Love Me ***1/2 [U.S. Dramatic]
I feel fairly confident that I won’t be the only person short-handing the debut feature from writer/director team Sam & Andy Zuchero as “WALL-E, if instead of WALL-E learning about human love from Hello, Dolly, he learned about it from YouTube”—but it turns out to be a bit more complicated than that. Five hundred years after the apocalyptic end of humanity, an ocean sensor buoy achieves self-awareness, and makes contact with a satellite launched as a final digital repository of the human experience. Absorbing information from the videos by a 21st-century social influencer named Deja (Kristen Stewart) and her boyfriend Liam (Steven Yuen), the buoy creates an identity as a lifeform named Me, as the satellite becomes Iam and they begin a virtual relationship. Sam & Andy find plenty of visual imagination in conveying both the physical universe Me and Iam inhabit, and the way they manifest as avatars trying to approximate what they think the experience of being human is all about. But this is also a relationship movie that touches on the artificiality of online identities—Stewart and Yuen are great while exploring a range of experiences in their performances—and how the way we see others perform their lives online can make our own sense of self feel inadequate. It’s all fairly sentimental, in a way that might not work for some folks, but it’s one of those stories that allows us to recognize what we should appreciate about being alive through the eyes of characters who aren’t.

Thelma *** [Premieres]
I’m not convinced writer/director Josh Margolin has a firm handle on what he wants to say about his movie's central familial relationships, but he finds enough charm in casting a nonagenarian as the protagonist of an action blockbuster that it makes up for a lot. That hero is Thelma Post (June Squibb), a recently-widowed 93-year-old who gets taken for $10,000 when a scammer impersonates her grandson Danny (Fred Hechinger)—but the determined Thelma isn’t about to let the crooks get away with it. The odyssey that ensues finds her teamed with an old friend (Richard Roundtree, in his final performance) on a trek through Southern California that includes chases on an electric scooter, turning a hearing-aid app into a communications device, and even the old “walking away from an explosion” bit. Margolin employs those tropes almost perfectly, creating a great metaphor for the way someone at a later point in life can still have an internal picture of themselves as vital and capable. There’s also a wonderfully warm connection between Thelma and Danny, and while it’s a pleasure to see a grandparent/grandchild relationship on screen that’s so openly loving, it’s not quite clear how Danny’s own struggles at figuring out what he wants to do with his life—and the accompanying tension with his parents (Parker Posey and Clark Gregg)—relates to Thelma’s own experience. It’s much more satisfying watching Squibb get to carry a narrative, in a story that contemplates the messy ground between the you that needs to kick back, and the you that still wants to kick ass.

I Saw the TV Glow ***1/2 [Midnight]
Between 2021’s We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and this sophomore feature, Jane Schoenbrun has carved out a fascinating creative space in exploring the way people turn to media as a way to deal with not being otherwise seen by those close to them for who they truly are. It opens in 1996, as 7th-grader Owen (Ian Foreman) becomes fascinated with 9th-grader Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine), who has her own obsession in a supernatural TV series called The Pink Opaque; two years later, with Owen now a high-schooler himself (Justice Smith), the two reconnect over their shared connection with the show. Schoenbrun’s gifts for crafting an unsettling production—built largely on sound design and Alex G’s music—continue to impress, and the aesthetics of the series-within-the-movie are period-perfect without feeling like blatant nostalgia-mongering. Richer still is the psychology that Schoenbrun is mining, understanding that the fandoms for certain stories are intense precisely because they speak to things that the fans themselves may not even fully understand; it doesn’t require a knowledge of the filmmaker’s own gender identity to see this as an allegory for trans self-discovery. Lundy-Paine in particular provides a haunting, haunted performance as reality and fiction start to blend into something resembling an evangelical fervor. Sometimes we connect with a story so much we don’t know where we end and it begins, specifically because it might offer a window into a new beginning.

Dìdi ***1/2 [U.S. Dramatic]
You can spot the pieces of a dozen other coming-of-age tales in writer/director Sean Wang’s debut feature, but he melds them all so deftly with the specificity of his characters’ time, place and cultural background that it never feels like you’ve seen it all before. That time and place is 2008 in Fremont, California, where the summer before Chris Wang (Izaac Wang) enters high school finds him dealing with uncertainty about friends, nascent crushes, the impending departure of his older sister Vivian (Shirley Chen) for college and then tensions in the household as Chris’s mother (Joan Chen) tries to raise her kids mostly on her own while Chris’s father is working abroad. Dìdi certainly is built in part on the unique adolescent experience of Millennials, with friendships and potential romances revolving around early social-media—how easy it is to forget that MySpace was once a pretty big deal—and the first generation growing up with cell phones and attempts to shape their online personas. But the filmmaker also wants to touch on the more universal insecurities of being young and not being sure yet about your place in the world, especially when those around you keep emphasizing your ethnicity as a fundamental part of your identity. Young Izaac Wang nails a sweet spot between likeable and kind of typically 14-year-old-boy dickish, while the story finds warmth in the fact that the parents you think will never understand you might be the only people who will ever care unreservedly about you.

A New Kind of Wilderness *** [World Documentary]
A gentle and melancholy study of figuring out where you belong in the world, Silj Evensmo Jacobsen’s documentary manages a deft trick of making subject matter interesting that could easily have come off as maudlin. The subject is a family living in the wilderness of Norway—British-born Nik Payne and his three young children—whose semi-off-the-grid lifestyle is thrown into uncertainty after the death of Nik’s wife, photographer Maria Vatne, from cancer. Jacobsen wisely opts not to stack the deck, capturing the rhythms of the family’s chores, home-schooling and leisure time while still recognizing the certain degree of privilege involved in that life, and why it becomes necessary for Nik to consider other options. There’s a secondary story involving Maria’s older daughter Ronja from a previous marriage, who returns to living with her biological father after her mother’s death, and the film never entirely incorporates her narrative into the primary one, except to the extent that Ronja’s distance from Nik’s oldest daughter Freja leads to another kind of grieving. But A New Kind of Wilderness works mostly because it chooses not to romanticize its subjects removal from modernity, recognizing the complexity involved it balancing the kind of life you want to give your kids with the kind of life you’re able to give them.