The story kicks off with a mysterious clock being shipped to the Diehl residence. Without much pause, it’s thrown into the basement to rot away. Taylor (Easton Rocket Sweda), a mute boy who speaks through various AI voices on his iPad, fixes the clock and discovers he can turn back time just by changing the hour hand. At the same time, his parents (Greg Kinnear, “Phil” and Isla Fisher, “Blithe Spirit”) have warned the kids of an important meeting that will be happening later that night, everyone knows it’s a talk about a trial separation for the two of them. Taylor, alongside his two other siblings (Shay Rudolph, “I Wish You All the Best” and Mason Shea Joyce, “Hotel Artemis”), devises a plan to bring their family back together.

The familiar “Groundhog Day” trope is far from new, but it works best when it’s combined with new genres — movies like “Timecrimes,” or “Palm Springs” are great examples. The Present does a good job of combining comedy and romance into this looping day — we not only see the same day from many different angles, but also from many different perspectives in the family.

The problems with this film arise when the focus is placed on the adult relationships, specifically the core relationship with Greg Kinnear and Isla Fisher’s characters. Their emotions and motives are so volatile towards one another that it is amazing that the relationship has even lasted as long as it has. It feels like one slight misstep and the marriage is over, no matter the interjections. While there are some definite sweet moments between the couple, I can recall one where Kinnear’s character reluctantly gets a makeover and shows up to therapy looking as dashing as ever, it never breaks into the level of maturity we should expect from these role types. Despite commanding around the kids, the adults often act just as childlike as their younger counterparts, creating eye-rolls for much of the 86-minute runtime.

It’s a good thing then that a majority of the screen time is given to the kids in the family who abuse their time travel powers in many fun and exciting ways. Many scenes are shown multiple times from multiple angles giving the audiences that “Ah-ha!” moment time and time again as we watch the kids scheme up a master plan to bring their parents back together. There is an excellent montage sequence late in the film that I wish all time-shift movies had. The kids try everything under the sun to get the parents together whether it’s manipulating the stock market to one of them even faking their own death. Great stuff.

For a majority of The Present, the kids are tweaking and mastering this single grand plan until nothing could possibly go wrong, oddly though this plan is abandoned late in the third act and rather we get a generic and head-scratching ending to it all. Despite the lackluster conclusion, the movie features enough quaint jokes and silly time travel hi-jinks that it will definitely be fun for a whole family viewing.

Well . . . the animated horror story, To Your Last Death, introduces viewers to four siblings, all of them seriously damaged by their abusive father and his twisted personality. There is Kelsy (voiced by Florence Hartigan, “Phoenix Forgotten”), a young bimbo who married a man much like her father, living a life of luxury, but crying in the dark where no one can hear her; Ethan (voiced by Damien C. Haas), a rocker addicted to pain killers, who didn’t grow up to be so bright; Collin (voiced by Benjamin Siemon, “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” TV series), a closeted homosexual who wants nothing more than to make his father proud and seems like he is never meeting his old man standards; and lastly our protagonist Miriam (voiced by Dani Lennon, “The Shasta Triangle”), a woman who can’t get over her childhood memories that manifest as lucid dreams of physical abuse to her, her siblings, and their mother who was strangled to death by her own husband.

They’re brought together with the most sickening of intentions by Cyrus Dekalb (voiced by Ray Wise, “God’s Not Dead 2”), an important business man with a sinister grin and threatening voice. All he wants to accomplish is the disappearance of his heirs, whom he considers a big disappointment. They are also the reason why he couldn’t archive his biggest goal, to become Vice President of the United States. One by one they will be locked up and tortured, both physically and mentally. Feeling the pain that will lead them to death, and hearing one last time (MAYBE, one last time) the hurtful and disgusting comments of their “beloved” daddy.

The bloody “fun” begins with Miriam’s memories, we hear the echo of her voice saying, “He killed them all” floating in the air while she lies on the floor. This young woman is shown to be the only survivor among her already mentioned siblings, and here is when things get interesting.

You see Miriam has somehow been saved by a dark entity called “The Game Master” (voiced by Morena Baccarin, “Deadpool”) — some sort of black haired super villain who appears and disappears at her own will. This wicked entity, presents Miriam with an opportunity to go back in time and make things right for her and her siblings. Without any other option, Miriam sees herself wrapped in a repeating game of torture and desperation, for the mere purpose of entertaining a group of cosmic beings betting on the outcome. To get through this, her pain will be endless and the violence endured will be replayed as many times as The Game Master wishes.

The game won’t be easy (an understatement, if ever there was one) and a crazy amount of blood will spill over the film’s 91 minutes of air time. Over and over the characters will be struggling with what would be the most traumatizing moment of anyone’s life. As an example, Kelsy in one iteration must bleed herself in a pan or risk her throat being slit. In another, Ethan is repeatedly asphyxiated for wrong answers on a timed quiz. Miriam has to remember as the show-woman of this game, if she doesn’t provide amusement, all thumbs will go down for her and the grisly outcomes befalling her and her brothers and sister will be permanent.

To Your Last Death can be seen as a mixture of the Netflix series “Dark” and “Russian Doll” with the tortuous elements of “Saw” and “Hostel.” The animation style is a bit robotic in the way the characters move which gives it a very roughly made, amateurish feel, though it stylistically reminded me of TV series “Mr. Pickles” and “Archer.” Voice acting doesn’t always rise to the gravity of some of the more extreme situations, but overall it meets the need. Nonetheless, if comic book violence, buxom women (albeit animated) and blood and guts from beginning to end is your thing, To Your Last Death was created with you in mind. Those that are curious should check it out too, provided some free time presents itself.

For audiences that have been missing the cinematic experience, Tenet is the perfect way to return, as it is an experience best suited to the cinema. The opening sequence of a hostage crisis at a Kiev opera house sets the tone, as masked gunmen storm through an orchestra pit, armed police instantly respond, terse instructions and code words are passed, and gun fire breaks out in controlled, sporadic bursts. It is a dizzying and arresting opening, thundering through the viewer’s consciousness and allowing little time for orientation. Strap in and keep up, the ride is just beginning.

From this opening seizure of awareness, the film doesn’t so much hop as skip around the globe, from the North Sea to London to Mumbai to Oslo to the coasts of Italy and Vietnam and, appropriately enough, back again. Cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema lenses these locations in dazzling detail, possibly only outshone by the haute couture sported by the characters. As the unnamed Protagonist, John David Washington (“BlacKkKlansman”) wears a suit as finely as his unflappable cool that puts James Bond in the shade. Working within the framework of an espionage thriller, Tenet ticks all the boxes of its franchise brethren, with the added bonus of Nolan’s typical concerns of the intersection between time and memory.

On the one hand, these generic pleasures of the locations, costumes and set pieces offer the kind of grand scale well suited to the cinematic experience. On the other hand, sometimes the skipping between these aspects is so quick that there is insufficient time to become invested in the scenery or follow the expository dialogue. A noticeable problem is the sound mixing that sometimes emphasizes the deafening sound effects or Ludwig Göransson’s crashing and exhilarating score to such an extent that you cannot actually hear what people are saying. This problem becomes more prominent in the latter stages of the film when characters wear breathing masks that obscure their lip movements. This aspect makes the film oddly apt for a post-lockdown moment, but also further obscures the dialogue, beyond even Tom Hardy’s delivery as Bane in “The Dark Knight Rises.”

Speaking of obscuration, the viewer looking for rounded and absorbing characters may well be disappointed. Nolan’s films are sometimes called chilly or unemotional and, while that would be unfair to say of “Memento,” “Inception” or the anguish-inducing “Interstellar,” it is a fair criticism of Tenet. Such is the pace of the movie that there is rarely sufficient time to engage with characters. The film seems to acknowledge this during a key moment when scientist Barbara (Clémence Poésy, “Resistance”) instructs the Protagonist not to try and understand the film’s central gimmick, the concept of temporal inversion. Some audiences and critics have commented on not thinking too much being the best way to watch the film: Don’t think too much and rather feel your way through. But this can be a problem if one finds the film unemotional from a character standpoint.

As mentioned, the Protagonist is cool and capable, but there is little else to him. The Protagonist’s partner Neil (Robert Pattinson, “The Lighthouse”) offers similar proficiency in intelligence, combat and unusual ways of getting in and out of places, but again serves as a feature within the plot more than anything else. As antagonist Andrei Sator, Kenneth Branagh (“Murder on the Orient Express”) delivers a performance of menace that veers from careful restraint to terrifying outbursts. Most problematically, Sator’s wife Kat (Elizabeth Debicki, “Widows”) adds little to Nolan’s typically underwritten female roles. While she is more than the dead wife backstory of “Memento,” “The Prestige,” “Inception,” and “Interstellar,” her role is largely limited to caring about her son. While she does exhibit agency, it is never explained why the Protagonist cares about her so much, or indeed why the viewer should.

However, to return to in the aforementioned scene about not thinking too much, the Protagonist refers to instinct, and instinct may be a better way to characterize how Tenet works with its audience. Rather than deep emotional connections, the film offers a connective experience to the stream of images and sound, the viewer invited to feel the flow in both directions. This flow is most apparent during its key set pieces. From the opening sequence to some extraordinary hand-to-hand combat, from an airport heist to an electrifying car chase and the final massive assault (some of which occur forwards and backwards), Tenet demonstrates once again Nolan’s faith in the cinematic form as well as his confidence in the viewer’s ability to engage with this form. As the Protagonist strikes, ducks and weaves, so do we. As buildings rattle from explosions, so do our teeth. As cars spin and somersault, we gasp and hold our breath before crashing back to earth. And as events unfold in reverse to what we expect, so must we embrace this strange new world in order to operate within it.

Although the visceral thrill of its high points is magnificent, overall Tenet lacks the Swiss watch rigor of “Inception,” at times fumbling much like “The Dark Knight Rises” and “Interstellar.” Interestingly and like these films, it falters in terms of its larger scope, suggesting that Nolan is at his best when focused on small scale events that reference the wider consequences rather than depicting massive events in all their grandeur. Even “Dunkirk” focused on individual dramas while placing the wider events as the backdrop. With Tenet, the forward thrust of the Protagonist is strong so long as the viewer is along for the ride, whereas the referencing to globe-spanning events across the whole of time is less elegantly handled precisely because we are barreling forward (and backward) at breakneck speed. However, despite its problems, Tenet is still a hugely enjoyable experiential adventure of espionage, ego and eruptions of various sorts, and certainly tempting enough to warrant a second viewing. Maybe even backwards.

Writer/director Tony Dean Smith introduces us to Jimmy (Adrian Glynn McMorran, “Warcraft”), a small-time criminal blessed with supernatural clairvoyance. Jimmy foresees fragments of his future as a series of acid flashbacks — isolated sequences flood his consciousness at moments of emotional intensity. Jimmy uses his gift dishonorably, gathering ill-gotten gains by betting on boxing matches and running small-time hustles for local gangsters.

One of his associates, Ray (John Cassini, “A Dog’s Way Home”), is in possession of a bag of hard-to-shift Zimbabwean blood diamonds. “I need you to do that thing you do in that head of yours. I need you to find safe passage for these.” He hires Jimmy and his prophetic condition to find a buyer, but when two goons in Ray’s employ try to double-cross the deal, a sequence of seemingly inevitable dominoes start to tumble that cause Jimmy to see an undesirable fate — namely, his own death. With the assistance of new lover Angela (Magda Apanowicz, “The Green Inferno”) along with estranged foster father and “fruit loop scientist” Elliot (Bill Marchant, “Chappie”), Jimmy discovers the origin of his abilities and must use them to change his fate.

Unfortunately, fresh takes on time-travel are rare events. 2014’s “Predestination” fixed the grandfather-paradox at its center, whilst Alex Garland’s recent miniseries “Devs” looked to unpack the phenomenon with Big Data. Volition seems acutely aware its genre’s history. There are echoes of the metaphysical determinism in “12 Monkeys,” the mob-fusion of “Looper,” and an attempt at the DIY engineering of “Primer.” However, the narrative trickery of temporal displacement has been done ad nauseam, even being deployed — and with greater execution — in “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.” Much like Jimmy, we’ve seen all these tropes play out before. More problematically, the time-travel mechanism in Volition is just as blasé as Domhnall Gleeson’s eye-squinting in “About Time,” with such shaky science feeling more at home in the Richard Curtis rom-com.

Credit can be given to the grungy real-world environment that smacks like a calloused backhand, with all actors lending strong performances to create an atmosphere of economic depression. Jimmy serves as a competent and likable hero, staggering onwards through all his tribulations with a bottle of whiskey and an admirable alignment towards chaotic-good.

But while Volition looks great for a low-budget science-fiction thriller, skewed visual sequences are overused — the cinematic tricks becoming tiresome after too many repetitions. In much the same way, the re-treading of old story paths become similarly boring, precisely because we’ve already seen the events play out. Watching a stale sequence multiple times from different angles does not make us lean in for more, but instead lean back.

Although the story doesn’t quite hold together, our circular trip through Jimmy’s life does enough to keep us in our seats. At 91 minutes, the shuttling pace of Volition is ultimately worth the ride, but only the once. Unlike its hero, looping reruns aren’t in its destiny.

What in the name of Bill Murray is going on? First, the reliable pleasure of the time-loop narrative: The fun of recognizing micro events and utterances that define that window of time; the way the filmmaker creates this repetitious tapestry, and how their protagonist reacts and learns. Watching this realization dawn on a character never gets old.

Relatively recent high-profile hits like “Source Code” and “Happy Death Day” have successfully shoehorned the formula into new genres — sci-fi and slasher respectively. Now sophomore director D.C. Hamilton and writer-star Kelly are attempting to do the same with what one could label an “existential drama.” Something closer to the mind-bending intentions of “Donnie Darko,” then, only warmer and more romantic.

The Fare mixes up the formula in various ways, and not always to its benefit. The setting might be simple — a taxicab on a straight road — but the rules are complex. For example, it seems, at first, that Harris has no memory of the time loops, yet Penny does. And as we enter the third act of the film we are met by a tsunami of new information. It’s more complicated than mind-blowing; a torrent of exposition which might have been condensed to a single word. It’s a word that changes Harris’ role, and once he is reframed the film enters fresher pastures.

Kelly is a better writer than she is an actor, but there is good chemistry between the leads and the writing usually lands on the right side of the earnest/maudlin divide. The intimacy of the taxi cab is ripe for dialogue-based courting (remember that wonderful opening meet-deep from Michael Mann’s “Collateral”?), and while Harris and Penny aren’t exactly giving Jesse and Celine (“The Before Trilogy”) a run for their money, their inane flirtation does feel warm and real.

It’s when Kelly and Hamilton stick to the mechanics of their conceit that the film works best. There’s an amusing diversion when Harris tries to drive off-road, only to be commanded by a booming voice to “Turn back!” like the voice of God from “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” It’s silly but also points to the film’s main theme: Appreciate the time you have, with whom you share it, rather than wrestling the hand of fate.

There are some flashback scenes later which make us wish we’d never left the cab, including a cheesy romance montage which turned my mind to that scene from “The Naked Gun” with the Peter Noone music. But for the most part this is a serious-minded and smart little thriller, which skillfully sidesteps its essential absurdity. Far from high concept, it’s aligned with the conceptually out-there work of Mike Cahill (“Another Earth,” “I Origins,” et al.). The Fare might take the meandering way around (despite its brief runtime), but it does eventually reach its destination in the form of a moving finale.

The Fare shoots for timeless romance and overreaches — a simpler fable would have edged it toward greatness — but its ambition is commendable. There’s plenty here to suggest a thoughtful and intelligent filmmaking team. Even if it doesn’t quite take the most direct route, there are ample interesting ideas to fill its 82 minutes, not to mention the minds of its audience.

Purist fans of the novel may be outraged, because The Man Who Killed Don Quixote is more “The Man Who Filmed Don Quixote.” Opening with the loony knight Quixote (José Luis Ferrer, “Thirteen Chimes”) and his faithful squire Sancho (played by Gilliam lookalike Ismael Fritschi, “[REC] 4: Apocalypse”) attacking a “giant” (actually a windmill), the illusion is rapidly broken as a film crew appear within the frame. From here, the meta-cinematic elements of the film become ever more apparent, as do the extremely Gilliam-esque aspects.

Gilliam has always been a highly singular director, and it is no wonder that a passion project like this is as distinctive as anything he has done. The set of the film within the film is littered with large pieces of models, reminiscent of Gilliam’s “Monty Python” animations. The flights of fancy that may or may not be actually occurring recall “The Fisher King” and “The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus,” as does this film’s sense of hubris. Despite the zany quality, Gilliam’s camera is largely stable, allowing the larger than life characters. As the camera pans over the film crew in the opening scene, we are introduced to the pretentious and arrogant Toby (Adam Driver, “BlacKkKlansman”), a commercials director and presumably a stand-in for Gilliam himself, which shows a certain amount of self-deprecation on the part of the director. Hired to direct a commercial in Spain with artistic flair, Toby seems disenchanted with the whole shenanigans. His agent Rupert (Jason Watkins, “The Crown” TV series) fawns over him, the producer (Will Keen, “Victor Frankenstein”) constantly complains about Toby’s expensive choices, the Boss (Stellan Skarsgård, “Thor: The Dark World”) is simultaneously flattering and threatening, while the Boss’ wife Jacqui (Olga Kurylenko, “Mara”) likes to mix business with pleasure. As the production falters, Toby discovers a DVD of his own student film “The Man Who Killed Don Quixote,” that he shot in the same area ten years previously (as mentioned, meta). This production starred a local cobbler Javier (Jonathan Pryce, “The Man Who Invented Christmas”), and in the present day, Toby encounters Javier, who now actually believes himself to be Don Quixote.

Then things get weird.

Quixote is a great tragicomic figure, and fittingly the film delivers humor and pathos in equal measure. Javier’s utter belief that he is Quixote gives his scenes of chivalry a touching commitment, while the relationship that grows between him and the befuddled, bemused and bamboozled Toby is both charming and, at times, excruciating. While the film is very funny, this is largely at the expense of Toby rather than Javier, mocking arrogance and pretentiousness rather than laughing at an old man who has taken leave of his senses. The presentation of Javier/Quixote is never mean-spirited, and some of his exploits are moving and raise cheers as much as titters. The irascible Toby is the stereotypically creative soul: Desperate to create under his own terms, possibly a genius but certainly a pain. He recalls previous Gilliam characters such as Larry (Jeff Bridges) in “The Fisher King” and Hunter S. Thompson (Johnny Depp) in “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.” Yet the chivalry of Javier/Quixote slowly works its magic on his reluctant squire (or “squirrel”), who comes to accept the increasingly bizarre events he finds himself caught up in. Along the way, our heroes encounter illegal immigrants, a beautiful model/escort who may need recusing but is also highly capable, a malevolent Russian oligarch and what may be a dangerous cult. Come the end of these adventures, one’s mind may be as frazzled as it would be after wandering under the Spanish sun for years.

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote will not be to everyone’s taste. It is a frustrating, often ill-disciplined meander through beautiful countryside and the musings of unhinged minds. It’s also rather good fun. Frequently very funny, both through pratfalls and the absurdity of some of the characters, the film never loses its melancholic undercurrent. As Toby says at one point, Javier’s situation is desperately sad. And yet, come the end of the film, there is something positive about a prolonged delusion, so long as it makes one happy, gives one purpose, and can benefit others. After all, the ridiculousness, hypocrisy and exploitation of “the real world” can seem like giants worth charging at, rather than monolithic and uninterested windmills.