Is This Thing On?

Now three movies and seven years into his career as a filmmaker, the Philly transplant/West Village resident Bradley Cooper has featured a singer, a composer, and now a standup comedian in his work. His latest, Is This Thing On? — a film brought to him by his friend, star Will Arnett, based on the true story of the Manchester, England, sales director-turned-comedian John Bishop, who lived the cliché of using standup as therapy to cope with his impending divorce from his wife — is filled with performance. Arnett’s character, Alex Novak, sings to himself in the bathroom to ease the adrenaline following a moment of stress. In another scene, in the background, his children practice the baseline to Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure.” At one point, as brunch is being set at an Oyster Bay vacation home, a collection of adult friends casually breaks into a rendition of “Amazing Grace.” In this way, Cooper’s latest film is of a piece with his oeuvre to date, movies about the transformative power of performance, its value to artists of all stripes as an outlet, as redemption, as escape.

Unfortunately, that is nearly the only quality Is This Thing On? shares with Cooper’s first two films, A Star is Born and Maestro, movies that were meticulously constructed, from an obsessive film nerd who attacked his new role as auteur with an emotions-on-his-sleeve, blood-and-sweat intensity that was communicated in every studied and elegant camera move. Cooper is a director that shows his work, and part of the Bradley Cooper Experience is being impressed or turned off by watching a film its maker has clearly put so much effort into. These were prestige films with big stars and long productions, featuring performances that garnered awards hype and omnipresent, buzzy campaigns.

When Is This Thing On? was announced as a 2025 release, it lacked that same degree of anticipation and fanfare, even with its position, slated to premiere as the closing day selection at the New York Film Festival. When you watch the product, it’s clear why. This was not some long-gestating Fitzcarraldo that Cooper had to get out of his brain and onto screen. Rather, it was brought to Cooper by his old friend Arnett and the British writer Mark Chappell and shot in 33 days, in a few locations, importing John Bishop’s UK-based story to New York and setting almost all of those locations a few blocks from Cooper’s apartment, including his daughter’s school, a bar he used to hang out at in college, and the greatest comedy club in America. Chappell is a prolific sitcom writer and screenwriter of pleasant, middlebrow comedies, and with what feels like a light pass from Cooper, he has produced another one. Is This Thing On? can be best understood as a for-hire, post-Maestro palate cleanser for Cooper, a cool down following the relative disappointment of that yearslong, all-consuming passion project. 

Alex, who works in finance, and his wife Tess, a retired Olympic volleyball player (Laura Dern), agree to end their 20-year marriage at the film’s outset, with the same passion and ceremony you might dedicate to deciding on Thai for dinner. He is the titular object that is “not on,” shut down and unhappy because he has sublimated himself for years in his family, which also consists of his two boys, 10-year-old Irish twins. 

Alex and Tess live in the suburbs, but the film gives them unlikely bohemian friends from college, two couples, one gay (Sean Hayes and his actual husband Scott Icenogle), one straight (Andra Day and Bradley Cooper). Alex is forced to get a flat in the city, and one night, in the film’s most credulity-straining moment, signs up for an open mic to avoid paying door fees at the fucking Comedy Cellar of all places, and finds himself on stage, doing okay as he ambles his way through a stream of consciousness reflection of his shattered life for strangers. The film subsequently follows Alex catching the bug, as he finds his way back to himself on stage, and back to his wife off it. The film’s logline could very well be “Men will literally do standup to avoid going to therapy” (Or, “Take my wife, please”), and its arc is all Alan Ball-grade, made in the suburbs cliché ennui. It’s a sub-Husbands and Wives chatty, shaggy, unromantic comedy about the work of marriage that contains nothing but the kind of reheated, shallow revelation that a single session with a Zoom marriage counselor could have explained to the couple protagonists. 

Also a problem is that the comedian at the center of the film is rarely funny. Will Arnett, on the other hand, is, which we know from one of this century’s great comedic performances, as Job in the first three seasons of Arrested Development. The performance he gave in that show was so great that he’s remained famous and able to get projects like these off the ground for 20 years, but as Alex, he’s against type. At first, this is by design, the shut down man offstage and the fledgling comic feeling his way toward his calling on it. But that dynamic never changes, even as he becomes a more competent performer with proven material who is supposed to be funny; his routines are hack observational relationship comedy that also serve as “revelatory” diary entries. Cooper wisely steals from FX’s Louie, casting real, great comedians around Arnett (Jordan Jensen, Reggie Conquest, Chloe Radcliffe, Dave Attell, and Amy Sedaris as den mother, all pulling up from the logo whenever they get an inch of daylight) and setting them around a table at the Olive Tree Cafe upstairs from The Cellar to share drinks and bust his balls. But the effect probably won’t do much more than just make you miss Louie, and the innocence you once were able to watch it with. 

Which isn’t to say Is This Thing On? is without its laughs. Cooper literally falls into the movie, crushing a carton of oat milk under him on the floor of his absurd loft apartment. He’s an often high, struggling actor named Balls who in the film goes on a facial hair and wardrobe journey from an apostle to Marc Maron to Waylon Jennings. He turns in the film’s funniest and second best performance, and you find yourself often wanting to watch a movie about his character instead. Peyton Manning shows up for a memorable five-minute cameo, and the best joke in the film is his face when he learns that Laura Dern’s Tess, who he is out to dinner with, is newly separated from her husband and getting a divorce, responding as we all might if we were out to dinner with Laura Dern and suddenly discovered we might have a shot. 

A thread running through Bradley Cooper’s films are powerful lead performances from women, and Dern continues this tradition. Coming off a long overdue Oscar win for her last film with Noah Baumbach, she was criminally underutilized in their recent reunion (Jay Kelly), but she isn’t here. Tess’ arc, getting back into volleyball through coaching and working out her feelings toward her husband after years of emotional neglect, are no less trite than the rest of the film, but Dern is operating at a register right now where if you put her on screen to read podcast ad copy, it would be compelling and compulsively watchable. 

But this is a Bradley Cooper film, so even on a limited budget, with greatly restrained visual style, the film is shot in a tight aspect ratio and the handheld camera swoops and zooms intelligently across long takes of domestic dispute or Alex working on stage. (There’s no real way to explain it, but this writer would have bet that it was Cooper himself operating the camera when he wasn’t in the frame, which was confirmed after the screening in an in-person press conference.) There is some exhilaration and freedom in a filmmaker as thoughtful as Cooper throwing out much of the sub-Spielbergian blocking and letting the great camera spin. When it’s working, Is This Thing On? feels freer in a way that allows for more chaotic fun and naturalistic performances from his cast, so much so that you hope if Cooper takes anything from this experience, it’s that there can be discovery in occasionally letting your hand off the reins just slightly, as he so often does in his acting. 

But it’s impossible to escape that this is all in service of a sappy, dopey film that builds to a non-resolution, a reunited husband and wife that have learned little beyond the common sense that they need lives of purpose outside of the home and that marriage can often be an unsentimental, unglamorous slog you must buy into everyday and work through together. And that it all culminates in a children’s performance of the aforementioned “Under Pressure,” punctuated with a full cast dance party that you’ve seen so many times before and scored to the exact same song, feels borderline parodic. Is This Thing On? is of a piece then with this prestige season in film, which features not unpleasant but also decidedly minor work from some great filmmakers. Ah well, perhaps the fire next time. — ABE BEAME

Gavagai

As far as the so-called Berlin School is concerned, the films of Ulrich Köhler have mostly led a somewhat peripheral existence — which is less to comment on their popularity with general audiences or accolades among festival juries and critics than on their jaggedness of genre, tone, and scope. Yet irrespective of how one feels about Köhler’s œuvre, through it runs an aspiration to treat cinema as a testing ground that connects our very present with the vastness of film history and its innumerable nodes of departure. Gavagai, his first solo feature after the peculiar last-man-on-earth reworking In My Room (2018), adds yet another “experiment” to Köhler’s filmography, presenting us with a premise seemingly familiar yet difficult enough to find a precedent for: a film about the making of a previous film by the same director (Tom DiCillo’s anarchic makeshift-diptych Johnny Suede (1991) and Living in Oblivion (1995) did not so much “come to mind” as they represent the sparse results of this specific research prompt). In the case of Gavagai, meanwhile, this means that we find ourselves in the film’s initial scenes on the African continent, where a middle-aged white female French filmmaker — a réalisatrice — attempts a reverse adaptation of the Medea myth, with a white Medea ostracized by Black Africans.

If this alone were the premise of Gavagai, the recognizable parallels to Köhler’s Sleeping Sickness would be vacuous at best. Yet, it was precisely this attempt at a postcolonial feature loosely based on his parents’ work as NGO development workers, as well as its subsequent premiere at the 2011 Berlinale — where it won him the Silver Bear for Best Director — that lingered with Köhler, reverberating as a kind of self-inflicted and multifarious embarrassment that stays much longer in the conscientious mind than the fleeting moments of success. Not wholly unlike an ethnographer who attempts to represent a process in its entirety, Köhler’s intradiegetic creation of a contemporary Medea adaptation does not end with finalizing the shoot of that film, but progresses, through Köhler’s typical ellipsis, from the sunny shores of Dakar into the ever-gray cold of the Berlin winter.

There, in front of a characteristically uncharacteristic InterContinental, we see Jean-Christophe Folly as Nourou, the actor playing Jason of Corinth, Medea’s husband, in the now premiering film. A security man, displaying casual racism, blocks his entry into the hotel. Enter Medea actor and German co-star Maja (played by Maren Eggert), with whom Nourou enjoyed an extramarital affair during the shoot in Senegal. And along with Maja (and Medea, if you will), enter Köhler. For the following scene is, as Köhler and Folly recounted at NYFF in conversation with director of programming Dennis Lim, more or less directly taken from an incident surrounding the premiere of Sleeping Sickness in 2011, when Köhler reported the hotel security person who, extrapolating from Folly’s skin color to the validity of his presence, initially refused the Paris-born actor entrance to the festival-affiliated hotel. Folly, after receiving an apology from the festival, was subsequently lodged in a sumptuous hotel with complimentary champagne — though by this point, quite obviously, the enjoyment of these cuvées was spoiled beyond vintage.

As far as this anecdote goes, it seems to have produced only losers. As you would expect for a scene which, for so long, has lived rent-free in Köhler’s mind and, to no small extent, instigated the making of this film, there is some centrality to it. Overcharged with meaning and complexity, we have, for one, the German actor who, guilt-ridden by the sheer presence of Nourou as the embodiment of her infidelity, turns the situation into a personal mission of revenge. Then there is the security man who, far from admitting his own wrongdoing, turns out to be an outsourced subcontractor, which not only means that the hotel cannot so easily dismiss him, but that said dismissal, if carried through, will eventually hit the economically most precarious. Conscious of this, Nourou sees all this transpire before his eyes. Without any say in it, he is involuntarily dragged from victimhood into the role of someone on whose seeming behest another person loses their job — which, granted, deprives him, the person of color, of his agency — one of the many racism-adjacent phenomena against which, ironically, every film festival so eagerly positions itself.

Nonchalantly, one might summarize this background information as follows: if you know, you know. But if you don’t know, this scene might not achieve quite the same effects, its perspicacity leaving behind a taste of discoursal staleness. Which is not to say that such situations do not still frequently happen every day (Folly, in fact, evoked ample recent examples on stage), but rather that Köhler’s rendition of them has little claim to originality and rests, in fact, much more on our knowledge about its extratextual origins. By obscuring these autobiographical inspirations — starting with the overbearing French female filmmaker Caroline (Nathalie Richard), whose resemblance to Claire Denis, though apparently not intended, wasn’t and will not go by unnoticed, and continuing with Maja, who assumes Köhler’s erstwhile white-savior role at the hotel reception desk — Köhler might, in fact, nourish rather than deflect the idea of a roman à clef. It’s a kind of raw self-flagellation, a referentiality to actuality, which distinguishes Köhler’s project from the intricately aloof meta-elaborations of, say, Fellini or Kaufman.

“From the outside, filmmaking is an absurdly comical process – but for people working on a film, it is often an existential drama,” Köhler is quoted in a recent interview. Watching Gavagai, it quickly becomes clear that Köhler at no point is interested in balancing these two sides of the coin. In the first part of the film, set along the coast of Dakar, we see the obnoxious yet undoubtedly passionate fictional French director increasingly lose control over her cast and crew, with Medea actor Maja actively revolting against her director’s abusive practices and one of the Black stars about to abscond from set as crew members mistake him for one of the Black extras, suggesting that his driver may as well fill in for him since no white person was able to tell the difference anyway.

Deliberately, in contrast, Köhler stresses the repetitions and differences as they occur in the reality of his fiction and the fiction thereof. As would seem apt for a Medea adaptation of postmodern impetus, his director stand-in Caroline, at one point, sees the two children — Medea’s children — drive away in the motorboat aboard which we earlier saw Medea move ashore. Struck by the image of the seemingly autarchic children, she urges her crew to film. A little later, we find ourselves amidst the romantic plays of the lead couple Maja and Nourou, whose somewhat histrionic dialogue is little later recontextualized through its repetition, indicated primarily through the changed lighting, which consequently reframes the foreseen scene as playful rehearsal.

Considering the film’s title, Gavagai — the metalinguistic thought experiment borrowed from the philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine that describes the impossibility for a linguist to infer the meaning of a word uttered in an entirely foreign language solely from that utterance and its minimal context — it does not surprise to find such scenes in the film. There appears to be an interest, albeit of limited vigor and insight, in exploring the malleability of a given scene, of its rules, its genre. Take the Berlinale press conference scene, in which we see the answers given by the cast and crew translated in real time as the camera tracks along the different translation cabins erected to the side of the hall. In said press conference, moments later, we briefly take on Nourou’s perspective as his mind transposes, quite literally, the discursive “elephant in the room” onto Caroline’s head. While surprising in style, this resort to absurdity — interrupting the press conference just as Caroline and her cast face a staccato of charged questions regarding the film’s politics — links back to an oft-cited Köhler essay from 2007 titled “Warum ich keine ‘politischen’ Filme mache” (“Why I don’t make ‘political’ films,” the translated version of which appeared in issue 38 of Cinema Scope, for those who remember). Therein, Köhler bemoans the underchallenging didacticism of many overtly political, state-funded films and insists on the subversive potential of l’art pour l’art.

A longstanding admirer of filmmakers such as Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Lisandro Alonso, and Lucrecia Martel, Köhler’s kinship to them is most pronounced as the narrative lapses into instability. Upon learning that the complaint brought forth in his name at the hotel reception has led to the dismissal of the security man, Nourou seeks him out to talk. He joins him and his boss (played by Thomas Arslan Muse and crowd-pleaser Mišel Matičević) for a car ride, which slowly but surely steers the vehicle that is Gavagai into thriller territory: dusky realms in which heretofore unthinkable actions seem suddenly not only possible, but increasingly inescapable. It is precisely this kind of shift, such reevaluations and recalibrations of seemingly fixed constellations, that illuminates Köhler’s preoccupations. And while these, through most of Gavagai, remain just tenuous echoes resounding from earlier works, we do end on this brief moment, which we saw Caroline observe earlier, the children driving off toward the horizon on their captured motorboat, leaving us wondering about the ways in which the image finds the frame. — PATRICK FEY

If I Had Legs I’d Kick You

The ceiling caves in at the outset of If I Had Legs I’d Kick You, the Rose Byrne-starring second feature from Mary Bronstein, her first film in 17 years. In 2008, she debuted with the sour, misanthropic mumblecore classic Yeast, so based on the trailer and your history with Bronstein, your expectation for this latest might be a fraught, raw, indie depiction of motherhood, with Byrne gunning for a trophy in a makeup-stripped, dressed-down, messy character sketch. You will not be proven wrong exactly, but the hole that opens up in Byrne’s ceiling in Montauk at the beginning of IIHLIKY looks less like a leak-produced break and more like a perfect alien gaping maw, threatening to subsume anyone in its radius, something out of Jordan Peele’s Nope. As the camera begins to slowly travel up and through the hole, like a birth canal, Carpenter-aping ambient techno thrums and the A24 logo flashes in crimson as the credits roll. It’s an intro worthy of Oz Perkins, which helps you immediately orient yourself to the fact that what you’re watching is a horror film.

Byrne plays Linda, a psychologist in Montauk with a daughter who has an undefined physical disorder that comes with weight goals and a feeding tube and a machine that administers a nutrient slurry from what looks like an infusion bag (and crucially, beeps incessantly). Linda’s husband is away, on week three of an eight-week job (Christian Slater, who exists in the movie as a disembodied, judgmental voice on the other end of the phone, yet another source of pressure), and in his absence Byrne is left alone to do the ferrying to and from school as well as the clinic where her daughter receives treatment — this all, while holding down her full-time job. The hole in the ceiling is the final straw, another crisis to manage unsuccessfully, the stressor that begins unraveling her life, as she holes up with cheap wine and greasy food in a shitty motel with her daughter — who Bronstein wisely doesn’t show, both to avoid audience attachment to a precious child and to drive home the point that in the everyday stress she inflicts on Linda, she can’t see her either — trying and failing to hold it all together.

Bronstein’s sophomore effort is a hybrid. It is part parental horror that has its roots in classics of the genre like Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, and The Omen, but that we’ve seen revived in a wave of “elevated horror” over the past decade like The Babadook, Insidious, Hereditary, and Goodnight Mommy. It’s a genre that mines the fear and anxiety of parenthood, that you suck at being a parent and are fucking your child up in daily increments, as well as what at times feels like the gleeful sadism of the child toward their parent. What makes If I Had Legs I’d Kick You unique, and remarkable, is there are no direct supernatural elements. It uses the parlance and tone of horror to relate its story, but there are no ghosts or monsters to hide behind, which only raises the stakes, makes the action more fraught and horrifying as you feel the real consequences of a story grounded in the heightened reality of an unwell person with a sick child dependent on her. 

The second influence on the film is the creative circle around it. Bronstein’s aforementioned first film was intimate, a handmade and handheld portrait of self-loathing insecurity and codependence that was delivered in the style of Mumblecore in that it was semi-professional actors working out semi-improvised real world scenarios on a non-existent budget. But similar to her husband Ronald’s debut Frownland, which Mary co-starred in, Yeast wasn’t about the sweet aimlessness of hipster youth in Brooklyn. Instead, it presented a sour, dark, and misanthropic vision of its characters, their fucked up relationships, and their world. Fitting, then, that Ronald has essentially served as a third Safdie brother since 2009, working as co-writer and co-editor of their projects beginning with their debut, Daddy Long Legs, which he starred in. The films the trio have made together continue the project of Frownland and Yeast, applying increasingly accomplished production design via camerawork and sound to stories about miserable, abrasive people in dire straits, and so it’s not surprising that If I Had Legs I’d Kick You comes courtesy of production company Elara, run by Ronald and the Safdies. (Conan O’Brien, meanwhile, came to the project through his friend Adam Sandler, star of the Safdies project Uncut Gems.) In the starry cast, in the application of sound (from Felipe Messeder, replicating the brilliant work Skip Lievsay has done with the Safdies, and Josh most recently in Marty Supreme), in the fearless unpleasantness Rose Byrne and how cruel the film is to her, how disliked she is by the characters around her (like A$AP Rocky, turning in a completely different and even better performance than what he accomplished this summer in Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest), in the built atmosphere of anxious chaos — in all of this, If I Had Legs I’d Kick You feels like an expansion of the greater Safdie/Bronstein unit’s mindmeld. 

All of these films, from downbeat character sketches to taut thrillers, are about people down on their luck, being tortured by life and circumstance (often thanks to their own poor decisions). What IIHLIKY reveals most explicitly is how close all these films are to straight horror, that by a simple adjustment of a degree or two, Good Times could easily have been a scary film. Which is not to say that Bronstein’s latest is derivative work — this is very much the director’s film, and she brings a mother’s personal history, as well as a child caregiver’s professional experience, to Linda’s harrowing journey (Bronstein worked in the New York City hospital system, ran an underground daycare, and had experience raising a very sick child of her own in the years between her films). Her failings and failures are more intimate than anything we’ve seen from past Elara productions. 

Linda is stuffing her face with pizza cheese rolled like a blunt and getting in blood feuds with Elementary school crossing guards. She’s not connecting with a postpartum mother/patient she should have a deep connection to and empathy for. She’s replicating the unwanted advances via transference dreams another patient has for her to her therapist and supervisor, played by O’Brien. Linda is a character you want to hug and shake simultaneously, eliciting a still visceral but altogether different emotion than anything Howard Ratner has ever provoked in a viewer. IIHLIKY ingeniously mines genre devices to elicit a particular discomfiting feeling in the audience, of being perpetually overwhelmed and defeated, being worn down and afraid that you’re showing that wear and tear to the world. Bronstein manifests the paranoia that you are unfit to raise your kid.

At the film’s end, Linda breaks and commits her most horrific act, dangerous and unforgiveable, then runs to the ocean in what appears to be an attempted suicide. She can’t even get that right, thrown out of the deep blue back onto the beach over and over again, in yet another instance of the film torturing its protagonist. Linda opens her eyes, on her back on wet sand, and we finally see her beautiful daughter looming over her. Linda’s final words to the girl is a phrase this writer has to stop and repeat most days, and if you have kids, you probably have too: “I’ll be better, I promise, I’ll be better.” After two hours of Bronstein’s merciless pace and tone, it’s a last line that will crush you. — ABE BEAME

The Last One For the Road

Plenty of films have traversed the anxieties of separation and national identity, specifically the question of what happens when a nation breaks up from within, is no longer its own, and finds its citizens beholden to another way of life. In Francesco Sossai’s sophomore feature, division and anarchy don’t tear away at the social fabric, but it’s clear that something ineffable has been lost, and the search for it proves equally elusive and meandering. The Last One for the Road peddles a whimsical and distinctly European brand of nostalgia, courtesy of its Veneto-set landscapes, through a booze-filled register of melodrama and happenstance. Old men Doriano (Pierpaolo Capovilla) and Carlobianchi (Sergio Romano) are imbued with intoxication and fêted by life’s slow disappointments, and when we first meet them, they lie, dozed off, in a car midway through some kind of nocturnal road trip. Their haggard looks, along with the insistent red glare of the headlights outside, appear to bespeak untold pain and regret.

Doriano and Carlobianchi will not, however, admit to such emotions; their carefree movements regale them with self-assurance, and their bumbling expression tempers the charade of wistfulness with rash, devil-may-care levity. What these men inadvertently stand for, as they make their way through the morose Italian countryside, is a rejection of the times that have, equally unwittingly, passed them by. Progress and industry have yielded no less poverty for them than the bottles of drink they imbibe, one after another, into wayward oblivion. A German stranger outside a pub remarks to Carlobianchi that he came to see Italy before the Italians destroyed it; “I think you’re too late,” comes the reply. When the duo stumble into a late-night celebration by some undergraduates, they all but abduct a young architecture student named Giulio (Filippo Scotti) from the raucous group, cajoling him to ditch his design review and fix his broken heart with them over a long draught and an even more languorous hangover. “There’s never another time,” insists the common refrain.

Sossai, indeed, pads his narrative with long meandering stretches of what might approximate contemplation, borne largely out of the men’s vague attempts to reunite with their long-away friend Genio (Andrea Pennacchi) and of — not altogether separately — the youth’s grudging acquiescence to the muted revelry of his companions. For the most part, the director is content to bask in the flurry of late-night feeling, from whose torpor rises the reminiscing of the old values and days: laziness, promiscuity, brotherhood, even the rural mystique the men fondly recollect from stories of Genio winning the village’s Piaggio Ape race. There are, consequently, few inroads to be made on the subject of reflection proper, sparse as plot and sober cognition are. But the film traces a sentiment quite understated by its genre. While Giulio raves over the aesthetic composition of concrete and water at a burial ground, his elders face the afflictions of a changing political order, with nationalism and the old economy swapped for a Lisbon-Treviso-Budapest highway and the fruits of their illicit past labors rotting, quite literally, beneath their feet. Ever on its penultimate step, The Last One for the Road strides uncertainly toward the future — Ciao, Italia; Viva Europa! — one drink, and then another, at a time. — MORRIS YANG

Currents 5

Fields of Vision is the title for the fifth Currents program at NYFF this year, and it’s an appropriate title for the five short films whose gestalt tends to be rooted in giving your eyes a workout. There are two 3D movies, two featuring prominent use of flicker, and a multi-projector 16mm piece — they’re a group of films that mostly make the case for being seen theatrically if they’re going to be seen at all. The title is also an apt one for a selection of films that were all heavily tied into the daily lives of the directors and manipulations of what they saw, from Blake Williams taking a road trip with his family to Jodie Mack’s continued attempts to capture the essence of her supposedly “unphotographable” garden. Mack’s film Lover, Lovers, Loving, Love is structured in four chapters reflecting each part of the title, all of which are based around floral specimens. The shift from single flowers getting to show off their petals as a potential Lover to the bombastic flicker of the Love-making finale traces a dramatic arc from sexual conception to exquisitely beautiful corpses. Her garden may be unphotographable, but the flowers it produces are all ideal models in the seemingly infinite number of poses they can strike.

Operating on a grander scale than the short lives of flowers, Jiayi Chen’s expanded cinema piece As a Tree Walks to Its Forest finds three different ways to walk through the woods. More than anything else here, it’s a live production: three projectors showing loops of 16mm and unsplit 8mm, all centered around trees and forests. The effect of the three projection channels produces a sort of series of panels and triptychs, with the trees forming new shapes as you hear the sound of projector motors being turned on and off. (This had the occasional issue of people’s heads accidentally entering the frame at its Lincoln Center showing, which gave new meaning to “hair in the gate.”) The other four films in the program tended to go for a certain aggression in creating new visual patterns, but the simpler serenity of trees emerging in and out of darkness made As a Tree Walks to Its Forest an ideal closer.

One doesn’t really need to see Peter Larsson’s animated collage Keyhole Conversation, the one weak link in the group, but it’s a harmless little doodle that doesn’t outstay its welcome and might point viewers in the direction of the director it derives most of its gestalt from in Robert Breer. A much more interesting homage to an avant-garde legend comes from Williams’ FELT, which is clearly affectionate toward Ernie Gehr’s early digital classic Glider (2001). Gehr used a gigantic camera obscura at the Cliff House in San Francisco to distort the waves of the ocean so that they looked like they’d swallow the sky, but Williams takes this exact same sight and renders it in the 3D medium he specializes in to enhance their seductive curls. FELT is the more ambitious of the two 3D films in the program in the sheer number of 3D effects it pulls out of its hat. Since it was structured around a road trip, the more disparate nature of different locales and different formal tricks is baked into the fun of it. The film opens with slideshow photographs of landscapes of the kind we might associate with our childhood, but those are the only normal landscapes here — the use of 3D turns them into bizarre angles and stuttering motion blur. Williams explicitly compares them to origami folds, which require you to make your own mountains and valleys by folding them up: a delightful mission statement. This commitment to making your own way is enhanced by the fact that there’s only one Aerosmith song playing on the car radio, a droll joke Williams might have cribbed from another notable experimental film with a particularly apt title: James Benning and Bette Gordon’s The United States of America.

While it’s not as ambitious in its use of 3D, Victor Van Rossem’s Toward a Fundamental Theory of Physics is perhaps the strongest film in a mostly excellent group for using it for a single, precise purpose. The visuals in Physics are inextricable from the camera Van Rossem designed and 3D-printed himself. His own variation on the TimeSlice camera, best known for being a sort of prototype for the “bullet time” effects in The Matrix, has 293 lenses designed to run a single strip of film in a simultaneous fashion. When combined with lengthy exposures and the conversion to 3D, the colored lights that Van Rossem waved around in front of the camera flow into one another and into the viewer’s eyes effortlessly. The effect is somewhere in between a Man Ray photogram or if a hand-painted film was made out of light. It’s intensely beautiful, but the charmingly homemade quality occasionally pops up in the form of our filmmaker himself, briefly visible as a distorted image, waving the lights like a conductor who doesn’t call attention to himself. It’s the most unexpected element from this program to appear in one’s own field of vision, but given the abundance of homemade charm on display in all the titles, perhaps it was foreshadowed all along.  — ANDREW REICHEL