In the first, “The Death of R.M.F.”, Jesse Plemons plays Robert, a man who appears in thrall to Raymond (Willem Dafoe), who sets Robert’s agenda, from his diet to his sexual encounters.

In the second, “R.M.F. Is Flying”, Plemons plays Daniel, a cop whose wife Liz (Emma Stone) has gone missing; when she returns, he is convinced she is an imposter.

Finally, in “R.M.F. Eats a Sandwich”, Stone plays Emily, a woman who seeks out a cult leader (Dafoe) for a spiritual and sexual awakening.

Inevitably, as is the case with most portmanteau films, one episode stands out – in this case “The Death of R.M.F.”, which has an unnerving quality to it.

The second instalment is the most shocking, featuring Liz and Daniel sitting around with friends (Mamoudou Athie and Margaret Qualley) watching a highly explicit sex tape the four of them made.

Bringing up the rear is the final short, which rather drags with its depictions of sweat lodges, bodily contamination, and Stone skidding around in her cool-looking Dodge Challenger.

Stone, now on her third movie with the Greek director, seems to relish the extremes she gets to go to.

Quite what it all means, however, is another thing entirely. The characters seem to be in states of crisis, with miscarriage a common theme.

Looking at humanity in all its weirdness, Kinds of Kindness is a baffling film to take in, as abrasive as its musical score from Jerskin Fendrix, who performed similar tricks on Poor Things.

Certainly, compared to his more accessible films, such as The Favourite and Poor Things, this feels like Lanthimos at his most elusive and frustrating.

The New Orleans-based filmmaking brothers Bill and Turner Ross have made a name for themselves over the past 15 years with their lyrical, poetic documentaries. But with 2020’s “Bloody Nose, Empty Pockets,” they blurred the line between fiction and nonfiction, setting up an imaginary scenario in an actual dive bar on its last night of business, observing a curated group of regulars as they shut it down for good.

The new “Gasoline Rainbow” is their first official narrative feature, informed by their documentary roots and eye for capturing spontaneous beauty. During the Covid-19 quarantine of 2020, Bill and Turner Ross dreamed up a wild road film, which they loosely scripted and cast with five young first-time actors from Oregon. They play a group of friends from a small town called Wiley, who hit the road with the only things you need for an adventure: a dream, a posse, a van and the abiding belief that “anywhere’s better than here.”

The dream is to see the Oregon coast, 513 miles from their landlocked town. The posse is three boys — Makai Garza, Micah Bunch and Tony Aburto — and two girls, Nathaly Garcia and Nichole Dukes. The van gets them started on their adventure, but they soon learn that it’s not a necessary component. After spending the night partying in a cow field with a guy they meet on the side of the road, they return to find the van on blocks, vandalized, the tires stolen, and that’s when things really get interesting. They have to rely on each other and the kindness of strangers and community to make it all the way to the beach, to the Party at the End of the World, a mysterious event they hear about that becomes their ultimate destination.

Though the events on this journey are planned and produced by the filmmakers, the relationships are real, the interactions and conversations undeniably authentic. If pioneering English documentarian John Grierson’s definition of nonfiction filmmaking was the “creative treatment of actuality,” “Gasoline Rainbow” could ostensibly fit under that umbrella.

But this is not a documentary and it’s far more productive to consider the ways in which the Ross brothers have synthesized their influences and inspirations — such as “My Own Private Idaho,” “The Wizard of Oz,” “Easy Rider” and the 1984 documentary “Streetwise” — into their own unique form that exudes a singular kind of ragged, unpredictable vitality.

Each actor is a discovery with a special presence, but there is no one star or standout, which feels intentional. While “Gasoline Rainbow” is a heady slice of pure, uncut youthful energy, it is also a portrait of collectivism, caretaking and a celebration of mutual aid.

It’s apt that a film like this was born out of the isolation and confinement of 2020. There was a desire for freedom and movement, combined with the progressive value of taking care of each other that rose out of quarantine and the Black Lives Matter movement. In “Gasoline Rainbow,” the kids come by this sense of mutual protection naturally, but the value is reinforced along the way by the heavily-pierced punk hitchhikers who teach them how to hop a train to Portland in exchange for their leftover food, and the middle-aged rockers who provide a party, a couch to crash, breakfast and a boat ride. Micah’s cousin Noah underscores the importance, telling them, “I like the way you treat each other.”

These values of care and respect threaded throughout are why we never fear for their safety. They make decisions as a group, look out for each other and demonstrate their awareness by asking the strangers they meet, “Are you cool?” The film isn’t about the risks of a harrowing journey. In turn, it gives us a freedom as viewers to focus on their life stories that emerge in snippets of conversation, and those of the people they meet along the way. Their guides are fascinating in their own right, like Gary, a Portland skater who shepherds them through the city for a night, and later ferries them to the party.

This age — not kids, not quite adults — is such an impossibly short time, and it’s poignant to drink in their openness and pliability as people, their youthful trust and imperviousness, to watch them blossom and bond. They haven’t hardened into grown-ups yet and they know they have this one moment in time to enjoy fleeting youth, before jobs, bills and responsibilities. Nichole says that she fears not having enough time to figure things out, and this film is a celebration of that moment.

“Gasoline Rainbow” is also stunningly gorgeous, with carefully composed shots capturing the vast Oregon landscape, raspberry sunsets, golden fields, the beach at night and in the misty morning. The gritty urban space of Portland is so wildly different from their one-stoplight town, it’s intoxicating, the gang drawn in by the all-night parties, skate parks, rock festivals and free-flying freak flags.

Though a larger cultural commentary is not overt, certain realities necessarily come through, with jokes about cops, corporate logos emblazoned on train cars, discussions about parents in rehab and what it’s like to be the only black kid in small-town Oregon (“It sucks”). It’s a depiction of today’s youth, shaped by contemporary culture, but there is also a timelessness to their experience. The Ross brothers capture those universal feelings of a certain age: possibility, togetherness with your tribe, unmoored from traditional family structures.

The structuring destination of the Party at the End of the World speaks to this idea of time running out, and it imparts a sense of existential dread that hovers around the edges, but forces the characters, and the audience to remain in the moment, to embrace serendipity, surprise, and coincidence. As it all coalesces, there is a sense of visceral, emotional catharsis that could only be achieved at the end of a long journey. That the Ross brothers manage to impart this feeling to an audience after an hour-and-48-minute cinematic adventure is a true triumph. This wild, vicarious ride through youthful adventure is absolutely worth taking, for your own nostalgia and for the reminder that the kids are indeed alright.

A celebrity from the age of 11, Elizabeth Taylor was practiced at public relations for almost all her life, so there aren’t many personal revelations in Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes. But Nanette Burstein‘s elegantly constructed documentary, mostly in Taylor’s own words backed by illuminating archival images, works as a lively bit of film history about movie stardom in the volatile 1960s as the studio system was fading and the media exploding.

The film — which premiered at Cannes in the Cannes Classics sidebar — is based on 40 hours of recently rediscovered audiotapes, recordings Taylor made in the mid-1960s for a ghost-written memoir (long out of print). It was the most frenzied moment of her fame, when she was coming off the paparazzi-fueled scandal that was Cleopatra. Taylor, who died in 2011, recalls her many marriages — four when she made these recordings, since she was on the first of two to Richard Burton — and her career, from her start as a child in Lassie Come Home (1943) through her Oscar-winning performance in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966).

As she did in Hillary, about Hillary Clinton, and The Kid Stays in the Picture, based on Robert Evans’ autobiography, Burstein stays out of her celebrity subject’s way. Taylor’s voice is playful, almost girlish. Occasionally she is blunt, but more often seems cautiously aware of being recorded. Richard Meryman, the Life magazine reporter doing the interviews, is heard asking questions at times, but Taylor is firmly in control, at least on the surface.

Beneath that you can tell how beautifully Burstein and her editor and co-writer, Tal Ben-David, shaped the visuals. The archival photos and news clips offer a telling backdrop of images and sound bites, often more informative than what Taylor says — from shots of crowds filling the streets of London to see her on the day of her second wedding, to the actor Michael Wilding, to film of her in mourning black at the funeral of her beloved third husband, the producer Mike Todd, who died in a plane crash. The visual exceptions are the clichéd, recurring establishing shots of an old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape recorder, next to a martini glass.

Moving chronologically, Taylor begins with her desire to act even as a child. Photos from that time offer a reminder that she was always astonishingly beautiful. These early sections are fine but bland. She was too young to be married the first time, to Nicky Hilton, she says, and the second marriage just didn’t work out. George Stevens gave her subtle direction and bolstered her confidence when she made A Place in the Sun (1951). When she made Giant with him five years later, he berated her, telling her she was just a movie star and not an actress, a charge that often dogged her.

Taylor becomes sporadically more biting as the film goes on, displaying a sharp-tongued wit and personality. That is particularly true when she talks about her marriage to Eddie Fisher, the first of her marital scandals, covered endlessly in tabloids. It was public knowledge that Fisher and his wife, Debbie Reynolds, were the Todds’ best friends. Shortly after Mike Todd’s death, Fisher left his wife, whose image was always cheery and wholesome, for Taylor. “I can’t say anything against Debbie,” Taylor sweetly says on the tape, and without taking a breath goes on, “But she put on such an act, with the pigtails and the diaper pins.” She says of Fisher, “I don’t remember too much about my marriage to him except it was one big frigging awful mistake.”

Burstein includes some enlightening sidelights from that period. A news clip of the recently married couple has them surrounded by journalists on the steps of a plane, with one reporter asking Fisher about his bride, “Can she cook?” Even as a tease, who would dare say that now?

That fuss was nothing next to Cleopatra (1963), now notorious as the film so over-budget it almost bankrupted 20th Century Fox, and the set on which Taylor and Burton, each married to other people, indiscreetly sparked to each other from the start. The Vatican newspaper weighed in on the affair, disapprovingly. Taylor says her own father called her “a whore.” In one of the film’s more telling scenes, she says of their affair, “Richard and I, we tried to be what is considered ‘good,’ but it didn’t work,” a comment that at once plays into the moralistic language of her day and resists it. These signs of Taylor’s savvy awareness of herself as a public personality are the film’s most intriguing, if scattershot, moments.

The film also shows how besieged the couple was by the paparazzi, at a turning point in celebrity culture. Occasionally other voices are heard in archival audio, and in this section George Hamilton says of the press, “They were not going for glamour anymore. They were going for the destruction of glamour,” suggesting a longing for the old pre-packaged studio publicity days. But Taylor herself is never heard complaining. A realist, she made hiding from the paparazzi into a game for her children so they wouldn’t be frightened.

The recordings end at the point where she is assuring Meryman that she and Burton would be together for 50 years. The film then takes a quick trot through the rest of her days, including rehab at the Betty Ford Center and raising money for AIDS research. But the last word should have been Taylor’s. There is a private Elizabeth, she says. “The other Elizabeth, the famous one, really has no depth or meaning to me. It is a commodity that makes money.” The movie star Taylor is the one who most often comes through in the film, but that is engaging enough.