ALEXANDER BISLEY reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: West Iceland’s Donnie.

“LAUGH or cry at the stupidity of the world; you will regret both,” Noi Albinoi’s bookshop owner quotes Kierkegaard. Like Jar City, Dagur Kari’s imaginatively composed film taps into Icelandic unease. Fusing Donnie Darko’s spirit with Aki Kaurismaki’s comic minimalism, Noi Albinoi taps into a rich vein of teen angst.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: ugly war.

ONE THING Bruno Dumont will never be accused of being is subtle. So one’s predilection for his work will be dependent on one’s tolerance for his heavy-handedness. This means he’s one of contemporary art cinema’s most polarising figures: a film like Flandres can take away the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, while also having a high walk-out rate at Film Festivals. His previous, much-maligned film Twentynine Palms featured a European couple travelling through a Theorem-like wasteland (ahem, the United States), like an Adam and Eve being kicked out of paradise to commute with the rest of the animal kingdom. Flandres, Dumont’s fourth film, continues his exploration of base humanity, our inability to rise above our evolutionary roots, our pretence that life is nothing more than nasty, brutish and short.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: eco-ploitation.

TANZANIA’s Lake Victoria is a stunning expanse of water and is the world’s largest tropical lake and Africa’s largest lake. It is also near to where humans first populated the world, lying in the Great Rift Valley between Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania. Darwin’s Nightmare uses this ecological significance as a platform to explore how this place where humankind developed is still nasty, brutish and short. The lake, and specifically a Tanzanian city on the lake-front, Mwanza, becomes a microcosm to show the brutal toll wrecked by neo-colonialism, globalisation and human greed. This is a scathing and pointed documentary, indicting the West’s casual destruction of poorer nations in their quest for more and more resources. Sauper wrings some heart-breaking imagery (not without their own agenda), but the film’s overall ambition make this one of the more devastating pieces of filmmaking of recent years.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: a cold war tale.

THE COLD WAR has just ended and Mathias ends up with a head in his bag when he tries to go back to France to study forensic medicine. Yes, this is an oblique and frequently odd thriller, which looks at the rootlessness of a recently post-Cold War France, a kind of liminal no-man’s land where young people roam around trying to find some purpose in the world. Characters’ emotions are schizophrenic, and narrative matches the chaotic, unhinged nature of the protagonists. La Sentinelle is perhaps too oblique for its own good and whether it thrills or has any sort of emotional centre with its cast of attractive pouting French people is a moot point. But the film is like a slightly less intricate Pynchon novel, and has a fascinating mix of conspiracy theories, science, historical ruminations, ‘post-modern’ blending, and quests for identity.