; in the context of this movie, that seems appropriate.) Though the film has fairy-tale elements—roving highwaymen; a witchlike gypsy; raisin-flesh hermits in their hovels; a wolfpack howling at the moon—it was shot by Oleg Mutu, who was at least partly responsible for the kinetic hyperrealism of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007). The vision is unsettlingly stark and vivid: inflecting protracted medium shots with slasher-film shivers. And yet the morbid enchantment isn’t undercut by its shortfall of visual fancy. I found the locale transfixing; the wrinkles in time (from World War II to the present day) and personality were so subtly ironed that I perceived them only as one perceives moss gathering on a stone. Georgy meets a mute in a band of thieves, and all we can make out about the mute’s physical appearance is that he’s hidden under a brown beard; next thing we know, summer’s fled to winter, and blond Georgy’s buried alive in a heap of chestnut facial hair. He has even conjoined with the mute’s tragic biography. Compared to this transformation, all that doppelgänging up on Natalie Portman in Black Swan seems as shabby as a ghost costume made out of a mothy sheet.

My Joy is a nightmare critique of Russian authoritarianism: life on the outskirts of a police state. Stalin and Putin and Ivan the Terrible may have worn different crowns, but it’s always been the common folk who have borne the thorns. Unreal as the figures in this fable are—they look like serfs, and both their clothing and cars seem unstuck in time—Loznitsa doesn’t disdain them; he merely sees the cycle of degradation, and how it trickles down. The patrolmen in their fortress are beyond material corruption; they are like Kafka’s gatekeeper with a bloodlust, and it extends even to a Muscovite police commissioner who offers a bribe that’s violently rejected. The film is about hardness, in technique and theme; but it’s a lamentation of sensitivity. Along with the mute and an old man who’s lost his name, Georgy merges with Travis Bickle and Chief Bromden—mute because what he sees is unspeakable.

Well—somewhere further than a talking cat. Paw-Paw is the “X” on the couple’s calendar; if she can last out a month-long waiting period, they can adopt her. She is their only commitment, the event that will decide their fates forever and usher in the next stage of their lives; she is their only anchor in the rising tide of time, and the only object with which they can take its measure. Luckily for them, they can’t hear her talk—that onus is on us. (As she rasped on the voiceover, like an Ewok blues singer, I realized how much we take Bill Murray as Garfield for granted.) One can almost smell the stale ramen noodles in the walls of their flat. A self-conscious deadpan, favoring deadness over panning, is the order of the day—though the passivity is pointed. Jason and Sophie live in a static environment that recalls early Jim Jarmusch or Kevin Smith, with their underachieving heroes; but this is slackerdom gone sour, lived in unhappily, and past 30. And I think it may be crucial to note the difference in time (now) and place (L.A.), and, if gendered assumptions are your thing, the presence of a female sensibility.

In her profile of July—published, quite punctually, in July—Katrina Onstad elegantly sums up the resistance to the director’s work: “Twee fascinations with childhood innocence can mask an unwillingness to tackle life’s darker quandaries.” And the flaccid-faced boys in Me and You and Everyone We Know (2005)—July’s first and previous film—do indeed seem to be submerged in masks; their stares are inexpressively sad and unaccountably burdened. Fifteen is rather early in life to rediscover one’s innocence, but a boy that age has life lessons to learn from an even younger girl. Yet contrast this mawkishness with the subplot involving his eight-year-old brother. After seducing a woman in an anonymous chat room by inviting her to “poop back and forth” with him, they meet in person, on a park bench. After the music swells, he pecks her on the cheek and scurries off. What seems at first to be a light-hearted curveball becomes a profoundly sad moment; the woman is more alone than ever, her innocence and “corruption” inexorably linked. Could it be that July’s twee fascinations mask a latent willingness?

Getting back to The Future, it’s conceivable that some feathers may be ruffled not by her inability to deal with darkness, but rather her determination to treat it lightly. This isn’t some heroic attitude; I think it’s more a reaction against, or an acknowledgement of, entrapment. Homemade YouTube hits stand in here for our cultural obsession with youth, the promise of magically catching on, of being “self-made”; and the sidereal balm of L.A. leaves such dreams on life-support. (Sophie, who’s like Sally Bowles without the verve or talent, would’ve been trampled by New York long before she turned 35.) What is going on here, I believe, is far more specific than a midlife crisis—it isn’t a phase for her but a flatline. Echoes of the recession and its consequences seep into our minds like acid, even if the movie itself abjures or evades or is simply oblivious to them; and this avoidance adds to its tragic dimensions. It points to what may be the most vexing, and yet essential, quality that July has as a filmmaker: her introversion—or disengagement. It is common to equate her Etsy-Betsy style with Wes Anderson or her other contemporaries, but I think the Miranda July figure is more analogous with Woody Allen. They both play frustrated artists, sure—albeit different types. But the most damning evidence comes from characterization: They litter their screenplays with their own clones. The characters that don’t have July’s consciousness, like the divorced entrepreneur Marshall (David Warshofsky), aren’t fully rounded or convincing; and those that do, like Jason, have rather icky propinquities: Linklater looks like the Raggedy Andy to Sophie’s Raggedy Ann, more a brother than a lover. I didn’t want to see them stay together; yet his casting italicizes her solipsistic despair.

Since July is her own star, the fault really is in her. Despite comporting herself like the ostrich ballerinas in Fantasia, July is a fragile sort of beauty; but, paradoxical as it sounds, she looks too much like she acts. In both of her movies, she’s seduced a creepy-looking divorcé with an aggressively awkward pick-up strategy—and scored! Is she supposed to have “game” or are they just lonely? She does not seem to notice that her characters’ darlingness may be off-putting to some, indeed many, people who live outside of her demimonde. But no matter how bent her universe, or how replete it is with precious kibble for hipster chihuahuas, its creator is capable of poetic feeling worthy of Kore-eda or Lynch. Warshofsky, whose chest protrudes as his hair recedes, sports some louche bling; he howls out one line reading like a coyote in heat, and, in so doing, channels Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet or Lost Highway’s Robert Blake. Conversely, an old tee-shirt—Sophie’s safety blanket—pursues her with the doggedness of a lost pup. It swells up around her like a banana-colored womb, and her limber frame folds into it as if she were origami. Is Sophie ensnared or in ecstasy? Doing a pas de deux? Or possibly a combination of all three? Earlier in the movie, she hypothesized that a blue-haired neighbor lady, who sits by the window alone, as if tabulating the time it takes for the wallpaper to dry, was the Caesarean type-A who’d “seize the day”; the shirt says “c’est la nuit”—it’s the night. The discrepancy between those two statements comes close to describing the ethos.

With the moon unable to help him—able only to light his way—Jason ambles to the Pacific, through the city he’s put to sleep. The name of this ocean has never been more apt. Like a conductor before an orchestra, he brings to crescendo the frozen waves; they heave and ho like lungs expelling seawater, and they return to life much to the one-time sandman’s relief. Jason was in search of lost time, and now he’s faced and found it; but time is only as substantial as the wind. If you feel it, it’s already gone. He blows through menial jobs like Sophie; they’ve outlived their youth and the comfort of dreams. Time keeps on going—but where? Perhaps it spools with our faults. July’s poetry doesn’t translate to relief because she knows that the weight of nothingness can be very heavy to bear.

As Anthony Lane recognized, Malick has only recently basked in the light of the present day. Allen, in his diabolically prolific career—Midnight in Paris is approximately his 41st feature since 1966; The Tree of Life is Malick’s fifth since 1973—has given us quite a few presents, a handful of pasts, and at least one Orwellian future. He was the original Marty McFly. But even during his ’70s and ’80s heyday, when Annie Hall and Zelig broke more ground than the often-atrophied Allen sometimes gets credit for, he was in thrall to the influences of his childhood: trad jazz, Cole Porter, the Marx brothers—even their cousin Karl. It seems ironic that Manhattan is now considered the filmic apotheosis of the mythic New York that hosted CBGBs, Grandmaster Flash, and Studio 54 simultaneously—just as bottom-scraped denizens of that time and place, spurred by Bob Fosse’s Cabaret, felt a fillip of wistfulness for Weimar Berlin. The past is always greener to the future eye, Allen here concludes. Happily, though, that’s a “delusion” he can’t quite part with. It’s an impulse that this art form was founded on.

Midnight in Paris isn’t a fantasy on par with The Purple Rose of Cairo, its closest relative in the writer-director’s filmography; and it doesn’t herald a fresh start in new directions, as did Vicky Cristina Barcelona, with its influx of south-of-the-border blood. But it has serenity and charm. As one friend of mine said, it has the same faults that Allen films are increasingly culpable for; hence, the present-day-Paris frame of the story, involving an aspiring author (Owen Wilson) and his unlikely in-laws—Allen in extremis—is pretty blah: shoddily framed and edited, written as on-the-nose as a pimple, and, for the most part, hollowly acted—Rachel McAdams is its most tragic casualty. It’s impossible to conceive that either her Inez or Wilson’s Gil would ever remotely consider tying one another’s knots, especially since she has the hots for that stygian classic of Allen’s stock company: the brainiacal blowhard (Michael Sheen). You want to rip the beard right off his face. Wilson, however, transcends all this. He’s the omnipresent Allen surrogate, and he’s adjusted his lope accordingly; but his slower prowl and self-effacingly flaky grin make this familiar trope gleam in a new light. A Cali light. One can imagine this successful screenwriter—what, I’d love to know, is he “selling out” with?—as West Coast Woody, surfing when not reading Schopenhauer. Gil’s cool airs makes him the perfect Cinderella / Alice for Allen to toss down the rabbit-hole—in the form of a Peugeot phaeton—that deposits him, every night as the clock tower tolls midnight, in the year 1927.

Not knowing at first where, or when, he’s ended up, Gil is accepted by the Lost Generation as one of their own. But Gil learns to do what Allen the actor never learned to do: go with the flow. For all Gil knows, he may be tripping—a possibility the director never ponders. He’s too busy introducing Zelda (Allison Pill) and F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tom Hiddleston), Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll), Salvador Dalí (Adrien Brody), and Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates). All, conveniently, are Gil’s idols; this is his golden age. It isn’t, however, the period of choice for the “older” woman he falls for; Adriana (Marion Cotillard) would be a mere 76 years his senior, though she was ravishing in the / her ’20s. She yearns for the Moulin Rouge of the 1890s, and—lo and behold!—a Hansom cab pulls up and escorts them to it. The way Cotillard underplays her part suggests Holly Golightly as a shy flapper, even if you wince at the way Allen lets Adriana trade the Roaring ’20s for the Gay ’90s with feckless abandon. But that’s part of the movie’s silly magic; it’s as light as a moonbeam. In synch with the soundtrack, the cast plays Ragtime with the historical personages: They’re caricatures who speak their own prose. Stoll does so best; Brody wonderfully camps up his cameo; and Pill has the mile-wide eyeballs of Karen Black, who played Myrtle in the Robert Redford Great Gatsby. Only Hiddleston, as her husband, seems too watered down: saying “old sport” is bootleg when there was a preppy side to Fitzgerald that begs to be parodied. But relax. Cinematographer Darius Khondji bathes them all in lovely gaslight. This film is a sigh of acceptance, followed by an appreciative grin.

It’s a strange irony, perhaps even a sad one, that Midnight in Paris feels so quaint. A finger-wagging of the Tea Party hardly convinced me of the movie’s claims that some of its characters were at home in familiar ol’ 2010. In the end, Gil decides to give the present another go, but Allen—like Malick—has long since given in to the past. There are, however, forces far worse than absorption in one’s own imagination that can vanquish an artist; and when you’ve been ferociously active as such for more than 40 years, to cave in may be within your rights. But it isn’t without consequence. Midnight’s special brand of pomo playfulness owes a lot to early Allen, the formal pioneer who loosened up the conventions of comedy and drama; and so do all those who’ve commercialized and formulized his ideas by beating them into blockbuster shape—or maybe the other way around. He’s using time travel as a wistful MacGuffin for a mellow romance rather than a launching pad for sci-fi nuttiness; the past is symbolic rather than malleable. But nothing’s at stake—not Adriana, not Inez, not Gil’s future—and I think this thinness is distinct from the lightness of the atmosphere. In a way, this modest potboiler sums up the quixotic constancy of Allen’s career; he knows the drill so well, and hops so hastily from movie to movie, that he glosses over drama and outruns fresh ideas. His historical heroes speak like parodies of themselves and everyone else sounds like a parody of Woody Allen. Moving forward, for him, is a way of maintaining stasis; immersion in the future bucks both present and past. But perhaps it’s practice that leads to such ease as makes enchantment flow as freely as the Seine. And the fact that Midnight in Paris has distinguished itself as his biggest hit to date says something its maker should take to heart: In being captive to romantic delusions, he’s far from alone.

Depending on the hermeneutic you use, the real world of the film centers around either a.) a quartet of fetching young ladies (Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, and Vanessa Hudgens) trying to escape from an insane asylum on the outskirts of Gotham City; b.) a quartet of fetching young ladies—orphans who’ve been snatched up by mobsters and conscripted for exotic dancing—trying to escape from a harem on the outskirts of any film noir; or c.) a quartet of Charlie’s Angels engaged in combat with cybernetic Nazi zombies on the outskirts of Middle Earth. I think it’s d.) none of the above. The realities in which the girls are abused and molested are oppressive and maudlin, and yet no less cartoony than fantasies in which dragons collude with Germans. Snyder, like Tarantino, contrives to use a feminist gloss to pump his exploitation flicks full of high-minded airs, but that only makes them doubly exploitive; his girls are kicking ass to fulfill young boys’ dirty-old-man dreams. (Maybe man-children have such trouble emerging from their cocoons, and even more difficulty getting laid, because they’re being bred to think that dolling up like Sailor Moon while slaying baby dragons is the substance of real girls’ reveries.) Sucker Punch is an homage to Kill Bill, and Kill Bill was nothing but homages. At least Tarantino was building on his prized collection of esoterica; Snyder seems to have never set foot outside a multiplex, just as he seems to have never picked up a novel that wasn’t graphic. (And his ear’s as dull as his eye. I’m not sure which is worse: that all of his musical choices are obvious or that half of them are emo’d covers.) There’s no imagination under this movie’s baroque surface. One might say that to heap all this slag together takes talent; but the cyborg-Nazi-zombies do nothing that their non-hyphenated brethren don’t do in other video games—err, movies. And people often confuse talent with creativity. Creativity is having ideas; talent is knowing what to do with them.

Insanity, like irony, began to seep into the mainstream in its it’s-all-in-your-head, you’re-not-crazy-the-world-is form during the counterculture ’60s; there’s a reason they called it “freaking” out. But, as Jack Shafer implied a few months ago—in an appraisal of how the edgy ontology of Philip K. Dick, the Tucson gunman’s favorite writer, has affected our pop culture—the cray-cray is here to stay. The year 1999 was a sort of watershed for Dickheaded schizophrenia: The Matrix, Fight Club, and The Sixth Sense all became über-mega-hits. American Psycho and Memento followed in 2000, proving that even mind-fucking indies could cross over and make the big bucks. Just in the past year alone, Shutter Island, Inception, Tron: Legacy, Black Swan, The Adjustment Bureau, and now Sucker Punch have all skied down the lobes of slalomed brains, bouncing between realities the way you change your socks, and viewers have sucked this brain candy down like popcorn. There may well be a kernel of hipster snobbery in this—the mentality that dictates that my favorite (Brooklyn) band loses its caché of cool if you’ve heard of it. But Dick, who died in 1982, was the underground’s man; his vision was paranoid yet critical. Sucker Punch doles him out like baby food—and reduces him to a spoonful of empty calories. If we accept “insanity” as mere entertainment, then we begin to take sanity for granted. The Dickian vanguard is valuable because it lets us look outside the box. It teaches us that taking “reality” for granted is the insanest form of complacency.

I think it was definitely a clever idea to make the protagonist a politician, even if that entails ironies that Nolfi doesn’t dare tackle. Just some free-associating: As our tribunes, do elected officials have their own voices, really, or are they—or are they supposed to be—our ciphers? And in this political climate, when congressmen are soaked in money and media, not all of it honorably intentioned, and spirited away to fundraisers more often than they make decisions, how does that affect “free will”—the pols’ and our own? To be fair, this mass-market movie is cozily idealistic: David, such a man of the people, rides the bus to work. And the polls that have him becoming New York’s next senator by wide margins are overturned by a cheeky cover-story photo scooping him shooting the moon back in college. “The voters want their politicians to be mature,” David’s aide tells him. Uh-huh. Even his interview on The Daily Show seems painfully fake. But Nolfi isn’t bad with civilian life. Damon and Blunt may not be lovers-for-the-ages, but they prod each other on the bus with all the zest of sexual gamesmanship—disguised in the smartaleck sparks they shoot off. And there’s some plain goofiness. When the couple crosses party lines—into a Red Hook rave—and the pol shakes hands with his constituents, you wait for the paparazzi, who never arrive.

From a certain point of view, there are a lot of missed opportunities here. In the hands of Terry Gilliam or Rian Johnson or even Steven Soderbergh, this film could have gravitated toward Kafka or Paul Auster; its bald literalization of Man vs. Fate could’ve been a cerebral spoof—or a cloak-and-dagger assault on the audience, with God as grumpy as he was in A Serious Man. There’s only one scene that teeters on emotional devastation. Two cars smash into one another, as a result of David defying the senior agent you really don’t want to mess with (Terrence Stamp). Who knows what havoc David’s revamped reality has wrought? (Another narrative byway untaken: Harry, who goes rogue to help out the senatorial candidate, goes the way of Satan. I’ve always felt a little bad for these ministers of grace, who God always shafts out of His love for humankind. What spoiled children we are….) But—and this is not necessarily a bad thing—God and his G-Men (read: Nolfi) are soft on His beloved creatures. Being soft on his audience, the director does a good job of keeping the story smooth and lucid; the themes are as ironed out (and gonzo) as his suspense scenes, which provide a uniquely truncated tour of the Big Apple. The price he pays is that The Adjustment Bureau is no visionary sci-fi epic. It remains, however, likable—especially at a time when concepts like free will and individualism are taken for granted by real politicians and propagandists, reduced to platitudes, or used as a rhetorical cloak over things downright sinister. The film arrives at a hokey-but-satisfying, and very American, Compatibilist position: Free will is something to fight for.

Eastwood’s no-frills, almost monastic, style can be very generous; and there were times when I took pleasure in the filmmakers’ mastery of their respective crafts. As a lifelong San Franciscan who’s been clairvoyant since a childhood illness, Damon performs beautifully, gripping the character’s inner life with tactful reserve. George, at the behest of his entrepreneurial brother (Jay Mohr), was once paid generously for his powers; but being able to communicate with the dead means that he absorbs everything from the survivors who commission him. No longer able to bear this level of intimacy, he has quit and cloaked himself in anonymity. (As a token of this character’s sensitivity—and the actor’s—Damon is at his most expressive when George whispers; this man is haunted by the souls of the living. But, possibly inspired by his freestyle voiceover in The Informant!, this player’s musty auguries sound like vivacious improv.) When the opportunity arises for a more traditional form of intimacy with a flighty hot mess named Melanie (Bryce Dallas Howard), Eastwood lingers on their cooking-class courtship; one wants to see them get together. Unfortunately, she doesn’t heed George’s warnings, and goads him into performing a mini-séance for her father. The medium then uncovers facts that should’ve stayed on the down-low. As a token of the director’s sensitivity—and the writer’s, too—we see George again alone, and Melanie awash with tears.

This de facto theme of responsibility, which is amplified here to paranormal proportions, is not unfamiliar to Eastwood or Morgan; but, by reducing Damon’s plot to a mere third of the overall storyline, they may need to host a séance of their own to get it back. One thread, which starts the movie off with a bang, involves a Paris T.V.-news personality played by Cécile De France. She develops her sixth sense after being whipped around by what appears to be, without any substantiation, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. But it seems as if it would take more than an act of God to breathe life into this fuddy Frenchwoman. After a few setbacks, and her coworkers’ very reasonable skepticism about her sudden-onset spiritualism, Marie sees herself as the fortunetellers’ Joan of Arc; but, unlike Saint Joan—or most Eastwoodland creatures—her newfound tumescence doesn’t result in a social conscience. Marie is a mystical brat. It’s in the third segment—which concerns an English boy’s attempts to communicate with his dead twin—that Eastwood’s heart begins to hemorrhage. He and Morgan aren’t above killing the kid en route to the pharmacy, where he’s retrieving a prescription that’ll treat their mother’s alcoholism. His last line, before being brutally flung at an oncoming car, is the peppy “We’ll be just like a normal family!” Not anymore…

If the filmmakers’ patience seems lambent in some sequences, it seems like poor judgment in others; their solemn pacing is the cortège that delivers the plot to its funeral. (And this material isn’t buried alive, mind you.) I might feel more kindly toward Hereafter if I could unearth the point that Eastwood and Morgan had intended to make. Miss Cleo and her kindred may be tempted to thank the movie for advocating their cause, but it hardly does the hereafter any favors. Envisioning the afterlife is an unenviable task, but Eastwood takes it on timorously; he gives us a nondenominational blur, unfettered by any pesky moral or spiritual underpinnings. (It’s hell if it’s anything; the film’s only a few minutes short of being an eternal punishment.) And whenever Morgan has the characters wax philosophically about life after death, he makes their arguments so unconvincing that even a toddler would not be swayed. (I’ve had deeper conversations with people krunked by a bonfire—pontificating through their beer bottles.) Even the stunning recreation of the tsunami is, alas, arbitrary: It’s just a “cinematic” way to slap Marie with a near-death experience. (The flood must’ve conked her differently than the illness did Damon: She’s seen the light, but demonstrates none of George’s psychical empathy. However—because she lacks his burden, the momentum that smooshes them together seems to be blowing them off-course. Marie’s trouble is that nobody believes her; that’s a problem that George only wishes he had.) From its tone, you’d never know how indebted the film is to a fantastical T.V. series like the late Pushing Daisies; Hereafter is in roughly the same genre as Cold Souls or Air Doll, but it’s neither goofy nor poetic. It’s a SyFy-channel love story with the heat turned off.

Back in March, in an incisive profile of Eastwood published in The New Yorker, David Denby wrote that the director, “by constantly altering his early self as a star, achieved [maturity and responsibility] as he got older, and without becoming a stiff.” (Hereafter isn’t stiff, quite; in my opinion, it’s in desperate need of Viagra.) This evolution from Dirty Harry and the Man With No Name to Squeaky-Clean Clint, the Artist With A Big Name is implicit in most complimentary appraisals of Eastwood’s directorial opus. But, if this director wasn’t the Clint Eastwood—if he’d been a sensitive, earnest do-gooder all along, or made and starred in variations of Flags of Our Fathers (2006), Gran Torino (2008), Invictus (2009), and Hereafter for more than five decades—would he be considered a “great” filmmaker? I can only pose the question; I haven’t seen Play Misty for Me (1971), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), Bird (1988), Unforgiven (1992)—I know, I know; it’s on my mental queue—and others. But I’m almost afraid to re-watch Mystic River (2003) or Million Dollar Baby (2004), which I liked way back in the day. Although he’s frequently praised for shirking postmodernism, it’s impossible to say how much Eastwood owes his self-reflexivity. (If it wasn’t for Eastwood’s own performance driving Gran Torino, I might have thought that the film was directed by a revenant Stanley Kramer.) Prolific at 80, the man is no slouch—and certainly not a stiff; but Hereafter, overall, really might be. It doesn’t make death lively—it makes life deathly.

Within the first 10 minutes, Kore-eda has pulled the Pinocchio string; and later, at a restaurant, a little girl makes reference to Ariel from The Little Mermaid. When her father tries to rent the Disney movie from a video store at which Nozomi has improbably been hired as a clerk, he’s not sure what the title is. Neither is Nozomi. Clearly, they don’t see the connection; but Kore-eda makes connections that I might not have seen either. At the end of Hans Christian Andersen’s story, when his scaly princess dies, her body withers and turns to seafoam. But she has refused to slay her prince; in deliquescing, she’s attained an everlasting soul—a privilege that humans, one infers, tend to take for granted. The question our wastrel poses to her sex-toy Geppetto is one that’s riven poets since time immemorial: Why do human beings have hearts? But Kore-eda doesn’t offer Nozomi the consolation that Andersen gave her fishy fellow spirit. What makes this film feel so exotic—mysterious, even—is in what we sense is being withheld from us. Its absence permeates the imagery, and what remains is a grace that’s indistinguishable from despair. Kore-eda weds fairy tale with tragedy. He withholds what he doesn’t feel he has the right to provide.

The problem is that Air Doll takes in the world at the pace that its heroine does. (Just because she’s light as air doesn’t mean she’s quick on her feet.) Sprouting from a 20-page manga called The Pneumatic Figure of a Girl, the film seems two times too long. The schoolgirl strokes her doll’s hair with a fork; it’s a reference to Ariel, who, in the animated feature, was so bemused by the world above that she mistook cutlery for a comb. Nozomi mimics the people around her—particularly children—but her actions don’t allow us to see the world in a new light. Kore-eda leaves that to the heavyset metaphors that weigh down the subtitles. Before revealing her unorthodox origins, Nozomi says things like “What are birthdays?” and gets planer-straight answers—as if it wasn’t outlandish for an adult to ask such questions in earnest. A coworker, Junichi (Arata), whose hair is flying toward a flock of seagulls, becomes the sex doll’s boy toy. But when Nozomi deflates in the store, exposing her true nature, he doesn’t seem properly surprised—just turned on by her fragility. The world of the familiar, which is unfamiliar to Nozomi, is unfamiliar to us, too. By overinflating his metaphor about the postmodern condition, the director makes it pop.

Kore-eda isn’t a conventional filmmaker; he doesn’t foist plot points on us and tell us how to feel. There’s a splash of the anything-goes anarchy of Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo, but Air Doll may be the only film in which miracles are amoral. It’s almost the opposite of Lars and the Real Girl: Ryan Gosling was initially deemed the village loony for falling in love with latex. In Kore-eda’s Tokyo—where you don’t have to be replenished with a bike pump to feel hollow—he’d be considered the norm. Kore-eda’s core idea is a variation on The Purple Rose of Cairo, Woody Allen’s masterpiece—itself a reworking of Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria. In Cairo, Jeff Daniels played a silver-screen shadow who stepped into the theater and became Mia Farrow’s dream lover. Nozomi is a composite of those two characters—both fantasist and fantasy. Allen’s film came to a heartbreaking conclusion; Kore-eda’s is even sadder: The air doll has no reverie to return to. She’s Galatea without Pygmalion. The poor thing is Galatea gone wrong.

However, the nacreous beauty Bae—who looks eccentrically perfect—is a prime candidate for Galateas Gone Wild. Moreover, she gives a magical, affecting performance; her economical gestures are particularly welcome in such a prolix movie. Bae drives Nozomi deeper into sorrow and recognition without ever doffing the air doll’s exoskeletal innocence. There isn’t a touch of malice in her, even at the end when—*SPOILER ALERT*—Nozomi mistakes a vital organ of Junichi’s for a plug that lets out his air, and casually snips it off. He’d blown her up and watched her compress as a form of foreplay. She wants to breathe life into him; but she’s seeking equality where there is none. (I wonder if the sexual politics would have been different if Nozomi was a boy balloon.) It’s a powerful scene: I didn’t sniffle, like the French couple seated nearby, but I could feel my heart deflate. This prince has been slain.

It was sometimes hard for me to keep my head above the longueurs, but Kore-eda has rewards in store for those who keep on treading. Kore-eda is in a depth all his own; he may be the soul of pity. Even peripheral characters cannot escape his heartfelt, keen—and often irrelevant—vigil. Perhaps the most emotional scene in any movie this summer came in Toy Story 3, when the troupe faced death together with interlocking hands. They live, of course. With Kore-eda in control, they might not have—yet his mourning for their loss would have been as rich as our celebration of their survival. He’s venturing on to virgin soil: L’Avventura in Tokyo Disneyland, and undisclosed locations that seem to be all his own. In an interview, he calls this movie a poem; I don’t doubt him. Its vision is so extraordinary to me that I can overlook its postnatal stumbling. Air Doll is an adult toy in a very singular sense.

That Wright’s new film, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World—starring Michael Cera and based on manga-inspired comic books by Canadian writer Bryan Lee O’Malley—has been a box-office dud is vaguely, if not wholly, anomalous. Although the film was well-received at ComicCon—Cannes for comic geeks—and can boast a hip soundtrack (featuring Beck and the genuinely eclectic Broken Social Scene) that should’ve been catnip to indie-music geeks, it seems to have been neglected by its target demo. Perhaps everyone’s so bashed by the state of world affairs that they need nothing less exorbitant than The Expendables to rouse them from their funk; or maybe the filmmakers have tapped into a demographic that’s tapped into online streaming; or, possibly, the old truism that people want to see people they “identify with” on the screen no longer holds true. In any case, it’s a misfortune. While it does not live up to Hot Fuzz, Pilgrim is probably the brightest, bubbliest movie this summer; and its failure, which will—for the time being, at least—vote Michael Cera out of stardom, prognosticates some possibly gloomy trends.

From the very first image—a chintzy pixellation of the Universal logo, accompanied by a N.E.S.-styled rendition of its fanfare—we know that Wright is playing with video games. Honestly, that jarred me a bit—particularly when, only a few minutes later, Pac-Man and Zelda’s names were both conspicuously dropped. I sensed the presence of Diablo Cody loitering behind the scenes. But, I was happy to discover, the video-game references are chiefly—and cleverly—stylistic, not spoken. Wright pays homage rather than sucking up. He employs the usual “kaboom!” and “meanwhile” title cards, but—rather than simply reproducing comic-strip frames and thought bubbles—he’s devised an equivalent style of dislocations that is both unique to him and unique to movies, all without failing to scribble in recognizably cartoonish shorthand. True, it’s an instant-gratification machine: A few brief scenes exist merely to be setups for gags, and the quips go by so quickly that the new ones banish the old ones from one’s head. It’s tweet-paced. But his style is also at the service of the boho-Toronto characters—20-somethings who, typically, are fashioned to be idolized by teenage romantics. Pace Iron Man 2, the garishness of comic books can appeal to the outsize feelings of young people; to that extent, comic tropes can provide lighthearted metaphors for real-life experience. The writers’ sentiment (Wright cowrote with Michael Bacall), and Pilgrim’s gentle nudging of hipsters, reminds me of recent lyrics by Arcade Fire: “So much pain for someone so young, well / I know it’s heavy, I know it ain’t light / But how you gonna lift it with your arms folded tight?”

Actually, those lyrics also encapsulate Cera’s persona. He teases his moral uptightness, but it’s there—and it was there hardcore in the last outing of his I saw, Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. I think I underrated that movie a bit; I misunderstood its target audience. This isn’t to say that it was anything stupendous, but it carried a laudable amount of conviction for a teenie-bopper flick. Cera, however, seemed to be folding his arms tighter than before; his sorrows were too nebulous for Nick. In Pilgrim, he’s finally gotten a little ballsy; his passive-aggression is in tact, but he’s not afraid to be a dick. However, beneath the balls—yeah, I went there—he still has the awkwardness that manifests itself in the few extra words he interpolates into every sentence, and his not-fully-comprehended need to do the right thing. His naïveté is in the classic Huck Finn mold, and I think it is—or was—at the core of his appeal. Cera might’ve been playing it safe by harping on his little-guy-ness, but he stamped it on every role like a name tag, and—until now, it seems—didn’t do much to renew his caricature. But if his appeal is on the decline, I’m curious to know who—if anyone—might fill that vacuum; and if a vacuum persists, does that mean a regression in tastes? Not-quite-grown-up grown-ups are in now; yet Cera’s edge is that he has a dinky body but an old-soul sensibility. Although he hasn’t demonstrated the same range as an actor, Cera may end up like Elliott Gould: someone so feasted on by his particular film generation that he can’t help but become a relic of it.

But Pilgrim isn’t just Cera’s show. The ensemble cast helps one forget the banality of the video-game-overloaded plot. In order to win Ramona’s heart, Scott must vanquish her seven evil exes—most of whom seem way older than her, and inexplicably famous. Each of the exes is very funny in turn, and Wright is able to shake things up visually, but the story seems to be recycling itself. It’s like looking over some dude’s shoulder as he plays an arcade-game boxing match; the levels keep getting tougher to beat, I guess, but they all seem the same from back here. Fortunately, Wright’s panache is redemptive; it makes Pilgrim’s progress more fun than this summer’s intellectual tourist trap, Inception. The cast is redemptive, too. Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who plays Ramona, has Maggie Gyllenhaal eyes and hair that cycles through primary colors. She also has a sweet, ambiguous presence; one can understand Scott’s attraction to her. And her chimeric underplaying legitimizes her hipster look: Her nonconformity is a manifestation of her melancholy. As a Japanese-Catholic schoolgirl, whose hitherto untouched heart gets squashed, Ellen Wong’s cupidity is charming, a parody of the transformation Sandy makes at the end of Grease. Kieran Culkin is creepily smooth as Scott’s oversexed gay roommate; is it a subtle joke that Wallace shares his name with Wallace Langham, who played a similarly accoutered, sexually ambiguous schoolyard sadist in The Chocolate War? (All such references are subtle: Are the opening titles meant to remind one of those from Metropolis?) Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air, Twilight) is the only kink; she’s too redolent of the teen-movie world.

Hopefully, Netflix will be redemptive, too. I’d be sad to see Pilgrim fade into obscurity. While it’s by no means a great or profound movie, it’s inspiriting. It rocks. Even when Scott’s garage band is bombing, it’s fun to catch its vibes just as it’s fun to catch live music—really any live music—when you’ve had a few (too many). And the jams interact nicely with Wright’s hyperkinetic editing, loaded imagery, theatrical lighting—hell, he even takes us to a claymation-desert afterlife and back. As much as or more than ever before, comedy directors are at the service of their actors; the method behind Dinner for Schmucks and Cyrus is akin to that of documentarians whose cameras are trained on meerkats, ready to pounce if their fuzzy friends do anything of interest. Just substitute Jonah Hill for meerkats. Wright, on the other hand, is a remarkably sophisticated visual talent; his very mania is funny: Goofy Scorsese. I just hope that audiences won’t continue to neglect the difference between Wright and wrong.

But Pixar pastiches are too richly imaginative to feel like hand-me-downs; they don’t make allusions, they draw together familiar threads and stitch them into a unified whole. What separates Toy Story from The Velveteen Rabbit or Where the Wild Things Are or A. A. Milne’s stories about Winnie-the-Pooh—though not The Brave Little Toaster, a childhood favorite of mine borrowed from liberally here—is its inclusion of consumer culture. In earlier eras, sentient dolls weren’t threatened with the garbage pail; they had the insurance policy of being passed on to the next generation. At a time when there’s a new hot item every Christmas, these figurines have to stay in shape if they want to stay in the crate; the conflict between cowpoke and spaceman in the first Toy Story was not instigated insignificantly. Though the toys’ acceptance of their new phase of “life” is cheerful in part three—and, for a blockbusting cartoon, courageous—there are strands of feeling that seem almost heartbreakingly mature. When, as they inch perilously closer to the hellish maw of a fire-breathing incinerator, the toys link hands and form a chain, it’s an eerily moving moment—the acceptance of moving on in Up has advanced to an acceptance of moving beyond. No plastic circle has ever left our mortal coil so gracefully unfurled.

Duke (of the Web series Clark and Michael) is entertaining as the nerdy 20-year-old who witnesses his own conception—even though he’s a few years early. (Either that or his mother suffered a horrifyingly protracted pregnancy. Not that the filmmakers betray much knowledge of or experience with female behavior.) Corddry, who gets the best lines—as well as the worst—works well to hide how one-note the jokes are. Blubbery Robinson is a pitch-perfect bawler when he chews out his no-good girlfriend—who’s nine at this point in history. But he’s yet another victim of that recent brah-medy staple: the dude who’s scarred from pussy-whipping. The self-hatred inherent in Robinson and Corddry’s roles isn’t satirical; it’s as if guys have lost a cosmic war between the genders, and this passive aggression is the menfolks’ only way to rattle its cage. The shtick isn’t even funny in a sad way anymore; it’s just pathetic. I’m not exactly sure what Cusack’s motives were. He’s listed as a producer, and gets top billing, yet he’s stuck playing the straight man—he’s not particularly funny, nor does he get his head wet in the serious subtext. Then again, middle-aged pathos wouldn’t really float in this tub’s brackish water.

Back in 2003—aged about 15—I wrote a comic about modern-day teenagers traveling back to 1985 via a Back to the Future D.V.D. featurette. I even made the same joke about Michael Jackson’s pigment. On the whole, it was pretty lame; but I ever-so hoped that something clever could come of the premise as executed by grown-ups. Instead, the resultant script could’ve been written over a weekend. It’s a hangover of The Hangover, which had itself binged on Will Ferrell comedies. I laughed a few times during H.T.T.M., but if I found a hot tub that would whirlpool me back to before I bought my tickets, I’d gladly take a dip. Hollywood has a knack for taking quirky ideas and focus-grouping them into oblivion; the setups keep getting weirder, but the jokes remain the same. If this movie were to reach 88 miles per hour, it’d be because the filmmakers were asleep at the wheel.