Teddy (Jesse Plemons) is a disturbed conspiracy theorist who tends his backyard beehives while researching colony collapse disorder. Michelle (Emma Stone) is the high-powered CEO of a large pharmaceutical company, the products of which have been accused of contributing to colony collapse disorder. When Teddy and his younger, easily manipulated cousin Donny (Aidan Delbis) kidnap Michelle, one might worry that Bugonia, the latest provocation from director Yorgos Lanthimos (Poor Things, Kinds of Kindness) is headed for some sort of twisted meet-cute scenario. Don’t worry, though: it’s much weirder than that.

For one thing, Teddy doesn’t just think Michelle is an evil Big Pharma executive responsible for massive ecological harm, he’s also convinced that she’s an alien, specifically an Andromedan, and that her people are ultimately set on the extinction of humanity. For another, both Teddy and Donny voluntarily chemically castrated themselves before abducting her, in order to avoid just those sorts of temptations. With his captive shaved bald (because she communicates with her mothership through her hair), slathered in antihistamine cream (for reasons unclear to this viewer), and tied to a table in Teddy’s basement, he fervently and sometimes violently interrogates her, demanding to be taken to her leader.

Lanthimos has made a career out of seasoning bizarre and disturbing scenarios with enough wry humor and originality to garner acclaim and awards, but Bugonia ranks as his darkest and most mean-spirited film since he’s come to Hollywood after spearheading the so-called “Greek Weird Wave” with the perverse family saga Dogtooth. It doesn’t have the period surrealism of The Favourite and Poor Things, or the absurd allegory of The Lobster, to leaven what’s at its core a nearly nihilistic worldview. The unkempt, intellectually barren, and emotionally devastated Teddy is a pitiable creation, a victim of informational pollution that’s just as potentially catastrophic as the environmental sort. (Donny is even more pathetic.) Michelle, for all her girl-boss combativeness and sympathetic situation, can’t veil her contempt for these two losers as she tries to talk her way out of trouble.

The film’s essentially a three-hander (really a two-and-a-half hander), with the exception of a local sheriff (Stavros Halkias), who used to be Tommy’s babysitter and starts poking around the place, and flashbacks in which Tommy’s mother (Alicia Silverstone!) suffers from a chronic illness that seems to have helped inspire his paranoid mania. Stone, who’s been in Lanthimos’ last four features, glories in her character’s indignities and conveys Michelle’s condescension and cunning convincingly. Plemons, who joined this little troupe in Kinds of Kindness, has the less interesting role, and doesn’t have much to do beyond rant, menace, and look increasingly confused. Delbis, an actor on the autism spectrum appearing in his first feature, delivers the most eye-opening performance in Bugonia, albeit one that’s limited by his character’s passivity and pathos.

This being a Yorgos Lanthimos joint, a rug-pulling twist is likely to be on the menu. And as time goes by, you inevitably start to wonder whether there’s some truth to Tommy’s accusations and perhaps less than total truth in Michelle’s replies. The problem with a bifurcated narrative possibility like that, though, is that almost no revelation can truly shock. We’ve already spun our own scenarios, which may be even more outlandish than the movie’s. So, when the director finally goes large, without previously giving us much reason to invest emotionally in his characters, the result is more of a shrug and a chuckle than anything remotely mind-blowing.

Screenwriter Will Tracy (Succession, The Menu) adapted Bugonia from the 2003 Korean film Save the Green Planet!, which takes a much more cartoonish approach to a similar plot. The title, unexplained or even spoken in the film, refers to an ancient Greek ritual in which the bloodless slaughter of a cow was intended to result in the spontaneous generation of bees, so make of that what you will. This is an angry, borderline hopeless film that amplifies current existential anxieties too successfully to be much fun. (multiple locations)

Winner of the Palm d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival (that’s the top prize), It Was Just an Accident is yet another example of the courage and storytelling genius of Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi. Panahi has been imprisoned twice for making films that dare to critique his nation’s theocratic regime, most recently just three years ago. Nonetheless, he continues not only to defy the government’s insistence on approving his scripts, but also to incorporate his experiences as a dissident into his art. This gripping narrative kicks off when the car in which Eghbal (Ebrahim Azizi), his wife, and his young son are traveling gets damaged after they hit a dog on a rural road (“It was just an accident”). While waiting for repairs at the nearest repair shop, the sound of Eghbal’s particular gait, notable because of his prosthetic leg, catches the ear of mechanic Vahid. He recognizes it as belonging to “Peg Leg,” the nameless, masked torturer who made his life as a political prisoner years earlier a living hell. Impulsively, he kidnaps Eghbal and recruits other former prisoners to help him decide what to do next.

It’s about the simplest metaphor imaginable for a debate over the morality of vengeance, one that has played out almost everywhere the oppressed and imprisoned are no longer in thrall to their persecutors. But Panahi’s able to connect this story to his precise milieu while allowing it to speak in a broader way about how we should respond to oppression and injustice. He does so by making Vahid’s former cellmates fully authentic characters, including a bookshop owner who really wants to put all that suffering behind him, a wedding photographer who’s inclined to agree, and the bride she’s photographing, whose burning rage at what Peg Leg did overpowers them all. There are moments of bleak humor, especially once the whole gang of makeshift avengers is puttering around Teheran in a van with an unconscious Eghbal on board, and moments of great emotional power, as events bring the captors into contact with their prisoner’s terrified family.

Panahi shot entirely without permits and using nonprofessional actors, although you’d never know it but for the subtle electric edge to the many guerilla-shot street scenes, an intensity that transfers the heightened awareness of the film’s cast and crew into its characters. In front of and behind the camera and on- and off-screen, everyone involved was taking huge risks for the sake of art and truth, and the fact that the movie they made is a gripping Hitchcockian thriller serves merely as icing on the cake. (Living Room)

Anniversary: Even the most seemingly perfect of families can be torn asunder in time of political division, as this vaguely relevant but pointed drama makes clear. If you thought arguing with your MAGA uncle or your anarchist nephew over Thanksgiving dinner was rough, the Taylor family would like a word. Ellen (Diane Lane) is a poli-sci professor at Georgetown, while her husband Paul (Kyle Chandler) owns a restaurant that caters to Washington, D.C.’s elite. Their children include daughters Cynthia (Zoey Deutch), an environmental lawyer, Anna (Madeline Brewer), a successful standup comedian, and the youngest, Birdie (Mckenna Grace), still at home. Son Josh (Dylan O’Brien), a struggling novelist, sounds the only note of discontent at his parents’ 25th anniversary party when he arrives with his new fiancée, Liz Nettles (Phoebe Dynevor, Fair Play), a former student of Ellen’s whose thesis paper proposing one-party rule for the United States has become a book, The Change. As Polish-born director Jan Komasa’s film traverses the next five years, “The Change” becomes a political movement represented by an American flag with the blue canton containing fifty stars shifted from the upper left to the center. The setup has the potential for a truly biting political statement, with the Taylors as a microcosm of the way cultlike politics can override even (or especially) familial loyalties. But although it’s clear that “The Change” opposes free thought and dissent, the specifics don’t go much further than that. The result is a cautionary tale that wants to be a non-partisan statement against Orwellian forced conformity, but emerges at a moment when bothsidesism is not only inaccurate but dangerous. (multiple locations)

Lesbian Space Princess: Saira’s just an ordinary lesbian space princess who struggles with self-esteem issues and lives in the shadow of her famous royal moms, who rule the planet Clitopolis. (It’s famously hard to find.) After her badass interstellar bounty hunter girlfriend Kiki dumps her, Saira fails once again to summon her own royal labrys, and things look grim. But when Kiki is captured by the Straight White Maliens (“We used to be the most powerful force in the universe!”), Saira and the labrys may be her only hope, but only if she can conquer her imposter syndrome. This adorable, lightly raunchy Australian animated feature, the first from co-directors Emma Hough Hobbs and Leela Varghese, is a fast-paced, wittily juvenile treat. The animation style is simple but stylish, the humor is cheeky but not mean, and the moral of the story is crystal clear without preaching.  (Sunday 11/2, Tomorrow)

VOD/streaming

Ballad of a Small Player: Based on the acclaimed 2014 novel by Lawrence Osborne, director Edward Berger’s follow-up to the Oscar-winning papal thriller Conclave stars Colin Farrell as a down-on-his-luck British gambler who goes by Lord Doyle trying to stay one step ahead of his fate in the neon-drenched Asian mecca of Macau. When an investigator (Tilda Swinton) hired by the elderly woman back in England whose retirement fund Doyle made off with shows up, he’s spurred on a desperate quest to parlay his baccarat skills into enough winnings that he won’t be deported back to the U.K. Fortunately, Doyle’s got a guardian angel of sorts, a local woman named Dao Ming (Fala Chen) who swoops in to save him when he’s faced with a restaurant bill he can’t pay or other sticky situations. It’s a classic, pseudo-Schraderian portrait of a man tempted by love but flirting with death and mired in his own isolation, and Farrell does fine work with it. Macau looks amazing, too, as do the costumes—the place feels so timeless that it’s almost jarring when somebody pulls out a cell phone and you realize the story’s set in the present day, not 1975. But a little of this goes a long way, and Berger indulges both his camera and his cast by letting many scenes play on longer than necessary. His epic version of All Quiet on the Western Front was also a Netflix release in the U.S., and he seems consciously to be scaling down for this more intimate story, but can’t quite resist the urge to gild the lily here. (Netflix)

Mr. Scorsese: You’d think that by now we’d know everything we really need to know about Martin Scorsese, at least if “we” means film buffs of a certain age and, generally speaking, a certain gender and demeanor. But especially since he has transitioned from New Hollywood troublemaker and spelunker of the soul into an elder statesman of capital-C cinema, there’s been a need for a retrospective, hopefully not a final one, that tracks the ups and downs and ups again of his phenomenal sixty years as a filmmaker. Director Rebecca Miller, whose only other documentary credit is a portrait of her father, playwright Arthur Miller, expertly weaves together scenes from Scorsese’s films, archival footage, and, pricelessly, interviews with Scorsese and others today reflecting on the impact that Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and so many other pictures have had, as well as the literal blood, sweat, and tears that went into their creation. It’s tempting to say that even five hour-long episodes can’t fully capture the man or the movies, and some later titles are definitely glossed over. (The endearing Hugo doesn’t get mentioned at all.) But Miller wisely focuses on a few key films, including the above as well as The Last Temptation of Christ and Gangs of New York, the two passion projects that Scorsese pursued for decades, only for the making and release of each to be an enormous headache. She also wisely positions Leonardo DiCaprio as someone as key to Scorsese’s later career as De Niro was to its first half. The whole thing should be catnip to anyone with even a passing interest in filmmaking as an art. (Apple TV)

Also this week

Spike & Mike’s Festival of Animation: Starting in the 1990s, the Spike & Mike brand was enough to let you know you were in for an unpredictable lineup of animated shorts, and it was one of the few ways those films got in front of audiences at that time, especially so for the “Sick & Twisted” adults-only programs that followed and eventually supplanted the originals. The name has been fairly defunct for a while, but Skybound Entertainment (co-founded by The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman) recently purchased the rights and is mounting a brand-new anthology of new submissions as well as a couple of items recovered from the Spike & Mike archive. Be aware, the selections look to trend toward the “Sick & Twisted” end of the spectrum. (Friday 10/31 through Sunday 11/2; multiple locations)

Skweezy Jibbs Makes a Movie: The Portland-based TikTok star hits the big screen in a metafictional mockumentary that tracks the energetic but hapless Skweezy’s efforts to, yes, make a movie. This is the film’s U.S. Premiere, and it sold out in six hours, but additional screenings have been announced (although some of them are already sold out, too). (Saturday 11/1, Hollywood; also 11/12 at Ashland’s Varsity Theatre, 11/13 at Eugene’s Art House, 11/18 at Salem’s Grand Theatre, 11/19 at Vancouver, WA’s Kiggins Theatre, and 11/28 at Portland’s Clinton Street Theater)

I Am Frankelda: Mexico’s first stop-motion animated feature film is about a 19th-century woman writer who, dismissed by others, journeys into her own subconscious and “must restore balance between fiction and reality.” Sounds trippy. Presented by the Portland Latin American Film Festival. (Sunday 11/2; Hollywood)

The Rise and Fall of the Clash Redux: Director Danny Garcia has re-edited and added new footage to his 2012 documentary that primarily chronicled the decline of the pioneering punk band following its commercial success and the departure of guitarist Mick Jones. (Sunday 11/2; Hollywood)

Yo No Soy Guapo: This 2018 documentary about the “Sonideros,” who mount pop-up street parties in Mexico City powered by their sonidos (sound systems) and continue a decades-long tradition, even as local governments try to cramp their style, will be introduced by its director, Joyce García, and accompanied by vinyl spun by DJs Backyardmango and Guadalupe. (Saturday 11/1; Tomorrow)

Worlds of Ursula K. Le Guin: This 2018 documentary about the literary legend screens in conjunction with the opening of the exhibit A Larger Reality: Ursula K. Le Guin at Oregon Contemporary, and will be followed by a conversation between director Arwen Curry and Katherine Murphy Lewis of the Portland nonprofit art incubator From the Ground UP. (Sunday 11/2; Tomorrow)

Mannequin in Red: This 1958 Swedish thriller, rife with homoerotic subtext and garish colors, has been cited as an influence on Mario Bava and the Italian giallo films. Presented by Church of Film. (Wednesday 11/5, Clinton)

The Secret Agent: Wagner Moura’s performance in this Brazilian political thriller set in 1977 has been getting major awards buzz. It won’t open in Portland for weeks, but this early screening is part of the Portland Latin American Film Festival. (Wednesday 11/5, Hollywood)

Also opening

Nouvelle Vague: Richard Linklater’s second film to hit local screens in as many weeks is a black-and-white ode to the making of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless. (Hollywood, some screenings on 35mm)

Self-Help: “A young woman infiltrates a dangerous self-actualization community after her mother becomes entangled with its enigmatic leader.” (multiple locations)

Sinners:  Ryan Coogler’s smash about twin brothers facing off against vampires who want to steal their souls AND their culture returns to theaters in IMAX just in time for Halloween. (Lloyd Center, Bridgeport Village)

Repertory

Friday 10/31

• Back to the Future [1985] (multiple locations; through 11/6)
• Bram Stoker’s Dracula [1992] (Academy Theater; through 11/6)
• Halloween [1978] (Cinema 21; also 11/1)
• Halloween III: Season of the Witch [1982] (multiple locations)
• House [1977] (Tomorrow)
• Knife + Heart [2018] (5th Avenue; through 11/2, on 35mm)
• The Lost Boys [1987] (Salem)
• A Nightmare on Elm Street [1984] (Academy)
• A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy’s Revenge [1985] (Academy)
• A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors [1987] (Academy)
• Re-Animator [1985] (Cinemagic; on 35mm)
• The Ring [2002] (Hollywood)
• The Twilight Saga: Eclipse [2010] (multiple locations)
• You’re Next [2011] (Clinton)

Saturday 11/1

• An American Werewolf in London [1981] (Cinemagic, also 11/2)
• City Lights [1931] (Cinema 21)
• Clueless [1995] (Academy Theater; through 11/6)
• The Exorcist [1973] (Cinemagic, also 11/2)
• The Legend of Billie Jean [1985] (Academy Theater; through 11/6)
• The Seventh Seal [1957] (Academy Theater; through 11/6)
• Tampopo [1985] (Tomorrow)
• The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 [2011] (multiple locations)
• The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 2 [2011] (multiple locations)

Sunday 11/2

• City on Fire [1987] (Hollywood)

Monday 11/3

• The Deer Hunter [1978] (Cinemagic; through 11/5, also 11/9)
• Kung Pow! Enter the Fist [2002] (Cinemagic; through 11/5, also 11/7)
• Peking Opera Blues [1986] (Hollywood)
• Swept Away [1974] (Hollywood)

Tuesday 11/4

• Space Rage [1985] (Hollywood)

Wednesday 11/5

• Misery [1990] (Salem)
• Planes, Trains & Automobiles [1987] (Tomorrow)
• Rocky IV: Rocky vs. Drago—The Director’s Cut [1985] (multiple locations; also 11/9)
• The Seventh Curse [1986] (Hollywood)

Thursday 11/6

• Death Wish 3 [1985] (Hollywood, on 35mm)
• The Queen of My Dreams [2024] (Tomorrow)