Synopsis

Not content to let Oppenheimer ask all of the big questions, German director Timm Kröger combines old Hollywood style with heady metaphysical substance in the intellectual thriller The Universal Theory. Set in 1962 at a quantum mechanics conference in an isolated lodge nestled amid the towering landscapes of the Swiss Alps, The Universal Theory is the story of a gifted young physicist, his curmudgeonly mentor, and an enigmatic jazz pianist who knows things about our wunderkind scientist that he’s never told another living soul.

Driven by mind-bending twists, improbable coincidences, and Hitchcockian suspense, The Universal Theory is a captivating nesting doll of a film that nods to the German masters of old Hollywood and considers the metaverse theory from a refreshingly intelligent point of view. Kröger — himself also a cinematographer — films his tale with an eye for the majestic natural beauty that surrounds our characters, effectively evoking both the paranoid postwar era and the brain-tickling complexity of theoretical physics.

Synopsis

Austrian filmmaker Jessica Hausner (Little Joe) returns to the director’s chair with a provocative thriller out of this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Mia Wasikowska (Alice in Wonderland, Crimson Peak) stars as Ms. Novak, a nutrition teacher at an elite prep school whose dogma of “conscious eating” quickly devolves into cult-like conformity for a group of seven teens. By the time their parents realize how extreme this so-called “Club Zero” has become, it may be too late to break Ms. Novak’s spell over her students.

A mannered, impeccably constructed combination of dry satire and gross-out body horror, Club Zero takes aim at Instagram “wellness” culture and social conformity. A typically controversial statement from an iconoclastic director, it’s bound to be the one of the most talked-about films at this year’s Festival.

Synopsis

Johnny is a successful banker who lives happily in a San Francisco townhouse with his fiancée, Lisa. One day, inexplicably, she gets bored of him and decides to seduce Johnny’s best friend, Mark. From there, nothing will be the same again.

“What is this?”
-everyone