Mad Men behaves like nothing else on television, a distinction that, after the impressive ratings boost during the bleak, sinewy, and leisurely paced third season, is beginning to beam with triumph—insofar as a lyrically cynical, ethically convoluted portrait of early-’60s corporate marketing can be said to “beam.” Brimming with enigmatic, meticulously cultivated details that have endeared it to film buffs in particular, Mad Men imagines mid-century Americana as a dreamily, if painfully, transformative era, where the difference between heroism and villainy is often determined by corporate hierarchy, where sexual politics carry strong overtones of distaff uprising and masculine uncertainty, and where the dalliances and secret-harboring shoeboxes of business titans like Sterling-Cooper creative director Don Draper (Jon Hamm) seem to reference noir’s prototypes rather than the genre itself.

Instead of attempting to milk the nostalgic milieu for the usual lollypop-cheap family values, even by way of inversion, the show’s period social consciousness has continued to succeed by gently floating between contemporary non-topical commentary and irresistible flourishes of historical scholarship. Even a casual conversation about the paradox of perceptive empathy (is your color blue the same as mine?), significantly occurring between Don and an extramarital lover-cum-schoolteacher, subtly notes the subliminal tension-trafficking that typified the time’s psychology. And the pervasive nicotine-, alcohol-, and hate-infused social exchanges ruthlessly expose what we always suspected about our grandparents’ careerism—namely, that it was just as self-loathingly cutthroat and emotionally debilitating as that of our gig economy. And if we aren’t half-guiltily sacrificing African-American doormen on our way to the top anymore, Mad Men might amorally observe the lack of opportunities to do so rather than any progressively dissuading civil obligations.

Much like last year’s crowd-pleasing, muck-aimed Swiffer mop The Cove, Mugabe and the White African is cinema-as-journalism at its most aesthetically confident and humanely satisfying—and it’s all the more profound for being so without a cute, shamelessly anthropomorphized creature to melt its audience into involuntary pots of sympathy fondue. A politically minded documentary that maintains the look and feel of an impromptu chamber case study, Mugabe follows a little over a year in the lives of Zimbabwe farmer Mike Campbell and his son-in-law Ben as they defend their land against government agents attempting to seize and redistribute property across the nation.

Just as the stoic, skeletal holy man both defies and presides over the feverishly ecclesiastical business of the Palace of Mopu as an intransigent, blood-locked ghost, Black Narcissus impishly keeps watch over the Archers’ canon with a sunken, rabidly prismatic eye. Now rather ironically viewed as perhaps the filmmakers’ most supernal visual achievement,Black Narcissus is nothing if not anomalous among the incomparable string of 1940s British masterpieces produced, written, and directed by collaborators Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. The script was adapted from Rumer Godden’s ponderous, post-colonial allegory, rather than conceived in-house. The story teased and tempted Anglo nuns into a hornily unholy froth through the piercing clarity of the Himalayan elements and the ubiquity of Hindu fertility totems; regardless of the cosmic punishment eventually exacted for plummeting too far down the Great Chain of Sexual Being, the content’s untoward nature would have likely had the moralizing Glue Man of A Canterbury Tale breathily fidgeting with the control knob of his slide projector. And, rubbing angrily up against what was easily director Powell and cinematographer Jack Cardiff’s most sensitive, and most cerebral, photographic approach is an unprecedentedly curdled worldview, a visionary embrace of socio-cultural and interpersonal futility that one can’t quite take seriously without wincing—or succumbing to matte-induced vertigo.

With its downright molten tabloid scenario and (to put it delicately) genetically claustrophobic sensuality, the pleasures of Dogtooth might at first resemble our expectations of a splattery, art-house Flowers in the Attic. But Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos eviscerates the tender insinuations and off-kilter alliances of V.C. Andrews’ simmering schlock-psychosis, splaying entrails across torso in a bald, triumphant, Josef Fritzl-like promulgation of filial intimacy’s dark, insidious side. Focusing on the incalculably warped products of stringent, goldfish bowl-protective family values, Dogtooth locks us in a pale, closeted dream world where cats are vicious and fatal, plastic airplanes fall from the sky and into the grass to be competed for and then played with, the word “cunt” denotes a large lamp, and sex is a joyless mechanism for controlling, as well as occasionally regenerating, both genders. Moreover, wrangling free of this cruel and unusual cerebral battery requires undergoing an ironically old wives-y rite of fictional passage—when the canine incisors fall from their gums, the kids can leave the nest.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, or as it’s more appropriately known overseas, Men Who Hate Women, is a veritable manifesto of misogyny—thematically handicapped and narratively lumpy, with flashbacks and emotional outbursts that nearly insult real-life survivors of such unthinkable trauma, as well as shot through a sickly green lens that appears to be observing the action just as queasily as we are. Indeed, it’s the kind of untoward, god-awful ode to cracked masculinity that only rears a floppy phallus on the international market every few years. So even detractors of Millennium’s malignant opening chapter are likely to be somewhat morbidly disappointed by the comparatively benign The Girl Who Played with Fire, which dials back on the unsolicited penile thrusts in favor of snoozily uninspired plot development and barely intelligible character histories that will no doubt be paid off by the third and final installment.

There’s a shrewdly but skeptically revisionist tone about Oliver Stone’s new documentary South of the Border, one that oddly seems designed to abate any political enthusiasm that the film’s headily socio-economic incisiveness might instill. Interpolating archival media coverage of and personal interviews with a collective of South America’s most demonized and yet most financially savvy leaders (including Hugo Chavez, Fernando Lugo and Raúl Castro), Stone steadily shapes an intermittently muddied but more often piquant video essay that softly defends its maligned subjects. But while the film admirably offers U.S. audiences a more nuanced sense of contemporary Latino perspective, it ultimately lacks the fiery feel of a polemic that might melt our erroneous assumptions down and smith them into a much-needed emotional revolution against capitalist hegemony.

After having observed the eventual effects of the United States’s hyper-temperamental and mercilessly opportunistic interpretation of global diplomacy, at least in Central America, it’s difficult for me to not regard even perfunctory studies of our hemispheric neighbors’ socialist reconstructive attempts as required gringo viewing—though this obligation always carries, naturally, the caveat that very little of the reportage that reaches us from that region can be classified as non-propagandist. And the skewed stranglehold the media—defined here in so many words as a trans-Atlantic legislative and elitist mouthpiece—maintains over America’s perception of countries such as Cuba or Venezuela is one of Stone’s primary targets, but it also coils the movie into an inconveniently self-denying paradox. How can one shame news outlets for manipulating audiences into misguided conclusions when one is, in turn, employing similar editorial techniques to correct them?

How does one continue a TV show that’s already ended more than once? This is the gargantuan task before the singular assembly of math, science, Americana culture, and—oh, right—comedy nerds at the helm of Futurama, a sci-fi/dramedy cartoon adored by a formidable fanbase as much for its sophisticated emotional candor and relatable robots as for its smattering of inside-baseball physics jokes (Planet Express owner Professor Farnsworth at the horse races: “You changed the outcome by measuring it!”) and obligatory, if smarmy, pop allusions to Huey Lewis and Star Trek. Unlike the similarly nixed and then phoenixed Family Guy, whose irrelevantly nonsensical plot husks were designed for the slap-happy trafficking of arbitrary jokes alone, Futurama has always required a much more reluctant human investment—one that it coaxed from ambivalent viewers such as myself over the course of its original four-year run on FOX by deftly twisting expectations and sympathies with the same professional pride the ne’er-do-well, boxy-eyed Bender (John DiMaggio) employs on metal girders.

That Jarmusch waited until his fourth effort to offer such a lucid argument for his ethos says much about his affinity with the milieu of Mystery Train. The sleepy, barely urban Memphis seen here is no less artificial than the New Orleans of Down by Law or the California frontier ofDead Man (does the Sun Records landmark really receive so few daily visitors?), but it’s been comfily incubated by the earthy warmth of music, rather than film, history. And while the director’s clear debt to the latter is often manifested in disorienting and cryptically allegorical allusions, his determination to render a world informed, if not always inspired, by proto- rock, soul, and blues yields a reverential tone poem of startling warmth and perspicacity: As an auteur, Jarmusch is obligated to toy with and claim ownership of movie language, but he’s more than willing to admit that the golden prong of popular music is plugged into something beyond him. As the Japanese couple enters the main hall of the Memphis train station, Mitzuko yelps and then applauds the space’s echo in a quiet tribute to rockabilly slapback delay; a pridefully nomadic Rufus Thomas then holds out a cigar and asks the pilgrims for a flame. By the time Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, dressed to the nines in a garish red suit, enters as a cocky concierge spouting condescending aphorisms, it’s apparent that Jarmusch is “dancing about the architecture” of pop’s poor South etiology.

Wandering the lazy dub jungles between the passionate, if terminally silly, post-ska acumen of Sublime’s “Can’t fight against the youth”-isms and the self-deprecating reggatta de blanc of the Lonely Island’s “Ras Trent,” Wah Do Dem is a brief, peripatetic love letter to Jamaican tropes scrawled on hemp stationary. Conceived and executed by a collective of musician actors and audiophile filmmakers who serendipitously scored a cruise to Jamaica in a raffle, the lo-fi movie ambles along in percussively improvisational fits and starts, deliberately but unenergetically observing the impromptu vacation of its tourist protagonist get Trenchtown rocked by endemic shysters, thugs, and witch doctors. The resulting story, with its half-baked, episodic structure and aficionado’s soundtrack, rhythmically resembles the canned textural haziness and hesitant anti-professionalism we’d expect from a Super Ape tribute album sooner than from an indie travelogue—and is it a coincidence that the running time roughly meets the maximum Red Book spec for compact disc playback?

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It would, however, be generous to refer to Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, or its source novel, as “dramatized” history; with scant evidence at his disposal, author Chris Greenhalgh has arranged a romantic potpourri of corroborated events, educated guesses, daring assumptions, and unabashed fabrications into what appears less a love story than a tale of fleetingly cohabiting egos. The inclination both had toward polyamory, their like-mindedly obstreperous artistic dispositions, and their similarly ravenous desire to soak in and conquer the culture of their time make their purported affair a fairly believable fictional ingress. But after Stravinsky (Mads Mikkelsen) and his immediate family shack up with the philanthropic Chanel in the deceptively reductive opulence of her pastoral home, the film doesn’t quite know what to do with these coupling titans aside from watching them stew in their fecund, but ultimately corrosive, creative juices