If “Gael Garcia Bernal as Magellan” sounds to you like a pretty cool Netflix series, you have never seen a film by Filipino auteur and slow-cinema master Lav Diaz. Known on the international festival circuit for his epically minimalist features with bladder-busting running times, his movies are challenging, high-art dramas made for a very select few — the opposite of the flashy, ADHD-friendly content found on streamers.

Premiering in Cannes, where Diaz’s most awarded film, Norte, the End of History, played in Un Certain Regard back in 2013, Magellan (Magalhães) is not for the impatient viewer who likes their explorer stories action-packed and easy to digest.

And yet this exquisitely crafted feature may be one of the director’s most accessible works to date. It clocks in at only 160 minutes (Diaz’s films often run twice that long, if not more), but, more importantly, provides an honest glimpse at a figure who famously opened the world up for exploration, while furthering the mass destruction wreaked by colonialism.

“I saw a white man!” an indigenous woman screams in the movie’s opening scene, which shows her working calmly by a river in a picturesque rain forest. Like the snake appearing in the Garden of Eden — a Biblical reference that will soon be forced upon tribes with their own religious culture — the arrival of Europeans on the shores of unexplored lands will carry evil into an innocent place, changing it for the worse.

That first sequence takes place during the Conquest of Malacca in 1511, which saw Magellan fighting under Portuguese conquistador Afonso de Albuquerque. If you’re not familiar with this dark period, Diaz doesn’t necessarily make things clear enough to grasp. He’s less interested in historical facts and figures than in visually capturing what the start of colonial decimation looked like on both sides. Magellan never appears in his movie as a hero or antihero, but as a bold profiteer reaping what he can out of a global race to secure land through war and plunder. Guns, germs and steel indeed.

The narrative, which stretches from the bloody clashes on Malacca to Magellan’s death at the Battle of Mactan (Philippines) ten years later, portrays this decade of conquest and ruination with elegantly composed tableaux shot from a fixed position. Diaz is known for using black-and-white, but here he teams with Artur Tort (credited as both co-cinematographer and co-editor) to shoot with a rich color palette of green, brown and blue, finding beautifully detailed textures in locations on both sea and land. The villages recreated by production designers Isabel Garcia and Allen Alzola seem so authentic that you would think they had always been there, nestled in the jungle.

Certain images look like they were torn right out of 16th-century paintings, which is why Magellan is a movie you tend to gaze at rather than watch with full attention. Diaz often shows us the aftermath of battles, where dozens of bodies are artfully splayed on the ground, instead of the battles themselves. Lots of other drama happens off-screen, even if we do witness certain key moments from Magellan’s last years — whether it’s his decision to work under the Spanish crown after the Portuguese refused to back his last voyage, or his discovery of a passage to the South Pacific that became known as the Magellan Strait.

But the drama can be very stolid, borderline dull at times. Not that Garcia Bernal isn’t perfect for the part: Costumed in lots of fluffy shirts, he plays a fearless man with an immense ego who suffered for his success, making the whole profession of being a conquistador look less like a valiant enterprise than a major drag. But Diaz’s observant style (he never cuts within a scene; there’s no music to induce emotion) can keep us at arm’s length from events. Perhaps the most dramatic part of the film is the one that’s the most painfully stretched out, depicting Magellan’s long, relentless voyage (1519-1521) from Spain to the Spice Islands, which saw many crew members die along the way.

But whatever the Spaniards or Portuguese went through pales in comparison to all the tribespeople whom we see imprisoned, converted, enslaved or just plain murdered by Magellan and his men. The other main character in the film is Enrique (Amado Arjay Babon), an indigenous man whom Magellan captures on Malacca and takes with him on all his subsequent journeys. He gradually becomes “civilized” (to use a colonialist term) as the narrative progresses, until the tides turn in the Philippines and we see him returning back to his initial state, freed from the shackles of European domination.

As much as Magellan is a film that will play to a highly select audience, it makes a subtle but loud political statement about the colonial mindset both then and now. When the conquistadors claim they are fighting so that “Islam shall finally disappear,” hoping to beat the Moors in securing more territory, it sounds a lot like speeches you hear from far-right pundits and politicians in Europe today. Diaz’s movie may resemble a magnificent time capsule — and one that we watch with a certain distance — but there are moments when its stark realism reminds us how easily history can repeat itself.

Directed by the late Sangeeth Sivan, the story revolves around a group of friends—played by Shreyas Talpade, Dinker Sharma, Dherendra Kumar Tiwari, and Sonia Rathee—who begin playing a dangerous game with an ouija board, unknowingly summoning the spirit of Anamika. Word spreads fast, and soon there’s a long queue of people eager to get answers from the spirit—ranging from revelations about someone’s father’s real identity to solving petty domestic mysteries like stolen jewellery.

But things soon spiral out of control. How the group handles the chaos that follows forms the rest of the plot.

Kapkapiii, a remake of the 2023 Malayalam film Romancham, starts off as harmless fun. We’ve seen enough buddy comedies to know the tropes—a token drunk, a scaredy-cat—and they’re all present here. The problem is that Kapkapiii thinks it’s funnier than it actually is. Written by Kumar Priyadarshi and Saurabh Anand, the story gets increasingly convoluted. A tenant who fancies one of the guys is thrown in. Then comes a gangster, played by Dibyendu Bhattacharya. After the intermission, Tusshar Kapoor joins the gang, and from that point, it’s hard to track where the film is even headed. We get “chadar mod” and “len ke bode” in the name of jokes. Eventually, you stop laughing—and even stop feeling scared. You just sit there like a zombie—expressionless.

Shreyas Talpade is the anchor of this sinking ship. He’s the only one who truly understands the comic timing the genre demands, but with limited material, there’s only so much he can do. Tusshar Kapoor’s character is confusing—you’re never sure why he’s even in the film. Every actor tries, which is both reassuring and a little sad. Reassuring because at least there’s effort. Sad because, despite that, you’re bored.

The jump scares are minimal, and that’s about all you get.

The music by Ajay Jayanthi is a miss.

In the end, Kapkapiii is a classic case of wasted potential—a film that wants to be a quirky horror-comedy but ends up being neither spooky nor funny. It leans too heavily on tired tropes, underdeveloped subplots, and a scattered screenplay.

LOS ANGELES, May 23 (UPI) — Dogma, returning to theaters June 5, comes from a decade where indie writer/directors were celebrated for the words in their screenplays. Kevin Smith was one of the major voices that emerged in the era of Quentin Tarantino, Richard Linklater and Sofia Coppola.

In his first film, Clerks, Smith had his convenience store clerks express all of his thoughts about Star Wars, retail and relationships. Dogma, his fourth film, was the work of a writer who grew up Catholic and had thoughts about faith.

Exiled angels Bartleby (Ben Affleck) and Loki (Matt Damon) find a way to get back into heaven. As part of a Catholicism outreach campaign, New Jersey Cardinal Glick (George Carlin) promises forgiveness to anyone who passes through his church’s arch.

If the angels gain forgiveness, then take human form and die, God will have no choice but to allow them back into heaven. What they don’t realize is that invalidating God’s decree will cause the end of all existence.

So God’s Metatron (Alan Rickman) visits Planned Parenthood employee Bethany (Linda Fiorentino) and gives her the task of preventing Loki and Bartleby from entering the church. Smith regulars Jay (Jason Mewes) and Silent Bob (Smith) are sent as prophets to help Bethany in her quest.

This is a story that adapts Catholic scripture into a modern apocalyptic story, but it is really a vehicle for characters to talk about religion, the way characters in other Smith movies talk about movies and comic books.

That dialogue is performed emphatically, and more subtly it’s well edited by Smith and producer Scott Mosier. Smith’s biblical figures would use the F word while making their profound points, but maybe they learned it from millennia of humans, or at the Tower of Babel.

The film’s messages challenge some of the oldest doctrines of Catholicism. No one has to base their values on a movie, but as an artistic exploration of this thesis, all of Smith’s questions are backed up by a creative interpretation of the scripture.

The message is ultimately that God doesn’t care which religion you follow as long as you believe. That would offend organized religion, but the film unabashedly believes in God.

Jesus’ unsung 13th apostle Rufus (Chris Rock) tells Bethany that God wants people to think for themselves. As bold a take on religion as that might be, it is ultimately optimistic.

Bethany is a character seeking to regain her faith. She remembers the feelings that church gave her as a child.

Yet she no longer feels that as an adult, which is understandable with painful life experience. But she’s open to restoring her faith and this adventure gives her a reason.

Of course, Smith has a mischievous spark. Loki likes to talk nuns out of their faith when he’s literally an Angel with knowledge of God herself (Alanis Morissette).

Smith speculates on eras of Jesus’ life that were not in the Bible as characters speak of their time with him. Those extrapolations show empathy towards the burden of being the son of God for a teenager.

They’re also not meant to be canonical. Smith’s point is to get viewers thinking as they laugh, not launch a religion himself.

Exposure to biblical figures certainly does not make Jay any more wholesome, but his ability to keep making vulgar sexual innuendo amid crises of faith of apocalyptic proportions is impressive.

There is a little bit of gay panic when Bethany mistakes Bartleby and Loki for lovers, and Rufus exposes Jay’s secret desires for men. Characters also use the R-word, because 1999 was unfortunately before many people learned it was a slur, but Smith has addressed both of those issues in subsequent work.

The complicated release history of Dogma, passing between several studios, has made it difficult to see since its Blu-ray release. Now out of print and not streaming anywhere, the re-release is a welcome return of one of Smith’s seminal works.

Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.