Sylvie (Isabelle Huppert), the pivotal figure in Asghar Farhadi’s “Parallel Tales,” is a French novelist whose better days are behind her. She lives in a stately old Paris apartment that’s starting to fray at the seams, and her whole vibe is that of an analog crank. When she goes into writing mode, she lights up a cigarette, puts on her stodgy spectacles and sits down at her ancient Olivetti electric typewriter, which is clearly the same machine she’s been using for decades.

As she starts the writing process, she pecks at the typewriter a few letters at a time. It’s doubtful, however, that a veteran writer would sound like that — instead, the keys would be flying. It’s a minor but telling detail, since Farhadi is generally a stickler for authenticity. But in “Parallel Tales,” Isabelle Huppert, putting on overdone grouchy airs, seems to be playing less a real-world novelist than a stylized cornball-movie version of a Venerable French Author. The character seems not so much drawn from experience as plucked from a vat of pulp cliché. And that’s mostly true of the rest of the movie as well.

“Parallel Tales” is a very different sort of Farhadi film. It’s not the first project the fabled Iranian director has shot in France — that would be “The Past” (2013), which he made on the heels of his international breakthrough with “A Separation.” But though he had already begun the painful process of parting ways with Iran (in 2024, Farhadi vowed not to shoot another movie there until the ban against depicting women without headscarves was lifted), “The Past” was every inch a Farhadi film. It had his domestic psychodramatic intensity, and his flowing ingenuity.

The new movie, by contrast, is an inflated meditation on fiction and reality. It’s all about people spying on each other, which can be a good jumping-off point for a movie. And no one is saying that Farhadi has to stick to his familiar and often starkly artful mode of neorealist drama. But “Parallel Tales,” it’s my grim duty to report, is a meandering and rather amorphous mess. It’s a far-out parable of voyeurism and imagination, loosely based on the sixth episode of Krzysztof Kieślowki’s “Dekalog,” which was about a young man spying on a woman across the street and falling in love with her. But “Dekalog: Six” had suspense; “Parallel Tales” has longueurs.

As Sylvie starts peering through her small telescope at the fifth-floor apartment directly across from her, what takes place behind those windows is not what we expect. The place is a sound-effects recording studio, with three sound designers creating and dubbing aural effects — footsteps on a sandy beach, flapping bird wings — onto pieces of film footage. But the three are also involved in a love triangle: the curly-brown-haired Anna (Virginie Efira), who is romantic partners with the older head of production (Vincent Cassel), is seeing her younger co-worker (Pierre Niney) on the sly. We watch this and think: Okay, so what? But it turns out that the triangle we’re observing is already Sylvie’s fictionalized version of what she saw through the telescope.

Since Sylvie hasn’t exactly been taking good care of herself, her niece, Céline (India Hair), who owns half the apartment, sets her up with a young drifter, Adam (Adam Bess), who rescued Céline from a subway pickpocket. The doleful, scruffy Adam cleans the apartment (though he also shepherds a family of mice), and he then takes Sylvie’s abandoned manuscript — the fictional scenario we’ve been watching — and palms it off as his own. He gives it to a woman named Nita (also played by Virginie Efira, now blonde), who he meets at a coffeeshop. He wants her to read the manuscript, even as the film now segues into showing us the real version of what’s been going on in that apartment. (It’s less racy, though it still involves a lurch toward adultery.) Are we having brain spasms yet?

The most baffling dimension of “Parallel Tales” is how little life there is to the characters outside of these fiction-vs.-reality gambits. It’s not that the actors are bad. Vincent Cassel invests Pierre with a no-longer-young sense of regret, and Virginie Efira, in her double role, makes you feel the sharpness of Nita’s pain in contrast to Anna’s more libertine ‘tude. Yet none of this comes to much. When Nita rebuffs the advances of the lightweight cad Christophe (who’s Pierre’s brother), that’s the one focused emotion in the movie — a woman rejecting workplace harassment. No problem there, but it feels like a different film. 

In an abstract way, Farhadi is looking back to films like “Rear Window” and “Blow-Up” and “The Conversation,” as well as De Palma’s “Blow Out” and “Body Double.” But those movies, in different ways, were about trickery and deceit, about drawing the audience into a head game of perception. (“Blow-Up,” 60 years ago, was one of the movies that made art cinema fun, while “Body Double,” preposterous as it is, is vintage guilty-pleasure De Palma.) In “Parallel Tales,” Farhadi doesn’t play the audience so much as stymie it with the obliqueness of his storytelling. The movie manages to be rigorously muddled despite not being all that complicated. Maybe that’s because the tales it tells are parallel, all right. It feels like they’re competing to underwhelm you.

4/5 stars

With a story driven by beautifully restrained emotions and conversations steeped in philosophical queries about the meaning and significance of art, the Franco-Japanese co-production Nagi Notes combines the best of the two cinematic worlds it was born out of.

Playing in the Cannes Film Festival’s main competition, Nagi Notes is based on Japanese playwright Oriza Hirata’s Tokyo Notes, a play revolving around 20 characters sitting in a museum hall talking about their lives while a devastating war rages in faraway Europe.

In Fukada’s very loose adaptation of the 1994 play – which retains only two of the original characters and removes the spatial confines in Hirata’s Beckett-ish narrative – war and its imitations are also omnipresent.

On television, they see the devastation in Ukraine; up close, they contend with military trucks rumbling past their homes and the constant boom of regular drills taking place at a nearby training camp.

Fraternal twins Racine (Kara Young) and Anaia (Mallori Johnson) have always had only each other. After a childhood bouncing from one abusive foster home to the next, the two have settled into a life together where sisterhood always comes first. Both sisters have burns on their bodies, but Anaia’s facial scars make her stand out. And if someone bothers Anaia, Racine is there to fight for her.

We see this at the very beginning of Aleshea Harris’ debut feature, Is God Is. In a black and white flashback, the young twins sit peacefully on a bench together, until some kids walk by calling Anaia ugly. Racine quickly rises, beats the bullies, and then returns to sit next to her sister. In the present day, the twins get fired when Racine defends her sister at work. They are both newly unemployed when Racine tells Anaia that she’s been corresponding with their estranged mother (Vivica A. Fox). Soon enough, the twins pack their things and get on the road, driving their very cinematic classic car down the backroads of the American South.

Once they arrive, their mother gives them a simple mission: kill their father. In flashback, we learn that they were once a family until their mother got a restraining order against their father (Sterling K. Brown). One night, he violates the restraining order and comes into the house, hoping to embrace his wife. But when she doesn’t reciprocate, he pushes her into the bathtub, pours lighter fluid on her and sets her body ablaze. He also brings his twin daughters into the bathroom to see their mother burn — their scars are the result of their desperate attempts to save their mother.

Meanwhile, their father walks out of their life entirely. And though their mother survives the burns, she couldn’t take care of them. Now that her daughters are grown and she is near death, she can’t rest easy until the man who tried to kill her is dead. Unfortunately, the three women have no idea where to find the wayward patriarch. 

Harris’ screenplay follows a classic “hero’s journey” template, with the twins setting off on the open road, meeting a variety of eccentric characters in the search for their enigmatic father. The first stop is a church run by the charismatic Divine (Erika Alexander), who bills herself as a healer. The twins also meet their half-brother Ezekiel (Josiah Cross), who becomes a problem later. Thankfully, Divine has kept all their father’s things, and they steal his address book, leading them to his former lawyer, Chuck (Mykelti Williamson).

Eventually, the sisters make it to their father’s home, meet his new wife (Janelle Monae), their twin brothers (Xavier Mills, Justen Ross) and, eventually, the man himself. Racine and Anaia’s journey mirrors that of The Bride’s in Quentin Tarantino’s two-part epic Kill Bill, as they follow a bloody trail of revenge before the final showdown. Fox’s presence in the movie is another reminder; in Tarantino’s film, Fox is slain by The Bride (Uma Thurman) and she tells her daughter that she may seek her out for revenge when she’s older. Racine and Anaia, acting as spiritual successors, pursue revenge with their own Bill, this one Black and even more mysterious. 

Is God Is is not just the story of one Black family; it stands as an almost cosmic example of the dysfunction inherent in so many Black American families. Black men, weighed down by white exploitation in the world, come home to families that bear the brunt of their outside frustrations. Late in the film, when Anaia asks her father why he tried to kill her mother, his response is simple: She wouldn’t let me hold her. Never mind that she had a restraining order against him and legally he should not have been there; even after having all those years to think about his actions, he continues to blame his ex-wife. There is this prevalent idea in the Black community that a woman’s role is to calmly support the Black men in her life, setting aside her own feelings and safety. Brown’s patriarch is the embodiment of that unbalanced relationship, causing chaos and expecting more love and forgiveness in return. 

The “God” in the title is Fox, the name bestowed upon her for giving life to our heroines. Racine and Anaia are more than just sisters in this narrative — they represent all the justifiably angry Black girls who deserved more than the world gave them. Harris adapted Is God Is from her play of the same name, and the theatrical spirit lives on in the film through the rhythm and repetition of the dialogue. The central performances are strong, with Brown perfectly embodying a sinister, otherworldly image of masculinity run amok.

It’s a shame, then, that the film around these impressive actors is visually flat. The South we see in Is God Is is a desolate, underpopulated landscape — too neat and quiet for a story that should feel larger. All the words sound right and everyone is in place, but Is God Is feels like a film just short of greatness.