The always eminently watchable Rebecca Hall (The Man I Love, TV’s The Beauty) both anchors and buoys the tonally irregular but consistently thoughtful and compelling sci-fi comedy-drama The End of It, a feature debut for Catalan writer-director Maria Martinez Bayona.

Offering a near future that’s creepily plausible, resonant with recent headlines and nicely underplayed in terms of design, this posits Hall as Claire, a 250-year-old artist who’s kept looking like an elegant 30something thanks to sophisticated blood dialysis techniques and other kinds of high-tech, vaguely defined wizardry, available to a very select few.

However, when Claire grows bored with an effectively immortal life and chooses to die, her husband Diego (Gael García Bernal), 180-year-old daughter Martha (Noomi Rapace), and android personal assistant Sarah (Beanie Feldstein) react in various ways, ranging from supportive to angry. Running an attenuated 142-minutes, this feels slightly flawed by a script that doesn’t quite know how to play out its endgame and erupts with jarring flashes of spongey, overegged satire. Still, the performances and visuals consistently add value, and if this doesn’t sell many tickets IRL, it should haul in clicks as a streaming entity.

Shot mostly in the Canary Islands with the region’s searing, glaring Tropic-of-Cancer-adjacent light, freakishly black, volcanic soil and groovy mid-century-modernist buildings, the film suggests a future where the worst climactic disasters have been avoided. That, or the people we meet here are wealthy enough to have found a cushy little enclave to live forever without a care in the world. It seems they’re part of the select few, members of a vaguely alluded-to world order that provides the means to exist in a state of permanent, hedonistic ennui.

But the only way to get in on this immortality gig, or to be granted permission to have a baby, is for someone else to die. And since no one expires from, say, cancer or other now-curable diseases, and bones and organs can be replaced like car parts with artificial spares, people only pass when involved in freak accidents…or take their own lives.

On the occasion of her 250th birthday (she gets a cake with so many candles she can barely be bothered to blow them out), Claire is in a funk and just not enjoying any of this anymore. Having just replaced her last remaining natural bone, she takes stock. Years ago, she was an acclaimed artist whose work was a bit avant-garde and challenging. Now she designs jewelry, a remunerative but not very intellectually rewarding pursuit. (This plot point is a bit mean to jewelry designers.) Suffering an acute case of anhedonia, she decides that she will no longer have her blood work every day or any other kind of life-extending treatment and instead will just let nature take its course.

As grey hairs appear and other augurs of age become visible, Claire contends with the varied reactions of her small social circle. She couldn’t care less about the assorted colorful acquaintances who attended her birthday party, a cohort clad in an assortment of semi-minimalist clothes with funky little details and interestingly textured textiles, as if dressed in a mix of Comme des Garçons and Cos. (Costume designer Pau Auli’s work throughout is both witty and oddly covetable with its precise tailoring and subtle color palette.)

But it is more upsetting that Diego, her husband of many years, doesn’t get her reasoning at all, or even sees this as a personal rejection. Sarah, Claire’s relentlessly perky robot sidekick, similarly cannot compute why Claire would wish to undermine Sarah’s prime directive, to keep Claire alive. But she’ll do whatever it takes to keep her mistress happy, like some kind of humanoid golden retriever.

Only her daughter Martha, who shows up suddenly, having not seen her mother in 50 years, seems at peace with Claire’s decision. That turns out to be because she thinks this may be her chance to take Claire’s place as a breeding female in their society and has brought along an android baby to practice on, like some kind of 23rd century Tamagotchi that can be switched off and recharged whenever necessary.

Prone to wearing clothes that suggest an overgrown pre-teen herself, all frills, flounces and bright colors, Martha doesn’t look like great maternal material to Claire, although this judgmental attitude may be evidence of her own maternal deficiencies. The peevish sparring between the two of them gets a comic push from the fact that the two actors are very close in age (Hall is three years younger than Rapace), but like so many parents and children they remain stuck in a dynamic that formed sometime in adolescence and has never been outgrown.

The digs at the pretensions of artists, channeled through Claire’s decision to make her death a public spectacle in order to secure some future fame, are less amusing here because the blows never seem to quite connect with their targets. Also, one begins to suspect that a small budget prohibited the filmmakers from showing a wider view of this society, which also dampens any parodic purpose. Claire’s elective death therefore remains a problematic choice for some viewers, an act of vainglorious selfishness from a woman who was never terribly nice to begin with.

It’s lucky she’s played by Hall, who endows Claire with a spiky sort of wit and charisma, while her performance in the film’s final minutes packs a considerable emotional wallop and pathos to spare. The impact of that shocking final scene is sufficient to send viewers out feeling enervated after what’s been a pretty desultory final act. But even with these flaws, The End of It looks like it marks the beginning of an interesting career for its young writer-director, a talent with a strong visual sensibility and skills with actors.

“I’d like to be under the sea in an octopus’s garden…”

Remarkably Bright Creature
Directed by Olivia Newman – 2026
Reviewed by Garrett Rowlan

Whenever you have a lyric from a C-list Beatle song running through your head while watching a movie, it’s not a good sign.

But halfway through Remarkably Bright Creatures, a new film starring Sally Fields, those words earwormed their way into my head, replacing, I fear, the heartwarming sentiment I was expected to feel.

Based on a popular novel, Remarkably Bright Creatures—or RBC hereafter—is narrated by a captive octopus named Marcellus, who makes observations from his tank in a seaside Washington town.

The digitally animated creature, voiced by Alfred Molina in a flat tone that itself sounds half-submerged, spends his days hiding from the grasping eyes and fingerprints of schoolchildren on field trips. By night, he communicates through touch and glance with the janitor, Tova Sullivan, played by Sally Fields, a widow with a tragic past. She hobbles around on a sprained ankle and debates whether to move into a retirement facility.

As you might guess, RBC is slight on dramatic material, relying instead on the commentary of Marcellus, the aging octopus; Tova’s interactions with her octogenarian friends; and the arrival in town of a struggling musician seeking the father he never knew.

The film reminded me of those BBC-produced cozy mysteries I’ve become fond of renting from the Pasadena Public Library: small-town atmospheres filled with chumminess and colorful characters. Those mysteries, however, have an unsolved crime to propel the plot. Aside from the struggling musician’s attempt to locate his wealthy, incognito biological father, RBC leaves the viewer with little to chew on—or, I suppose, suck on. Marcellus’s eight arms and clinging suckers not only allow him to move in unique ways, but also to comment on the other characters from the vantage of his tank, a POV oddity that becomes one of the film’s more troubling anomalies.

As usual with this geezer genre, there’s the sobering apprehension of familiar faces, Kathy Baker and Joan Chen in this case, whose wrinkles and tissue breakdown reminded me of my own softening jawline. Colm Meaney, playing a former Grateful Dead fanatic turned coffee-shop owner, serves as Sally Fields’s love interest; his Irish brogue further evokes those BBC cozies.

“She lives in a larger tank than me,” observes Marcellus of the fussy attendant. His periodic comments sprinkle the plot, easing along our understanding of the characters until the metaphorical enclosure around Sally Fields dissolves as she takes the aging Marcellus to the seashore and returns him to his own octopus’s garden.

What the ultimate public reception of RBC will be, I don’t know. I wouldn’t have thought Project Hail Mary, with its spidery co-star in a beach-ball enclosure, would be popular either, so I suppose there’s hope yet for the movie and its slithering protagonist.

> Streaming on Netflix.

In a squeaker race for Cannes’ top prize, Romanian director Cristian Mungiu prevailed on Saturday, taking the Palme d’Or for his tense community drama “Fjord.”

The movie, a widely admired conversation-starter at the festival, stars Sebastian Stan and Renate Reinsve as religious parents who come into conflict with the child protection services of their tiny Norwegian town where they have relocated with their family.

Mungiu, a previous winner of the Palme for his controversial 2007 abortion drama “4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days,” now joins an exclusive group of 10 filmmakers who have won the Palme twice — an achievement shared by Francis Ford Coppola (1974’s “The Conversation” and 1979’s “Apocalypse Now”) and Ruben Östlund (2017’s “The Square” and 2022’s “Triangle of Sadness”), among others. No one has ever won a third Palme d’Or.

Another record, maybe even more impressive, was set by distributor Neon, which, with “Fjord,” extends its streak of Palme wins to an unprecedented seven in a row. Those previous six Neon winners, many of which eventually claimed Oscars, are “Parasite,” “Titane,” “Triangle of Sadness,” “Anatomy of a Fall,” “Anora” and last year’s “It Was Just an Accident.”

Neon will release “Fjord” in the fall, with an extensive awards campaign to follow.

This year’s nine-member main competition jury, led by Korean director Park Chan-wook and studded with notables including “The Substance” star Demi Moore, Stellan Skarsgård and “Hamnet” director Chloé Zhao, seemed intent on spreading the wealth among as many winners as possible. There were three ties at Saturday’s awards ceremony.

The award for actress was shared by Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto, co-stars of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “All of a Sudden,” a movie pegged by many to potentially go all the way. Similarly, the prize for actor was bestowed on both Emmanuel Macchia and Valentin Campagne, co-stars of Lukas Dhont’s World War I romantic drama “Coward.”

The prize for directing went to three people — and two movies — with a joint win for Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi (better known as Los Javis) for their century-spanning queer historical drama “The Black Ball,” as well as to director Paweł Pawlikowski for his exquisite post-World War II psychodrama “Fatherland.” (Pawlikowski half-joked at the podium, “This was a disastrous piece of mise-en-scène” after the awkward award presentation had him waiting in the wings.)

Claiming this year’s Grand Prize (essentially second place) was “Minotaur,” the rapturously received comeback film of Andrey Zvyagintsev, a Russian director who had been sidelined with a near-fatal bout of long COVID that put him in a coma. His new movie, about a wealthy Moscow family, is both an erotic thriller and an indictment of amoral oligarchy detached from the war with Ukraine.

The festival’s third-place Jury Prize went to the borderland German drama “The Dreamed Adventure,” directed by Valeska Grisebach.