‘Caddo Lake’
Unlike the impossibly complicated German series “Dark,” this puzzle of a film doesn’t require you to draw up a chart to follow the various story lines. Still, there is a Byzantine complexity that requires your full attention to the plot, which revolves around twin events. One is the desperate search that Ellie (Eliza Scanlen, giving strong young Jodie Foster energy) is conducting for her younger stepsister, Anna (Caroline Falk), who has vanished on the titular bayou-like lake. The other is what happens to Paris (Dylan O’Brien), who works dredging the increasingly shallow waters but is really rooting through the muck of his past — he is haunted by a car accident that he survived but killed his mother. Eventually, Anna and Paris realize that some spots on the lake, which sits between Texas and Louisiana, allow people to travel in time when certain conditions are met.
I actually gasped when the writer-directors Celine Held and Logan George dropped a big reveal, but that event moves the story’s emotional needle instead of coming across as a stunt (like some of the twists deployed by M. Night Shyamalan, a producer here). Beyond the plot mechanics, however, it’s the terrific actors — including Lauren Ambrose as Ellie’s mother — who make sure we stay in the loop.
‘Me, Myself & the Void’
The schlubby, man-child Jack (Jack De Sena) is a standup prone to expose his equally struggling life onstage, all for meager laughs in tiny clubs. He can’t make rent, his relationship with Mia (Kelly Marie Tran) is a wreck. And then he’s dead. Or at least he’s down on his bathroom floor, unconscious — and he can see himself there, as if he were having a freak out-of-body experience. Helped by his best friend, Chris (Chris W. Smith, with whom De Sena forms the comedy duo Chris & Jack), Jack sets out in a kind of netherworld to find out how he ended up in that predicament. One major lead might be his unsettlingly grim roommate (James Babson), whose bedroom is mysteriously off-limits.
Even with plenty of multiverse mulligans, it’s unclear whether Jack will ever get things right. The story of a man at his wit’s end — a particularly acute problem for a comedian — trying to learn his lesson is a familiar one, to be sure. But Tim Hautekiet’s comedy puts an interesting shaggy spin on it, like a small indie band doing a rough but somehow appealing cover of a classic-rock hit.
‘Things Will Be Different’
On the run and carrying stolen cash and rifles, the estranged siblings Joseph (Adam David Thompson) and Sidney (Riley Dandy) hole up in an isolated farmhouse. They know the place is somehow outside of our regular timeline and figure that they can hide for a while in that “magical safe house” until the dust settles. Michael Felker’s first feature offers a nice twist on the common premise of people who become trapped in vagaries of the space-time continuum: Here, Joseph and Sidney know what they’re getting into, and Joseph even appears to have a notebook of handwritten instructions. Unfortunately, the pair become stuck in a so-called Vice Grip and can’t return to their reality. Where they are and how they will escape forms the film’s crux.
It must be said that “Things Will Be Different” can be tough to follow at times, though slowly but surely, it offers what passes for closure in an unstable timeline. The movie’s executive producers include lo-fi sci-fi figureheads Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead (whose own wackadoo “Something in the Dirt,” which Felker edited, feels like a distant relative) and is a head trip for viewers who are not beholden to neat answers.
‘CTRL’
Nella (Ananya Panday) and Joe (Vihaan Samat) fall in love in college and develop a storybook romance, which they, like many of their peers, share on social media. For them, though, sharing quickly becomes selling, as the couple, known as NJoy, monetize their entire life as popular influencers. But those who live by the sword can end up self-impaling on it: When Nella tries to surprise Joe in a livestream, she inadvertently catches him smooching another woman. NJoy turns to Nding, and Nella’s followers turn against her — a move that feels somewhat arbitrary yet believable. But this is only the beginning of Vikramaditya Motwane’s film. Nella download a new app that promises to give her “the power to edit your past” under the guidance of an A.I. avatar (voiced by Aparshakti Khurana). What she gives up in exchange is the movie’s true subject.
The cyber-thriller side of “CTRL” is not the most convincing, but the film immerses viewers into a perpetually online candy-colored world — the screen often duplicates a phone’s, with graphics to match — that is stuck in a loop of perpetual feedback but also feels oppressively intrusive. When your life boils down to your online data, it’s frighteningly easy to just give it away.
‘Jackpot!’
Now that the Rock seems stuck in his Final Boss persona and Dave Bautista is exploring his dramatic side, John Cena remains the most reliable purveyor of punches and punchlines among the wrestling-bred thespians. His surprisingly effective chemistry with Awkwafina is what makes Paul Feig’s hyperactive comic dystopia transcend its often frantic parts.
In the film’s vision of 2030 California, it’s open season on the winner of the state’s monthly Grand Lottery drawing: Anybody who kills them (no guns!) gets to keep the money. When the struggling former child actress Katie (Awkwafina) is selected as the newest winner, sorry, victim, Noel (Cena) volunteers to protect her until nightfall, when she gets to keep her $3.6 billion prize and he earns 10 percent of it for his services. “Jackpot!” has attracted comparisons to “Idiocracy” and “The Purge,” but the film is more modest in its goals: Feig is less interested in sociopolitical satire than in getting the two leads in and out of set pieces — which is not all that surprising coming from the director of “Bridesmaids.” Noel’s hangdog brawn (an unlikely combination Cena pulls off with sneaky charm) and Katie’s bewilderment keep us going until time runs out, too.
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