“That South Park musical kinda makes fun of us.” Hugh Grant invites in a couple of mormon girls who don’t quite talk like real people, but maybe that’s the point. He quickly proves to be weirder than they are, with his dogeared bibles of all religions and specific theological questions they can’t answer, his never-seen but oft-mentioned wife, the metal in his walls preventing cell signals. Hugh puts on a Hollies LP and calls the Book of Mormon a “zany regional spinoff edition” of the Bible over “The Air That I Breathe,” then drops the gentle facade and locks them in his Barbarian basement with an apparently dead woman. Resurrection, afterlife, and simulation theory are proposed, the girls realize they need to outwit Grant at his own theological game and call out some inconsistency in his story, leading to a final showdown which kills Sophie Thatcher (of the new Companion), leaving only the quieter Chloe East (Wolf of Snow Hollow) alive to escape, no thanks to Elder Topher Grace who’d been searching for them. Decent movie, we should cast Hugh Grant as a verbose psychotic in more movies.

As the master dies, a duel between his top disciple QQ (Andy On, rookie cop of Mad Detective) and the master’s son Shen An (Jacky Heung of Chasing Dream), which QQ wins, taking over while the son asks for a rematch. I thought this meant Disciple QQ was the righteous leader and the son was the entitled guy trying to cheat his way into power, but I got it backwards. Anyway, the whole rest of the movie is rematches, QQ coming off worse and worse. It’s all nicely lit and designed, fake-looking in a beautiful way.

Meanwhile, Shen An has got a banker hotgirl (Bea Hayden Kuo of Tiny Times) but gets rescued by postal carrier Tang Shiyi, who knows the secret short sword technique QQ thinks Shen An is protecting. This all escalates to a video-gamey final wave battle in the castle before the the Martial Arts Circle breaks it up and sends everyone away for a few years to cool down.

Decided this movie was very silly, but as death grew nearer, I upgraded(?) to “very uneven.” Opens with so-called good friends discussing their backstories for apparently the first time, all on-the-nose dialogue, real “foreign auteur working awkwardly in English” sort of stuff, then gradually accumulates a shockingly high number of The Dead quotes. Julianne Moore is a void of a character, agreeing to vacation with terminal Tilda but sneaking away with John Turturro, all three of whom are writers. I had no idea when watching some Buster Keaton the night before that they’d unwind in this movie by watching Buster Keaton. Novelist Nunez had a second movie adaptation come out the same awards season, The Friend with Naomi Watts, which hasn’t come out yet but sounds bad from early reviews.

Nobody really liked this, but I, a renowned Alice Lowe enjoyer, will surely like it. She keeps dying for the same guy then being reborn, like dumb The Beast. It has hardly any good jokes, then her 1980s fortune teller says maybe instead of dying for him over and over, it’s his turn to die, but it still takes forever to get to the end. And come to think of it I didn’t really like Prevenge – I was thinking of Sightseers. That one’s good.

Onscreen text, echoey voice clips, gentle electro music with handclap percussion, poetry, research – all presented as weirdly as possible. Focused primarily on being weird, secondarily on moths. Takes a long sidetrack to make fun of a Poe story, and another to discuss the dumbass scientist who imported the mega-destructive spongy (nee-gypsy) moths from Europe.

Julianne Nicholson (La Doctora in Monos) has a weird daughter, tries dating Will Patton (last seen as a religious nut in Minari) then Sophie Okonedo (oscar nominee, had hands-for-feet in Aeon Flux) then Elias Koteas (pride of Canada, last and probably next seen in Crash). Janet breaks up with the first two, Elias vanishes mid-picnic. The writer/director was the daughter’s age in 1991 when the movie is set, what a coincidence.

Really is a doc about artworks being repatriated from France to Benin. The conceit of having the ancient artworks do the narration and the responses from modern museum attendees made this more interesting than it might’ve been.

A goof on Salvador Dali (who is played by multiple actors wearing the same mustache), and another meta-game after The Second Act. Journalist (Bird People star Anaïs Demoustier) repeatedly schedules interviews with a preposteous, self-obsessed Dali, and he keeps walking out. Even more Buñuelian than the last Dupieux/Demoustier movie Incredible But True, the action loops and rewinds, roles swap, there’s Black Lodge reverse motion, and it ends with everyone watching the interview film which was never made.

Meta-movie where the actors keep “breaking character” between takes because they are playing actors who are appearing in the first movie directed by AI (represented by a button-down man in a white void on a laptop screen). Louis Garrel is meeting Léa Seydoux for a date, she brings her dad Vincent Lindon, Louis brings his friend Yannick, who he’s hoping Léa can date instead. Manuel Guillot the waiter can’t handle the performance pressure and kills himself in his car (in character), then after the shoot he kills himself in his car. As a final meta-touch, it closes by showing us the extremely long track setup for the opening tracking shot. Filipe: “It does not really have much to say about AI or industry, but as a vehicle for a terrific group of actors who are as usual all-in in the filmmaker’s concept, this a very good time.”