The opening frame of “The Sparrow in the Chimney” evokes a kind of art-directed ideal of country living: In a spacious, rustically textured farmhouse kitchen, mid-afternoon sunlight pours in through open windows so large they double as French doors, looking out onto rolling, summer-kissed lawns and hazy woods beyond. A regal ginger cat slinks in over the sill, as amplified birdsong and insect chatter also seem to blur the indoor-outdoor boundary. A casserole simmers patiently on the stove. Who wouldn’t want to live like this? Pretty much everyone, it turns out, in Ramon and Silvan Zürcher’s elegantly vicious domestic horror movie, which forensically unpicks the compacted resentments, betrayals and traumas underpinning a single weekend family gathering, with a touch as icy as the lighting is consistently, relentlessly warm.

The Zürcher twins — who take a joint “a film by” credit on all their work, though only Ramon is billed here as writer, director and editor, with Silvan as producer — have a knack for probing inviting household spaces in a way that renders them unfamiliar, even alien. Their 2013 debut “The Strange Little Cat” observed the everyday routines of an ordinary family from a distance that turned their movements into droll physical comedy, while 2021’s “The Girl and the Spider” located whispers of the uncanny in the back-and-forth of a young woman’s apartment move. The third film in the Zürchers’ “animal trilogy,” “The Sparrow and the Chimney” marries that same detached observational quality and fey sense of the absurd to a more elaborately fleshed-out narrative, crackling with melodramatic danger and intensity of feeling. This increased dramatic heft could earn this Locarno competition entry the broader arthouse exposure that has eluded the Zürchers’ previous work, despite their ardent critical following.

The “animal” aspect of the trilogy isn’t incidental. Throughout “The Sparrow and the Chimney,” the natural world encroaches on human life in ways that don’t feel invasive so much as equalizing, as social conventions and restraints are gradually shed in favor of brute base instincts. The first innocuous sign of this collapse is, well, a sparrow caught in the fireplace of the rambling rural house where Karen (“I’m Your Man” star Maren Eggert) grew up, and is now raising her own gradually dispersing family. The bird is freed, in a dusty flurry of flight, by Karen’s lonely pre-adolescent son Leon (Ilja Bultmann); over the next two hours, few will make quite such a lucky escape.

Karen’s consistently stiff, stricken expression is the first clue that all is not rosy in this apparent idyll. When her younger, cheerier sister Jule (Britta Hammelstein) arrives to stay the weekend, with her husband Jurek (Milian Zerzawy) and daughter Edda (Luana Greco) in tow, Karen has to be pulled into a hug, as if her body has forgotten how. When Karen’s eldest daughter Christina (Paula Schindler) joins them from college, too, there’s an anxious void where an embrace should be. Meanwhile, her highschooler daughter Johanna (a scorching Lea Zoe Voss) wouldn’t touch her mother if her life depended on it: A self-styled Lolita who yearns to escape the nest, she radiates above-it-all hostility toward the world in general, but saves a special white-hot reserve of hatred for Karen. That’s beginning to rub off on cherubic Leon, a precocious gourmet (and vulnerable mark for local bullies) who cooks the family’s meals but doesn’t eat them.

The occasion for this family gathering is the birthday of Karen’s husband Markus (Andreas Döhler), though he’s not much in a mood for revelry either — he’d rather quietly continue his dalliance with the family’s young dog walker Liv (Luise Heyer), who lives in a cottage across the way, and has an alleged history of mental illness and arson. Thus are all the elements lined up for a quasi-Chekhovian knockdown battle of competing desires and miseries, though not every conflict plays out exactly as you might predict: Some aggrieved characters passively watch when you expect them to strike, while others resort to stark acts of violence without obvious provocation. The most aggressive presence here, meanwhile, may be a phantom one: Karen and Jule’s late mother, remembered rather differently by the two sisters, who still wields control over a house to which Karen feels oppressively obligated, while Jule was all too happy to wash her hands of it.

Zürcher’s script balances the excavation of long-buried secrets against a steady stream of present-tense confrontations and revelations, as does his limber, darting editing — while Eggert’s tensely still, hollowed-out performance, as a matriarch increasingly inclined to walk away from familial chaos, is a stabilizing anchor amid all this narrative sturm und drang. The remaining ensemble deftly rolls with the film’s volatile tonal shifts. There’s more broad, barbed comedy in their collective interactions, and occasional, devastating tenderness when they get each other alone — as in one exquisite scene where Christina, despite her recent absence, reads her younger brother’s inner life so acutely as to make him feel, at least for a moment, less alone in it.

“The Sparrow in the Chimney” may be a crowded work, sparking and seizing with nervous energy, but there’s a mutually enhancing tension between the rough-and-tumble of the drama and the refinement of the filmmaking. Characters seem to veritably chafe against the poise and gilded beauty of DP Alex Hasskerl’s immaculate compositions, and they sometimes strain to be heard over the intricate sound design, with its symphonic melding of human rhubarb and the hum, traffic and weather of the outdoors. Nearby, a lake and island where Karen’s children once swam has been taken over by intimidating cormorants, possessively guarding a spot they’re no longer willing to share; perhaps the time has come for this fevered, fractured house to cede itself to the elements.

The violent shadow of Guatemala’s decades-long civil war looms large over Mexico 86, an intimate political thriller about a family of two trying to stay together as the fight pursues them abroad. Written and directed by César Díaz, whose 2019 Cannes Caméra d’Or winner, Our Mothers, also dealt with the deadly repercussions of the Guatemalan conflict, this engaging if somewhat rote second feature stars Bérénice Béjo (The Artist) as a leftist militant forced to decide between revolution and motherhood.

Per the press notes, Diaz based the story on his own childhood, and there’s clearly an authenticity to the way he depicts the harried underground life that activists were forced to lead at the time, with a suitcase always packed so they could flee at any moment. What’s less convincing is the film’s tepid emotional atmosphere and predictable chain of events, even if they lead to a rather moving finale that manages to pull the rug out from under us.

If Our Mothers was more of a contemplative narrative about the war’s long-term traumatic aftereffects, Mexico 86 hits the ground running and never really lets up. After a prologue, set in Guatemala in 1976, shows activist and recent mother Maria (Béjo) witnessing her husband’s murder by government thugs in broad daylight, we skip 10 years ahead to find her living under cover in Mexico City, where she dons a wig, goes by the name of Julia and works as an editor at a progressive newspaper.

Maria is far from home but still deeply entrenched in her combat, shacking up with a fellow activist, Miguel (Leonardo Ortizgris), and doing her best to fight Guatemala’s military-backed — and U.S.-supported — dictatorship from a distance. She’s also doing her best to stay close with her 10-year-old son, Marco (Matheo Labbé), who lives with Maria’s mother (Julieta Egurrola) back home. When the two arrive in Mexico for a visit and Marco winds up staying, it puts Maria in a tough spot: How can she be a good parent while waging a clandestine war against a right-wing junta?

The dilemma recalls the one in Sidney Lumet’s 1988 masterwork Running on Empty, a similar story of family ties and leftist revolutionaries that was made two years after the events in this film are meant to take place. But whereas Lumet’s devastating coming-of-age story provided a major shot to the heart, especially in its portrayal of a teenager trying to crawl out from under his parents’ weighty shadows, Mexico 86 is less emotionally effective overall, and works best during its handful of suspense sequences.

One has Maria receiving a secret dossier about Guatemala’s mass killings only seconds before her contact is stabbed on a crowded street. In another strong scene, she escapes from her apartment with Miguel and Marco, which leads to a car chase with the secret police. When they get caught in a traffic jam, the chase turns into a shootout, with Maria at one point appearing to hold a gun to Marco’s head — a telling sign that she’d rather sacrifice her own child than hand him over to the enemy.

There’s a way out of all this, but it’s a tough one: Maria’s overseeing operative (played by Fermín Martínez from Narcos: Mexico) tells her she can send Marco off to a “hive” in Cuba, where he’ll be raised with other children of the revolution in relative safety. But the bond between mother and son seems to be tightening, despite some rocky moments, and Maria clearly doesn’t want to give up either Marco or the bigger battle.

Béjo, whose own parents fled the dictatorship in Argentina and settled in France, does a good job portraying Maria’s push-and-pull between family and political engagement. The path her character takes can feel obvious at times, and there’s a general lack of depth to Diaz’s script, even if it’s been drawn from real events. Yet the director manages to land a powerful ending that puts the effaced Marco front and center in a major way, even if it comes a tad late.

The film’s title refers to the 1986 World Cup, which took place in Mexico and which is never referred to except in a few perfunctory moments. The greater backdrop to the story is what happened in Guatemala during the dark years of its many dictatorships, including a genocide in the early ’80s that lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths. If anything, Diaz succeeds in conveying how fatal the conflict in his homeland truly was, making its way into foreign lands and tearing loving families apart.

Walt Disney created it. James Cameron will help add to it.

The Disneyland Resort in its seventh decade is getting a new area dedicated to a world of fantasy, this one having originated from the mind of filmmaker Cameron. A long-teased “Avatar”-inspired section is coming to Disney California Adventure. The Walt Disney Co. confirmed the plans Saturday night at its D23 fan convention in Anaheim.

Concept art shown by Disney revealed a water-focused attraction that Walt Disney Imagineering, the division of the company responsible for theme park design, promised would be “dynamic, intense and an emotional experience on a grand scale.”

Imagineering executive Ali Rubinstein said the new area in California Adventure would differ greatly from an “Avatar”-themed land at Walt Disney World in Florida. This one, said Rubinstein, would draw heavily from the second “Avatar” film, “The Way of Water.” Consider it “an excursion in search of majestic natural wonders that can only be found in Pandora,” said Rubinstein.

The announcement arrives at a crucial time for the Walt Disney Co. The firm reported lower than anticipated operating income for its parks division in its third-quarter results, with executives attributing the slowdown, in part, to a dip in demand driven by financial “stress” on consumers. Any drop in attendance at Disney theme parks — global tourist destinations that draw millions per year — raises questions not only regarding public sentiment on the economy, but the affordability and excitement surrounding the parks themselves.

In turn, this D23 convention was seen as crucial in inspiring fan passion for what’s to come. Throughout the weekend it was stressed that announcements at a parks-focused event Saturday evening at the Honda Center would focus on projects in some stage of active development.

“Disney’s plans are drawn,” said Josh D’Amaro, chairman of Disney Experiences, from the arena’s stage. “This means the dirt is moving.”

Also coming to California Adventure: A “Coco”-themed boat ride, for which D’Amaro said ground would break in 2026. D’Amaro said the ride would be influenced largely by classics such as the Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean, and would feature new animatronic technology.

“We’re bringing our skeletal cast of characters to life in a big way through the latest audio-animatronics technology,” he said. “These figures will appear in ways you’ll have to see to believe.”

Locations for the “Avatar” and “Coco” attractions were not detailed at the Honda Center.

Disney itself placed a high significance on this D23 when it came to Disneyland. The birthplace of the modern American theme park turns 70 in July 2025, and recently after a multiyear process the company won approval from Anaheim to significantly expand its parks, hotels and shopping districts.

The project, known as DisneylandForward, came with a pledge, as the Walt Disney Co. has promised to spend a minimum of $1.9 billion on Disneyland attractions, lodging, entertainment, shopping and dining in the next 10 years. Additionally, Disney has stated it will be doubling down on its theme parks, as it has guaranteed to spend $60 billion throughout the next decade in its experiences division, with at least half of that total dedicated to parks and resorts, according to a recent SEC filing.

“Turbocharge” has been the buzzword used by top Disney brass in relation to its proposed park expenditures.

At a media event preceding D23, Disneyland Resort President Ken Potrock said DisneylandForward gave the resort the “possibility” of expanding its footprint by approximately 50%, largely by rezoning parking districts. Disney executives indicated that they were well aware that fans were anticipating relatively major reveals at this D23, especially after the last convention, in 2022, went heavy on potential projects but was light on concrete proposals.

In turn, Bruce Vaughn, chief creative officer of Imagineering, stated at a media event Thursday evening that this convention would disclose “some really cool” stuff.

“I know you’ve all been hungry for something beyond blue skies,” Vaughn said, referring to the vague creative visions the company has divulged in recent years. “Blue sky is really fun, but building, delivering and putting shovels in the dirt is even better. That’s what this year is all about and the next decade is all about.”

Coming to the Disneyland Resort much sooner will be a new show for the Main Street Opera House, to tell the story of Walt Disney. The show dedicated to the park’s patriarch will debut next year for Disneyland’s 70th anniversary.

“This attraction will imagine what it would have been like to be in Walt’s presence,” D’Amaro said.

The robotic show will be set in the Disney founder’s studio office, and D’Amaro said great care is being taken to bring him to life, hinting that it will also feature what’s long been said to be his favorite song: “Feed the Birds” by the Sherman Brothers.

“It will feature for the first time an audio-animatronic figure of Walt,” he said. “We’re advancing the technology he pioneered 60 years ago with Abraham Lincoln.”

Nostalgia fans and Disneyland purists need not worry. The Opera House’s current show, “Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln,” will play in rotation with the Disney-focused show after the latter has its initial run.

Also announced: A land with a “Monsters, Inc.” theme for Disney’s Hollywood Studios at Walt Disney World, and attractions based on “Encanto” and the “Indiana Jones” franchise for the Florida resort’s Animal Kingdom.

This is a developing story and will be updated.