Contradictions abound in movie theaters right now: one of the screen’s most athletic leading men spends his entire thriller strapped to a chair; one of its most articulate (in English) leading ladies spends hers speaking French, an optimistic kid-flick with a rainbow theme depicts a world literally on fire … and more.

Haunting international features, an Oscar-nominated Kate Hudson and a table tennis thriller are still playing, too.

Mercy

In theaters now 

The year is 2029, and an artificial intelligence entity called Mercy sits as judge, jury and executioner over certain Los Angeles criminal proceedings in director Timur Bekmambetov’s thriller. Detective Raven (Chris Pratt), an alcoholic and also apparently a poster boy for LA law enforcement, after having brought in Mercy’s first conviction, awakens at the film’s start, hungover and shackled to the “Mercy Chair” which will kill him if he’s found guilty. Facing him on screen is Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson), an AI jurist who icily informs him that he has 90 minutes (cue on-screen timer) to prove he didn’t kill his wife, an event of which he has no memory. He’s to do this by availing himself of the city’s vast archive of surveillance and bodycam footage, drones, phone records and the like. He can also make a few calls to family and colleagues.

So, not RoboCop, but RoboCourt — kind of a nifty premise, except that no one involved seems terribly intent on interrogating the central notion of AI fallibility. “Human or AI,” says Raven in a spectacularly unpersuasive copout, “we all make mistakes.” Still, the setup allows Bekmambetov to indulge his fondness for storytelling with doorbell cams, iPhone screen grabs and computer searches, all edited frantically to make the use of so much low-res footage less annoying. A smartly choreographed chase sequence finally widens the focus and turns the last act of Mercy mercifully brisk. But the overall effect is derivative and secondhand — almost literally Minority Report, conceived not by the director of the 2012 film Lincoln, but by the director of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

The Testament of Ann Lee

Now in wide release 

Ambitious, stylized, intense, and thoroughly unorthodox, Mona Fastvold’s religious biopic tells the story of Shakers founder Ann Lee (a wild-eyed, fiercely committed Amanda Seyfried) as a full-scale musical drama. That’s not to say there are finger-snapping tunes. The score adapts 18th century Shaker spirituals, and the choreography involves the thrusting limbs and clawing fingers of the seizure-like dancing that earned this puritan sect of “Shaking” Quakers their nickname.

We meet Ann as a pious youngster more interested in spiritual matters than matters of the flesh. Marriage to a man who enjoys inflicting pain during sex, and the deaths of her four children in infancy lead Ann to the conclusion that lifelong celibacy is among the keys to salvation. With the help of her younger brother (Lewis Pullman), she finds adherents to a religious philosophy that also emphasizes gender equality and simple living, and leads them to found a utopian, crafts-based community in America. Director Fastvold and her co-writer Brady Corbet (the couple flipped roles from last year’s The Brutalist) serve up Ann’s spiritual journey in ecstatically musical terms, which is at once distancing and … well, ecstatic, though it pales a bit over the course of two-and-a-quarter hours.

Arco

In limited theaters

A little boy travels from a distant future where humans live in the clouds to a more recognizable, droid-filled 21st-century future in Ugo Bienvenu’s charmingly cautionary debut feature. The director and co-writer, a graphic novelist, imagines the distant future in utopian terms — families living in colonies that look like arboretums atop giant artificial trees, from which they leap to travel through time on the leading edge of rainbows. Children under 12 aren’t allowed to time-travel, a restriction that strikes our 10-year-old title character as arbitrary, so little Arco swipes his sister’s rainbow-patterned cape and takes his first leap, which doesn’t go quite as planned. He ends up in 2075, where droids perform many functions — teaching in schools, policing the streets, delivering packages — and whole neighborhoods have been outfitted with clear glass domes as protection against out-of-control wildfires and extreme rainstorms. Iris, who is about Arco’s age, follows a rainbow and discovers Arco has crash-landed in the woods. She takes him home and they bond, though there’s still the problem of getting him back to his home.

The story is action-packed and, especially when a wildfire rages nearby, decently suspenseful. Though the film incorporates a pretty dark vision of where the planet is headed ecologically, it leans heavily into solutions (those domes), so the story seems unlikely to seriously scare kids, its target audience. It’s also uncommonly beautiful, with animation that suggests the work of Hayao Miyazaki, with a slightly harder, more realistic edge.

Sound of Falling

In limited theaters 

Eerie, and not always signposted in ways that make its connections comprehensible, director and co-writer Mascha Schilinski’s dark portrait of a German family farm and the women who inhabit it across four generations could be described as a cinematic poem of yearning and guilt. It includes tales of Fritz, a boy of draft age during World War I who loses a leg, and the sterilization and abuse of female servants. There’s also a girl’s erotic fixation on Fritz some years later, a disco-loving young woman abused by an uncle in 1980s East Germany as his son pines for her, and a friendship between a tween from the family in modern reunified Germany and an intense stranger whose mother has died. One little girl participates in the family’s odd tradition of “death photos” — posed post-mortem photos with loved ones — then sees a photo that appears to foretell her own death. Not cheerful, in short. Also, not always coherent, but beautifully shot, and compellingly acted.

A Private Life 

In limited theaters 

Jodie Foster, elegantly bilingual as Lilian, a French psychiatrist, is the most compelling reason to see director and co-writer Rebecca Zlotowski’s decorous but mildly idiotic psychological mystery. Receiving word that her patient Paula (Virginie Efira), appears to have taken her own life, Lilian attends a memorial service and has odd enough interactions with Paula’s daughter (Luàna Bajrami), and husband (Mathieu Amalric) that she begins to suspect foul play. She contacts her ex-husband, who’s also her ophthalmologist (Daniel Auteuil) because she can’t stop tearing up — her tears spatter a man’s hand on the subway. She then contacts a medium (Sophie Guillemin) who hypnotizes her and successfully stops the tears, but also allows her to access a dream state in which she and Paula were violinists and lovers playing in a Paris orchestra during the Nazi occupation, with Lilian’s estranged son (Vincent Lacoste) among the Nazi militiamen.

None of this makes any more sense in the film than it does as I’m describing it, nor does the crime-solving odyssey she and her ex embark on (which would almost certainly result in both of them losing their medical licenses). Foster is sublime, and she has such easy chemistry with Auteuil that their scenes together make temporary sense of unlikely plot detours. If all of this were being played for laughs it might have had a Hitchcock-meets-Only-Murders-in-the-Building vibe, but it isn’t, and it doesn’t.

Our meet was not cute; he wrote psychological thrillers, not rom-coms. I appeared in his suggested profiles on Instagram. He followed, and I, a wannabe actor who shrewdly noted the CAA tag in his bio, followed back. No matter how much this city jades you, that hope of getting “discovered” is stubborn. I ignored all the other starving female actors he followed. I ignored the absence of tagged posts and friends in his photos.

On our first date, I was 10 months sober in AA and I had been celibate for a year and a half. I had sworn that the next time I had sex would be antithetical to all the sex I’d had before: sober, consensual and with genuine trust and care for each other.

He took this oath seriously, and I was grateful. After two months of hand stuff and dry humping, Malibu hiking, making out at Yamashiro and dressing up for Cinespia at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, I finally let him put the P into the V in an Airbnb in Joshua Tree. We had sex under the late October stars, and in the morning, we went at it again on top of a rock in the middle of the park.

He bought me vegan Van Leeuwen on the drive back, and from then on, we were sufficiently hooked.

He spoke of his past infrequently, but would answer when asked. He was born in Virginia, he told me, where I am also from. But shortly thereafter, he moved to Beachwood Canyon with his parents and younger brother. He promised to one day show me the house he grew up in. He went to UCLA and had been living in Hollywood with his brother ever since they graduated. He mentioned a few friends, but I never saw them.

I reasoned that he was in his 30s, and he worked in a lonely, every-man-for-himself kind of industry. And he had his brother, with whom he was supremely close, though I had yet to meet him either.

By Christmas, I was getting antsy.

He told me he loved me just as the ball dropped on New Year’s Eve. A week later, the January wildfires came. We escaped together, and my worried father on the East Coast paid for a hotel room further south. We made romance out of tragedy and took our time on the way back when the Sunset fire evacuation orders were lifted. Driving up PCH, he flipped a U to pull into a shake shop.

“We used to go here all the time as kids,” he said. Then he grabbed his credit card and instructed me to order us two shakes. I figured this nostalgia must have distracted him from the fact that my weak stomach could not handle dairy in such large quantities.

Still, I ordered one — I didn’t want to put a dimmer on his inner child indulgence. Later, I threw up, but it was worth it; I was grateful to be included in such a joyous memory of his.

The initial chaos of the fires subsided, and I had still yet to meet anyone in his life. We were nearing six months. I never felt suspicious though. Just restless.

He took my impatience in stride and spoke of plans for me to meet his younger brother soon. Later, he reasoned that he was waiting until after my birthday — he didn’t want to ruin my celebratory state with the truth.

An anonymous woman online struck first, just one week before. It was in one of those Facebook groups. You know the one: Are We Dating the Same Guy? Los Angeles LA.

He was in my bathroom when I got the alert. He didn’t grow up in L.A., the woman wrote. He lived with his twin. He didn’t go to UCLA. He’ll never commit to you.

When he returned, all I could do was hand him my phone. He didn’t pull away from the screen in shock. He simply sat on the bed, took a deep breath and repeated the same monologue he’d delivered to all of the young female actors before me.

It was true. His brother wasn’t two years younger, but two minutes. They were twins. He didn’t grow up in L.A., but in Virginia and then all over the U.S. He didn’t go to UCLA, but to a university in Virginia.

He said he and his twin were in cahoots on this bizarre lie. They had been telling it to women for years. He said the industry would take him more seriously if he were from here. He said people had prejudices against male twins. (Huh? I thought.) He looked at me with his sad baby blues and shared how he told these innocuous falsities, ultimately, out of deep-seeded self-hatred.

My pity outweighed my pride, and we stayed together another month and a half. I fought for us. I wanted to fix him, to give him the love he claimed to never have gotten. I too had done horrible things to quench my self-loathing. But look at me now!

Being a positive influence became a new addiction. I gave him bell hooks’ “All About Love,” which emphasizes the necessity for honesty in all partnerships. I gently suggested therapy. We distracted ourselves by maximizing my AMC Stubs to see all the Oscar-nominated movies.

But questions kept coming, and my trust was crumbling. It wasn’t the content of the lies, but the ease and frequency with which they were told.

“What about that shake place?” I asked one day abruptly. “It was just a random shake place.” He smirked. I’d like to say that was the end — the realization that he let me make myself physically sick for his lies — but it wasn’t.

That same month, I moved to Silver Lake, and he helped immensely. He went on tours with me, built my bed and schlepped all my clothes over from Hollywood. And that’s what’s so frustrating: As much as it was sick, it was also sweet. As much as he may have appeared psychotic, he was also romantic. Just like this city.

Eventually, my suspicions outgrew my compassion. I finally called him out for all the Instagram baddies he followed, and he blew up, accusing me of self-sabotaging. The sad part is I believed it. It took a long call with my sponsor to understand my misgivings were valid and that I deserved someone who would put in the work to regain my trust when they’d broken it. He wasn’t capable of that.

We went no contact for a week and then met for take-out Thai food in Silver Lake Meadow. He had finally read “All About Love” (allegedly) and claimed he’d made a therapy appointment. I told him maybe in some time he could call me. It was bittersweet and strangely cinematic. We kissed and then walked off in opposite directions.

I cried for a week and I had hope for about a month. But just like with substances, the situation looked increasingly strange and seedy the further I got from it. We did meet up again in the summer. He had quit therapy and started smoking, and I caught him stumbling in some random lies again. I ended it for good over text.

Early on, he joked that “the worst thing you can call someone in L.A. is a poser.” I wish I’d noted that line as foreshadowing, but just like any good mystery, the clues are only evident in hindsight.

The author works as a freelance production assistant and at the front desk of a local yoga studio. She lives in Silver Lake. She’s on Instagram: @margaretkeanee.

L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.

One Battle After Another earned 13 Oscar nominations – including best picture, best director and a lead actor nomination for Leonardo DiCaprio. In the action-thriller, DiCaprio plays a washed up ex-revolutionary searching for his missing daughter while raging against the machine. In this case, the machine is unabashedly racist, xenophobic, and corrupt. Directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, the ensemble also includes Sean Penn, Teyana Taylor and Benicio del Toro. Today, we’re revisiting our episode about the film that originally aired in September 2025.

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