A sick movie about sick people – specifically, Indonesian gangsters who killed wantonly in 1965 and are now willing to make a movie about it. It’s hard to feel bad for mass murderers, but it is fairly clear they are being manipulated by director Joshua Oppenheimer, who must know that his subjects are making fools of themselves. The fact that 90% of the people working on the film chose to list themselves as “Anonymous” in the credits gives you some idea of how they think the movie will be received in Indonesia, if it is shown there at all. The history the film recounts is shocking, but the shock comes from the superscripted information. The people on screen just come across as ignorant buffoons with a license to kill.

What I found incredible were Brad Pitt’s initially rejecting the request that he help save mankind and the Israelis’ letting all comers, including Palestinians, into their secure compound. By comparison, I found the zombies quite believable – frighteningly so – and the discovery of how to combat them quite brilliant. (Well, okay, maybe Brad’s successful injection of just the right amount of toxin gave me pause, as well.) Pitt, to my mind, is generally miscast, but here he carried the movie with ease. Our hearts raced along with the breakneck plot and our minds were kept engaged well after the film was over.

Not since My Dinner With Andre have I watched two such uninteresting characters talk so self-indulgently, often in complete paragraphs, to so little purpose. Julie Delpy came across as real, albeit neurotic, but Ethan Hawke was unconvincing as a novelist, as an expatriate, and certainly as a dad. When you watch a young couple courting, which is the subject of most movies as well as the excellent earlier installments of this saga, there is the easy payoff of consummation, with all that follows left to the imagination. Here, when we see similar exchanges – what, seven years into the marriage? – there is no payoff. This will go on forever, which is what it felt like watching.

Compellingly strange or strangely compelling, this Mexican film at the Walker Art Center was like a puzzle without an answer that was still fun to do. Just as all paintings needn’t be realistic, not all movies need to make narrative sense. Here, one discrete scene followed another – some were past, some present, some imaginary – but all involved the same characters, whom we came to know and even care about. Carlos Reygado’s direction evoked the magical realism of Garcia Marquez and the scenes all fit to create an often beautiful tapestry. The mysteries of Upstream Color were often just annoying; here they were lyrical.