This delightful comedy set in Guadalajara, Mexico, follows a mousy 20-year-old woman with crippling agoraphobia. Raised solo by her progressively paranoid mother after the death of her father in a car accident, Corina (Naian González Norvind) limits her perambulations to the five blocks surrounding their apartment and sticks to a strict routine. But her imagination is rich: When she’s not working as a copy editor at a nearby publishing house, she’s lost in her vast collection of books or writing her own stories (which her mom thinks is her actual job).
Directed by Urzula Barba Hopfner, “Corina” depicts the chain of events that explodes our heroine’s tightly contained world. These high jinks involve a famous and reclusive author who insists on an unpopular ending to her latest book, much to the chagrin of the executives at the publishing house; Corina’s elaborate lies to her mother about the nature (and stature) of her work; a mistakenly mailed manuscript; some spilled ink that conveniently conceals a name; and the thin walls of the publishing office, which make eavesdropping easy. Corina and her mother fear the unpredictability of the world outside their home, but it is precisely because of random contingencies and twists of fate that Corina not only comes out of her shell but also gets closer to her dreams of being a published writer. With wonderfully arch performances and a bright, Wes Anderson-esque color palette, “Corina” invites us to join its protagonist in rediscovering the wonder in life’s mundanities.
Fabián Suarez’s film opens with a resplendent image: Cherri (Juan Miguel Más), an obese, middle-aged gay man, is suspended in the sky among the clouds. He is decked out in a white tulle skirt, has large and beautiful wings protruding from his back, and is lit by a heavenly glow, as he nonchalantly eats a sandwich. He looks nothing like the pale, svelte angels of renaissance paintings, and yet he fits the part, exuding an angelic radiance.
It’s a brief and arbitrary note of fantasy in a drama that unfolds on the real, rainy-blue streets of Havana, but it sets the tone for what follows. Cherri, who spends most of his time taking care of his ailing husband, is tasked with choreographing a ballet with the patients at a weight clinic. He is the very image of grace when he dances, and he coaxes gorgeous movements out of his students, imparting to them his own physical ease and confidence. Yet he hasn’t quite mastered the art of self-love; he is embroiled in a toxic infatuation with a young security guard, undeterred by the man’s cruelty to him. Bursting with tenderness and attuned to the beauty of the bodies of all shapes, sizes and types “Cherri” is a moving film about what it takes to see your own worth in a world that refuses to do so.
Early in “Pig at the Crossing,” Dolom, a young Bhutanese YouTuber, dies in a road accident as he’s on his way to clean up a mess of his own making: He had an affair with a married woman and got her pregnant. But the crash leaves him unharmed. He walks out of the hospital in a daze, unsure how he got there or where his motorcycle is. It takes him many mysterious encounters — with relatives and friends who no longer seem to acknowledge him, and with strangers from strange lands and bygone eras who do — to realize that he is dead. He is in limbo, and it is up to him to let go of his self and cross into the afterlife.
Directed by the Bhutanese filmmaker Khyentse Norbu, who is also a Buddhist lama, “Pig at the Crossing” blends spiritual and metaphysical meditations with the dramas of everyday modern life. There’s comedy in Dolom’s bumbling run-ins with both the living and the dead, but the naturalistic performances and patient cinematography, often deploying long takes, root the film firmly in reality. Norbu cleverly externalizes, through fantasy, a struggle that is internal and universal: to come to terms with the actions that make up our lives — including the people we hurt and the stones we leave unturned.
As you might guess from the titles of Julian Radlmaier’s films (“A Spectre is Haunting Europe,” “Self-Criticism of a Bourgeois Dog,” “Bloodsuckers — a Marxist Vampire Comedy,”), this German director loves to riff on history, fantasy and Marxism. His latest movie, “Phantoms of July,” continues in the same tradition but with a subtler touch. A prelude set in the 18th century introduces us to Lotte, a chamber maid at the mansion of Novalis, the great Romantic novelist and poet, located near the town of Sangerhausen in East Germany. While wandering in a field, Lotte chances upon a striking blue stone, which becomes the instigator not just of her own French Revolution-inspired misadventure, but also the escapades of the modern-day women at the center of the film’s subsequent chapters.
Each of them, like Lotte, is a worker on the margins of history and on the bottom rung of the class ladder: Ursula is a young mother who grew up in Sangerhausen and works a thankless waitress job; Neda is an Iranian immigrant trying to make a living as a YouTube “travel influencer.” Radlmaier weaves these characters into a beguiling web of dreams, chance encounters, and histories, making use of Sangerhausen’s beautiful landscapes and rich (as well as checkered) past; asides about Germany’s anti-immigrant, gig-worker-driven present collide with stories from the Nazi era and the town’s former mining industry. The result is a film whose profundity is matched by its whimsy.
In the strictly monogamous world of romantic comedies, polyamory usually appears as an easy target for mockery. But the tide seems to be turning (and perhaps catching up to the times), if Olivia Wilde’s “The Invite,” and Paula Korva’s charming and intelligent “Sudden Outbursts of Emotions,” are any proof. Korva’s Finnish drama takes a well-worn premise — a couple in a rut decide to open their relationship in an attempt to revitalize it — and imagines its possibilities with sensitive attention to the complications of loving another person, whether exclusively or not.
The movie is also very funny. When Jane (Iina Kuustonen) and her husband go to their first play party on an “Isle of Lust,” Jane finds herself blurting out all the wrong things, not knowing what to say or which words to use, until someone tells her reassuringly, “It’s OK to be vanilla.” Later, in an “orgy workshop” where people practice touching and setting boundaries, Jane meets Valma, a striking older woman. Becoming more and more enamored of her new beau, who is a veteran of polyamory, Jane finds herself up against her own, deeply ingrained instincts: jealousy, possessiveness, secrecy — all of which Valma rejects with an enviable ease. As Jane challenges her presumptions and learns her limits, Korva shows us the many surprising shapes that relationships can take, with a wry sense of humor and not a speck of judgment.
