It's apparently a prequel to Indonesia's biggest box-office hit ever, and the first South Asian film ever filmed for IMAX. On a laptop (because Airplay and Screen Mirroring sucks) it's an effective piece of folk horror about a young woman who brings a peculiar bangle to a remote hamlet in hopes that doing so will release her mother from a mysterious illness. Takes a while to get going, but has a riveting Busby Berkeley-meets-Sam Raimi spectacle as its finale.

Gratuitously dumb, needlessly baroque attempt at a TANK GIRL-style cult fave that's afraid to actually be about anything and fails to do anything original stylistically. The gimmick of having a deaf and mute action hero is squandered in favor of endless, over-edited fight scenes that feel like the fevered output of 13-year-old arcade regulars--just because your movie tries to capture the "Double Dragon" aesthetic doesn't mean it has to be as narratively simple. Best part is seeing Brett Gelman of STRANGER THINGS and FLEABAG import his schtick into this dystopian milieu.

Despite its somewhat twee and privileged first-person hook, this is an ultimately deepish look at the human urge to preserve tangible records of our lives and experiences. This leads to ruminations on the impermanence of all things, the ways nature acts as its own archive, and the degree to which these urges serve as a way to avoid confronting our own contingency and mortality. Of course Werner Herzog shows up, and of course he reads Ozymandias, both of which only point out that the filmmaker's concerns are by no means new or unique. But now there exists this record of them, which is a good thing.

Bilbo Baggins is the teacher and Wednesday Addams is the pupil in this intermittently interesting melodrama based less on "Lolita" than on the Police song "Don't Stand (So Close To Me)" [parentheses from memory so forgive me]. I saw this on the last night it's playing theatrically here in town, and it was in a mid-sized auditorium in an audience of one Martin Freeman demographic (me) and five Jenna Ortega demographics.