‘The Artifice Girl’
Rent or buy on most major platforms.
Franklin Ritch’s feature starts off like a taut thriller: a couple of agents, Deena and Amos (Sinda Nichols and David Girard), are grilling Gareth (Ritch), who has created a digital little girl to bait and catch online predators. Cherry (Tatum Matthews) has the appearance of an 11-year-old and her software is so sophisticated that, as Gareth puts it, she is almost completely “on autopilot.” Her behavior is so humanlike that a troubled Amos wonders if Cherry has feelings, too.
We reconvene with these four characters a few years later. Cherry looks the same but has continued to evolve. She has been created for a noble purpose, but her seeming realness makes the whole endeavor feel icky to Amos, who points out that if Cherry has evolved into near-sentience, then she would need to be asked to consent to her mission. She disagrees: “You should disregard everything I feel,” Cherry says. “I’m not human — I’m a tool.”
Another fast-forward and the aging Gareth is now in a wheelchair (in a brilliant casting twist, he is now played by Lance Henriksen, who portrayed one of cinema’s most memorable androids in “Aliens”). We are in the last stretch and Ritch narrows his focus even further, so he ends up with a face-off between Cherry and her creator, as they discuss such weighty matters as agency, what’s considered real, the importance of the physical realm, whether humanity can result from coding — and if yes, should A.I. get rights?
“The Artifice Girl” is essentially a three-act play but Ritch has come up with something uncommon: a movie entirely about ideas.
Jonatan Etzler’s wonderful comedy is a godsend for lovers of time travel and time loops: It offers a mix of both in a candy-colored package, along with a surprisingly affecting conclusion.
The churlish Amelia (Hedda Stiernstedt) is 40 and going nowhere slowly in a small Swedish town. One day she’s hit by a truck and wakes up on the morning of her 18th birthday, back in 2002 — cue Juicy Couture tracksuits, AOL instant messenger and CDs. She looks like her adult self to the viewers but not to her friends, who see the time-traveling Amelia as their peer. After reliving her action-packed day, when she was happy and everything seemed possible, she wakes up on the same morning again, and again, and again. Her teenage years were, in hindsight, Amelia’s peak — she was her high school’s It girl — so she spends most of the film trying to figure out both how to break the time loop (she even watches “Groundhog Day” for tips) and how to course-correct to avoid a drab middle age.
Holding the key to both goals is Amelia’s former bestie, Fiona (Miriam Ingrid at 18 and Tove Edfeldt for the adult version), and what was hidden in the time capsule they buried when they were younger. While “One More Time” does not add anything new to the subgenre, it is an excellent example of it, and hits surprising grace notes.
The motto of Fairview Heights, the setting of Colin West’s sneakily affecting drama, is “Soar to new heights.” Cameron (the comedian Jim Gaffigan) has long taken it literally, with dreams of becoming an astronaut. They did not pan out, so he contents himself with looking at the stars and hosting “Above and Beyond,” a science show for kids airing on a local station. And then odd events begin to occur: a car crashes down from the sky next to Cameron; next is an old rocket. An actual former astronaut, Kent (Gaffigan again), moves to town and turns out to be a preening bully. At least his son is a sweet kid who befriends Cameron’s daughter (the actors Gabriel Rush and Katelyn Nacon have terrific chemistry).
For most of its running time, “Linoleum” reads like a study of a middle-aged man in slow-motion crisis: Cameron’s wife (Rhea Seehorn) has started divorce proceedings and he’s about to lose his beloved show to someone he hates. But West keeps dropping clues — and red herrings — that something else is off, really off. The eventual reveal is emotionally devastating, and may well send you back to the beginning of the movie to search for the trail of bread crumbs you had missed.
‘Last Sentinel’
Clear and present danger is far from optimal, but the crew of the Sentinel military watch tower would probably take it to the elusive and slippery danger they face. Stationed in the middle of the ocean that covers the entire Earth (save for two warring continents) in 2063, the four soldiers scrutinize the horizon from their rig-like platform. Their two-year rotation ended three months earlier but they haven’t been relieved yet, so they’re anxiously on the lookout for help as well as potential attackers.
And then one day, a ship turns up — but is it friend or foe? “Last Sentinel” may remind fans of literary fiction of the Dino Buzzati novel “The Tartar Steppe,” which painted the existential futility of a remote outpost waiting in vain for the enemy to show up. Like most stories set in an isolated, self-contained locale, Tanel Toom’s film is at its best simply letting us witness the mission’s drudgery and the paranoia slowly taking over the crew (which includes Kate Bosworth as the lone woman onboard). It’s slow going, but fascinating.
‘Robotica Destructiva’
It is fruitless trying to summarize this bonkers movie because to be frank, I’m not sure I understood what going on. Something-something about a weapon called the Arculon Destroyer that everybody wants and then there’s robot mayhem? On a planet? In another dimension? It all would give the screenwriting guru Robert McKee a conniption.
And yet Sam Gaffin’s latest entry in his Killer Robots! series is more ridiculously fun and certainly more distinctive than the formulaic fare filling out our virtual shelves. Operating out of Florida, Gaffin is keeping alive the tradition of midnight movies with his jury-rigged extravaganzas mixing C.G.I., models and puppets into bizarre video-game aesthetics, generously smeared with rambunctious humor and a relentless synth-pop soundtrack (the Killer Robots! is also a bombastic band led by Gaffin). This film looks and sounds like nothing else out there, and that’s good enough for me.
