‘Arco’
Let’s get a technicality out of the way: The dubbed version of this French animated eco-fable is the most easily available in the United States, but at least it is deluxe, with a voice cast that includes Will Ferrell, Natalie Portman, America Ferrera and Mark Ruffalo. This seems to assume that the movie is strictly for kiddies, which isn’t the case at all. Like Studio Ghibli productions, with which it shares concerns and aesthetics, Ugo Bienvenu’s debut feature welcomes audiences young and old.
The 10-year-old Arco (voiced by Juliano Valdi, who plays young Michael Jackson in “Michael”) lives in the tranquil 30th century, where people inhabit environmentally progressive homes perched on gigantic stalks, and time travel is common. One night, Arco slips out to attempt to go back to the dinosaur era — dino love is clearly evergreen — but ends up crash-landing in 2075, where he is rescued by a little girl named Iris (Romy Fay). Much of the story follows Arco’s wide-eyed discovery of an increasingly troubled past (our relatively near future) as he attempts to return to his own timeline. The movie is melancholy in its portrayal of encroaching technology and destructive weather events in 2075, but suggests humanity may learn from its mistakes.
‘Minore’
After tentacled beasties gruesomely divebomb a small seaside town, the baffled visiting sailor William (Davide Tucci) asks: “Is this a Greek thing?” Having never been there, I can’t say for sure whether vicious flying octopus-like creatures are common in that part of Europe, but Konstantinos Koutsoliotas’s “Minore” certainly is “a Greek thing” — in that it belongs to that country’s “weird wave” school of oddball filmmaking.
William is staying in a small hotel while trying to locate his missing father. He has better luck getting to know the locals, who include the friendly waitress Aliki (Daphne Alexander). The town is quiet and lovely, with assorted eccentric characters and traditional music jams at the taverna. Some of the men just love hanging out shirtless, sometimes covering themselves in oil, and William himself looks like the wholesome cousin of the Jean Genet sailor Querelle, though Koutsoliotas doesn’t push the queer vibe very far. Mostly he just lets us hang out with this eccentric ragtag crew, until the attacks begin and the director turns the Grand Guignol dial to 11.
We are told the new arrivals are the children of “the Great Devourer,” and anybody with a passing knowledge of Lovecraft lore will get a kick out of that term. Watching the villagers resist the cosmically terrifying visitors is a hoot, even when things get gory, as they are wont to do when the worst tourists in the world descend on a Greek beach.
‘Didn’t Die’
Rent or buy it on most major platforms.
If you thought that a zombie apocalypse would at least curtail the number of podcasters, I have bad news: Some of them are very resilient. Or at least Vinita (Kiran Deol, best known as a comedian) is, crisscrossing the country in a Tesla — somehow those are still around as well — to record a show, with her brother Rish (Vishal Vijayakumar) as a sidekick. The pair make it back to their hometown to stay with their brother, Hari (Samrat Chakrabarti). But podcasting the state of zombie America quickly takes a back seat in Meera Menon’s movie, whose black and white cinematography and humor sometimes bring to mind a (tamer) “Night of the Living Dead.”
Vinita is terminally jaded and appears unaffected by the dire situation, until her ex, Vincent (George Basil), turns up with an abandoned little girl in tow. Meanwhile the “biters” seem to involve and gain a measure of consciousness. That cannot be good. Menon, who has directed several episodes of the sci-fi series “For All Mankind,” displays a certain craftsmanship, a quality too often missing from micro-indies, as she depicts the blended family adjusting to its new reality. And frankly it’s refreshing to see a majority South Asian cast in an American sci-fi/horror movie.
‘Cold Storage’
Rent or buy it on most major platforms.
Jonny Campbell’s neat movie helpfully reminds us of two truisms. One is that you shouldn’t touch fungi that fell out of a space capsule. The other is that when officials confidently declare that a threat was “contained permanently,” they are either idiots or lying. Teacake (Joe Keery, from “Stranger Things”) learns that the hard way when he and his colleague Naomi (Georgina Campbell) investigate an odd pinging sound at the underground storage facility where they work — that the place was built in a decommissioned military complex should have been a warning sign. The duo quickly discover they are not equipped to deal with the green horror lurking behind the walls and they call the cavalry, which arrives in the shape of Liam Neeson.
Maybe it’s because of Keery’s presence, but the nimble, comically gross “Cold Storage” made me think of how “Stranger Things” could have evolved had it maintained the Season 1 vibe instead of bloating up like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man from “Ghostbusters.” The presence of the British grande dames Lesley Manville and Vanessa Redgrave only adds to the self-aware fun. This is B horror/sci-fi done well, and that’s not so easy to pull off.
‘This Is Not a Test’
Ah, 1998, when you could stop a zombie by crushing its skull with a bulky corded phone … Adam MacDonald’s movie, based on Courtney Summers’s Y.A. novel of the same title, takes place in a perpetually overcast world of pre-Y2K anomie.
Sloane (Olivia Holt) is not doing great, with a violent father who pushed her sister away. She’s having dark thoughts, but when zombies suddenly appear in her neighborhood, her survival instinct kicks in. She and a small group of her classmates hole up in their high school, where they listen to the news on a small boombox and fend off the hungry hordes. Sloane gets close to Rhys (Froy Gutierrez, Holt’s castmate in the “Cruel Summer” series), and the kids must figure out how to deal with the sketchy English teacher Mr. Baxter (a convincingly grizzled Luke Macfarlane) along with find a way to reach a possibly safe zone. Teen angst feels like the worst thing in the world — until someone tries to eat you alive.
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