‘The Astronaut’
Rent or buy it on most major platforms.
The first two-thirds of Jess Varley’s “The Astronaut” are relatively standard paranoid science-fiction fare. The title character, Capt. Sam Walker (Kate Mara), crashes back from space physically and mentally banged up. Her caring adoptive father, Gen. William Harris (Laurence Fishburne), arranges for her to stay at an isolated safe house where she can be evaluated and recover, with occasional visits from her husband (Gabriel Luna) and young daughter (Scarlett Holmes). It’s not long before things go bump in the night. Weird shadowy presences and noises manifest themselves. Sam notices new bruises on her body, which also begins to change in increasingly horrific ways. The film makes you wonder what the heck she brought back from space, though a better question might be what she left with. The movie should come with a warning: Abandon all hope for plausibility, ye who press the “rent” button. But there is something admirable about the way the director goes for a bold plot twist — bold and bonkers. The pivot creates more questions than it answers, but there’s something to be said for throwing caution (and sense) to the wind.
‘Tiempos Futuros’ (‘The Shape of Things to Come’)
“No one in the city has seen it rain,” Luis (Fernando Bacilio) tells his young son, Teo (Lorenzo Molina), referring to their hometown, Lima, Peru. To help improve the situation, the pair are building an elaborate machine in their apartment, a large engine connected to a rooftop contraption that looks like an oversize satellite dish. Luis’s plan is to cause the clouds that perpetually hang over Lima to finally break. But rather than get into the details of that effort, the director V. Checa focuses on the daily life of Teo, a quiet and withdrawn boy, but also a resourceful one. He supports himself and his dad by doing odd jobs at a club, then falls into something more lucrative when he begins surreptitiously installing surveillance devices on behalf of a group of petty criminals.
To be clear, this isn’t another adaptation of the H.G. Wells sci-fi novel (you’re better off entering the original title, “Tiempos Futuros,” when searching for the film on Tubi). Rather, this is a somber, haunting art house tale of daily existence in a world where rain always threatens but doesn’t fall — this is not far-off from the parched Peruvian capital’s reality. Checa paints a matter-of-fact picture of a future that has arrived early.
‘ReEntry’
Rent or buy it on most major platforms.
On the surface, Brendan Choisnet’s film looks a bit like a gender-reversed version of “The Astronaut,” this time with a man who returns changed from a trip. It’s not so much in the travelers’ destinations that the films differ (though there’s that, too) but in their tones: “ReEntry” is a psychological marital drama in which a couple feel as if they’ve become strangers. As part of an experiment devised by the genius scientist Alicia (the ever-reliable Noma Dumezweni), Lucas (Sam Trammell) steps into a gateway to unknown dimensions. Unfortunately instead of instantly reappearing, he remains missing for over a year — and when he finally returns, he thinks he was gone for just a flash.
Lucas’s wife, Elenore (Emily Deschanel), is thrilled to have her husband back, until she starts noticing details that don’t compute, like they are remembering moments from their shared past completely differently: The Sam who came back is identical to the one who left, yet not quite the same. At times “ReEntry” feels like a multiverse variation on gaslighting, or maybe an allegory for couples drifting apart — a novel perspective on an ages-old issue that has fed generations of domestic strife.
‘Forgive Us All’
Stream it on Amazon Prime Video or Tubi.
Some wealthy doomsday preppers buy property in New Zealand, convinced that this isolated nation would be a refuge from civilizational collapse. Maybe they should watch Jordana Stott’s movie, which makes clear that remoteness does not ensure safety. Sure, Rory (Lily Sullivan) is able to survive a zombie epidemic while holed up on a farm with her father-in-law, Otto (the great Australian actor Richard Roxburgh), and a battery of surveillance cameras. But eventually their routine is shattered by the arrival of Noah (Lance Giles), who stole a vial that could contain the cure to the infection and is on the run from the baddies who want it back.
“Forgive Us All” is a good, if sometimes slow moving, example of its genre, with welcome western touches like transportation by horseback. The attention to production values also rewards close attention — the squeaking, grunting, squelching, croaking, screeching Howlers, as the infected are called, have especially good sound design. But where the movie really hits home is when Rory asks Otto the question that haunts all such tales: “What are we surviving for?”
‘Watch the Skies’
Stream it on Amazon Prime Video.
The latest effort from the Swedish filmmaking collective Crazy Pictures (“The Unthinkable”) comes with a quirk: The movie was dubbed into English by its original cast, their efforts adjusted with a program called TrueSync so the characters’ lips match the new language. The result is visually acceptable but sounds rather weird since everybody now speaks a Swedish-accented English. Fortunately, Prime Video carries both versions, so head straight to the one with subtitles. Still, we are likely to see more similar attempts.
Set in 1996, “Watch the Skies” revolves around U.F.O. Sweden, a motley group of nerdy amateurs who keep a close eye on phenomena that could be linked to intergalactic visitors. Their eccentric routines are disrupted by the arrival of Denise (Inez Dahl Torhaug), a headstrong teenager and a rare case of a female hacker in a movie. She is convinced her father, who used to be a member of the group, was abducted a decade earlier by the very aliens he was obsessed with. Some of “Watch the Skies” is taken up by tensions triggered by Denise within U.F.O. Sweden, but for the most part this is a caper about obsessive geeks trying to solve a puzzle, with a strong Spielberg influence. Many movies about this particular subset of people often end up being about their troubled psyches rather than anything really sci-fi, but rest assured that something is definitely afoot here.
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