The Zero Theorem
Directed by Terry Gilliam

After a decade and a half of misfires (The Brothers Grimm), abandoned projects (The Man Who Killed Don Quixote), and plagued productions (The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus), The Zero Theorem marks Terry Gilliam’s return to a comfort zone, of sorts, in its proximity to the themes and style of his greatest triumph. Indeed, there’s no mistaking his latest effort’s similarities to Brazil: both take place in an information-overloaded/deadened future in which an alienated hero increasingly confuses fantasy and reality in the search for emancipation. But Brazil possessed a unique sensibility and attitude; Theorem, in contrast, feels empty, underdeveloped, and unintentionally self-parodic.

The new film stars Christoph Waltz as Qohen Leth, a computer programmer for a mammoth information company presided over by Big Brother-esque Management (Matt Damon). Haunted by countless phobias within a shrill and vapid society, Qohen requests to work from home—a burnt-out cathedral—in order to answer a long-delayed phone call that will ostensibly relate the meaning of his life. He receives his wish, but only by heading Management’s insanity-inducing project to discover nothing less than the purpose—or purposelessness—of the entire universe.

Unsurprisingly, Gilliam’s approach toward such lofty existential material (as scripted by Pat Rushin) emphasizes art direction and broad performances over coherent storytelling. A marvel of set design (Qohen’s pad is conceived as an architectural mash-up of the sacred and profane), Theorem also drowns key narrative and character details in a din of visual jokes that only reinforce an obvious point: that the world has forsaken spiritual and emotional depths for the technological surface. The unresolved “Is It All Just Happening in the Character’s Head?” ending remains ambiguous not for its complexity but for being rushed and confusedly executed.

As if aware of its derivativeness, Gilliam packs his film with rote wink-nudge references to his own past work; more egregiously, he also attempts to deflect any charges of pretension by transforming a talented supporting cast (David Thewlis, Tilda Swinton) into a carnival of grotesques. This proves especially painful in the case of a fetishized Mélanie Thierry as Qohen’s love interest—without a relatable human connection at its core Theorem undermines the very values it purports to champion.

Opens September 19

Abuse of Weakness
Directed by Catherine Breillat

Whatever its ultimate worth, Catherine Breillat’s Abuse of Weakness is notable for devoting the most screen time to check-writing since the opening of Tout Va Bien. And just as Godard and Gorin depict movie financing as a Faustian bloodletting, so does Breillat compare the monetary transactions necessary for the production of art to an excruciating physical depletion. Debilitated by a stroke, filmmaker Maud (Isabelle Huppert) becomes infatuated with arrogant hustler Vilko (Kool Shen), impulsively cast as the lead in her next movie and gradually made recipient of her bank account—so he can subsidize shady business deals and so she can keep him on board. As Maud’s health deteriorates the psychological manipulation increases: rich, insulated Maud uses the uncouth ex-con to condescendingly experience how the other half lives; Vilko, meanwhile, employs guilt to not only bully Maud out of her cash but also to win her undivided attention—a born actor (and author of a myth-inflating memoir), his deceptions demand an audience or else might as well cease to exist.

In the past Breillat has largely specialized in warmed-over art house shock about perverse sexuality. Instead of transgression, Abuse traffics in autobiography, but Breillat remains too insignificant and too rudimentary a filmmaker to create compelling meta-commentary—the parallels between Maud’s planned film, about the violent relationship between a movie star and a secret lover, and her real life (and Breillat’s real real life) go largely unexplored. If taken as a straightforward portrait of soul-sucking codependence, however, Abuse proves disturbing in its moral inscrutability. Huppert is brilliant as usual, moving beyond rote awards-craving imitations of physical distress in order to render Maud a victim deserving of both scorn and sympathy. When at the film’s end she claims it was both herself and not herself who made so many naïve, self-destructive decisions, we know exactly what she means.

Opens August 15 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center

Double Play: James Benning and Richard Linklater
Directed by Gabe Klinger

Gabe Klinger’s documentary is a portrait of a couple of cinematic outsiders, James Benning and Richard Linklater. Aside from their camaraderie and mutual admiration (Benning was the young Linklater’s first choice for visiting filmmaker when the latter founded the Austin Film Society in the mid-80s), it’s initially difficult to discern what commonalities the two possess: Benning is a hardcore avant-gardist best known for static, ultra-slow long take studies of landscapes and quotidian actions (13 Lakes, Ten Skies, RR, Twenty Cigarettes), while Linklater has situated his formal experimentation within the parameters of dialogue-heavy bohemian anti-narratives (Slacker, Before Sunrise, Waking Life). Klinger reveals points of convergence, however, as he follows JB and RL during the former’s latest Film Society visit as well as in a series of free-flowing conversations, editing suite drop-ins, and athletic sparring sessions—if you’ve ever wanted to see the director of One Way Boogie Woogie take a spill while attempting to snag a fly ball, you’ve come to the right place.

Ideas, plans, and reminiscences bandy between Benning and Linklater as casually as the unfolding of their films. What aligns them, we discover, is autodidacticism: not only did both master cinema outside film school, but both found movies relatively late after non-artistic beginnings (Linklater dropped out of college and worked on an oil rig, Benning studied mathematics and engaged in social work). Their shared interest in non-traditional storytelling—or, often in the case of Benning, non-storytelling—was never sullied by early industry indoctrination, and Klinger provides insightful film essay-esque examples of surprising overlapping themes and motifs from their work: Benning’s perception-expanding patience and Linklater’s long view on aging in his three Before films and the recent Boyhood; a melancholic appreciation for the national pastime in the former’s American Dreams (Lost and Found) and the latter’s Bad News Bears (both filmmakers went to school on baseball scholarships). Experimental purists may chafe at comparisons of Linklater to Benning, while indie fans may remain miffed by Benning’s oblique strategies, but that’s not Double Play’s fault: if this gently illuminating doc proves anything it’s that different corners of the cinematic universe can be easily bridged, especially through friendship.

July 18-24 at Anthology Film Archives

The Dance of Reality
Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky

This is cult surrealist Alejandro Jodorowsky’s first film in 24 years, but those expecting that epic gestation period to have finally yielded a cosmic opus—like the unrealized project at the heart of recent documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune—will be disappointed: Dance instead stands in a tradition of oneiric autobiographical art films such as The Mirror and especially Amarcord in its blending of feverish childhood memory and mythopolitical critique. As such, the film admirably succeeds, though you miss the desert-of-the-mind psychodrama that made Jodorowsky’s signature works (El Topo, The Holy Mountain) so singularly delirious.

Despite some ham-handed metaphors (townspeople extras donning featureless masks) and contrived whimsy (a mystical guru named the Theosophist), the first half of Dance poignantly depicts the contentious relationship between sensitive prepubescent Alejandro (Jeremias Herskovits) and his overbearing father Jaime (Brontis Jodorowsky, the director’s son—Jodorowsky himself intermittently plays onscreen narrator/spiritual guide). The action takes place in the small port city of Tocopilla during Chile’s Ibáñez dictatorship, and this backdrop —as seen through Alejandro’s hyperbolic imagination—fosters complex connections between the rising tide of totalitarianism, classism, and anti-Semitism and the intimate brutalities of family life.

Whereas the central domestic unit of Fellini’s Amarcord provided unambiguous comic relief from the reign of Mussolini, Dance depicts the home as both safe haven from and continuation of the terrifying outside world. On the one hand, young Jodorowsky’s big-bosomed, constantly singing mother (Pamela Flores) protects her son from local bigots and bullies with nurturing lessons in spiritual magic; on the other, Jaime’s socialist allegiances and selfless acts of charity are undermined by a penchant for disciplining his son through violent, emotion-suppressing manhood rituals.

Jaime’s plan to kill Ibáñez by becoming a horse handler initially appears a silly digression, but it actually begins a second act that charts papá Jodorowsky’s own rite of passage from small-scale Stalin (whom he resembles) to humbled martyr. It’s here that Dance shifts from magical realist bildungsroman to tragicomic morality play with surprisingly powerful results. Making an absurdist’s sense of the sins of the father, Jodorowsky redeems his past and restores hope for the future—a truly cosmic trajectory after all.

Opens May 23 at the Sunshine