I was frustrated for so long in the process of watching this series. After a rather conventional first episode, it confusingly leaps around, seemingly refusing to be tied down to any particular time and place. I was also frustrated that it has no interest in the plausible logistics of survival in an end-of-the-world scenario and so felt increasingly unrealistic. But then as the multiple threads combine, I finally realize how everything just fits. As a Broken Forum poster pointed out, this is really about trauma and healing from it in different ways. There are many parts of its message that I dislike but I can’t deny that this is one perfectly planned and crafted standalone series.

This French legal drama film won so much international acclaim that it’s a must watch. Despite the death at its heart, the film actually uses the intense courtroom scrutiny as an excuse to dissect every detail and every layer of a relationship between a woman and her husband. Director Justine Triet ensures that multiple interpretations of every scene, situation or line of dialogue are possible at the same time. Not only is the truth is elusive no matter how hard we search for it but at some point it may have to be something that we decide for ourselves.

Experimental films are usually difficult to make sense of but that is very much not the case here. The putative director William Greaves explicitly explains what he is doing and his crew further contribute their own theories. The real question is whether or not the end result is anything interesting or worthwhile. That’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer and it’s not even obvious if Greave is really as inept a director as he appears to be here. It appears from his filmography that he actually is a competent filmmaker so the apparent chaos here must be deliberate and so this is a work of art after all.

Digging through the annals of older films to find directors and performers who enjoyed some renown in their day but aren’t so well remembered now, can be a hit and miss affair. This one is definitely a hit twice over. Stefania Sandrelli is achingly beautiful as the lead actress in a film that seems to equate that beauty with shallowness. Antonio Pietrangeli is outstanding as a director whose images are as exquisite as the other great directors of his day and delivers a film whose sole purpose is paint a complete portrait of that character.

So here we have a garbageman character with underdeveloped social skills who turns out to have a tremendous talent for writing poetry, yet he isn’t even the film’s main character! Hal Hartley makes a series of odd creative decisions here and devises a titular character who should be seen as disgusting and irredeemable. Yet he makes it work, showing that even a man like him can have friends and inspire others. His mentor-mentee relationship with Simon feels unique and there is humor underneath that dark, dark material.

This is the kind of story that sounds so pat that I doubt a human writer would dare write it. It’s a documentary about a man in Norway who was born with Duchenne muscular dystrophy, dooming him to a short, wheelchair-bound life. He died at the age of 25 and his parents mourned him. Yet they also discovered that unbeknownst to them he had been part of a sizable online community, primarily from playing World of Warcraft, and so had touched many lives. And so we have a remarkable film that recreates scenes of his time within the virtual world from chat logs and animated sequences using art assets from the game.