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If you’re in the mood for an ethereal blank slate of a movie that’s more about mood than movement, Infinite Sea (Mar Infinito) might be your ticket. It’s set in a gray dystopian future or alternate reality. A handful of characters remain in a largely abandoned city. The lights are still on, but hardly anyone is at home. Most have been selected for space travel to colonize other worlds light-years away. Nuno Nolasco stars as a young man who was rejected by whoever is picking the pilgrims, and now spends his life trying to hack into that system to create a spot for himself. He meets a waiflike woman (Maria Leite) who may or may not help him achieve that goal.

Though only 78 minutes, the film seems longer, as eerie music and barren surroundings dominate over words and deeds. The film’s tone is more melancholy than Kirsten Dunst’s Melancholia.

Valentyn Vasyanovych’s “Atlantis,” a dystopian film set in war-torn Ukraine, won the Crystal Arrow Award of the 11th edition of Les Arcs Film Festival.

The film, which won the top prize at Venice’s Horizons section this year, takes place in 2025 in Eastern Ukraine after a ten-year war against Russia which has left the country in ruins. “Atlantis” follows two war veterans, Sergiy (Andriy Rymaruk) and a mate, who are both affected by the war and are living in an abandoned building.

Presided over by the French filmmaker Guillaume Nicloux, the jury was comprised of Santiago Amigorena, the Colombian screenwriter, producer and author, Mélanie De Biasio, the Belgian musician, Nina Hoss, the German actor, Atiq Rahimi, the Afghan director, and Antoine Reinartz, the French actor.

Besides the Cystal Arrow prize, five other kudos were handed out at les Arcs, including the Grand Jury Prize which went to Sarah Gavron’s “Rocks,...

Stars: Maria Leite, Pedro Barão Dias, Joaquim Guerreiro, João Vilas, Mário Oliveira, Clemente Santos, Francisco Afonso Lopes | Written and Directed by Fernando Alle

You know a film has to have a certain quality when it gets picked up for distribution by Troma; and if you’ve seen director Fernando Alle’s previous shorts: Papa Wrestling and Banana Mother***ker, you’ll know what that quality is… sheer creative insanity. And Mutant Blast is no different!

The film tells the story of Maria, a fearless soldier who, after rescuing Ts-347, a man with superhuman strength, is being pursued by a military cell responsible for scientific experiments that created Ts-347 And resulted in a zombie apocalypse. On the way, they meet Pedro, a man with few ambitions and a great hangover (and imagination). Together, they will try to escape to a safe place, but complications cross their paths in the form of a nuclear bomb.

Points for originality should go to “Diamantino,” an amusing but scattershot comedy that revolves around a world-famous Portuguese soccer star patterned in part on Cristiano Ronaldo. Co-directed and written by Gabriel Abrantes and Daniel Schmidt, this is a film that takes a lot of chances with its tone as it moves from farcical moments to scenes with earnest political messages.

Diamantino (Carloto Cotta) is a national idol on the soccer field, and whenever he scores a goal he sees enormous fluffy puppies surrounding him. This imagery of the giant puppies is funny because they’re so obviously meant to be small and harmless pets, and here they’re seen stomping around like dinosaurs. These giant fluffy puppies are an apt symbol of Diamantino himself, a sports God who is so absurdly innocent that he can be used by anyone around him for either good or bad purposes.

Diamantino is inspired...

The Constitution Written by Mickaël de Oliveira, translated by Maria Inês Marques Directed by Jill DeArmon Presented by Frigid NY @ Horse Trade and Saudade Theatre at Under St. Marks August 31-September 10, 2017

Making its American premiere after originally opening in Lisbon at the National Theatre D. Maria II in 2016 under the direction of its author, Mickaël de Oliveira, The Constitution marks the first production of Saudade Theatre, an organization dedicated to introducing Portuguese theater to an American audience. While saudade refers to a profound nostalgia or melancholic longing for something or someone absent, the company's challenging debut play represents the product of addition rather than absence: in Saudade's words, a "meeting between an European aesthetic and the American theatre culture." With The Constitution, this cross-cultural conjunction produces complex results from a simple premise.

The elegantly spare conceit of Oliveira's play is that four people have been locked in one building together...