May is the time for Hollywood to say, “Smash, here’s your big fucking summer entertainment, America!” Exhibit A: Marvel’s The Avengers, which notably uses the word “smash.”For anyone suffe

I find it frustrating that human beings perpetuate destructive behaviors until they’re faced with death or worse fates. We don’t floss until we’ve had cavities; we don’t eat healthy or exercise until we’ve been diagnosed with cancer or heart disease; and we don’t curb our gas emissions…until what, the seas melt and bury us? If we all lived on small islands like the Maldives, we might be facing that very question right now.

Writer-director Whit Stillman is back. We could debate over whether he was missed, but rest assured, after his 13-year break following the underwhelming The Last Days of Disco, he remains singularly Stillmanesque.

The Raven is in trouble before the first thinly drawn character appears on screen. The audience is informed, via title card, that in the days before his death, Edgar Allan Poe was mumbling incoherently on a park bench. His last days are still a mystery.

The Belgian brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne (L’enfant, Rosetta), who stumbled a bit with their last film, Lorna’s Silence, have made a winning comeback in The Kid with a Bike, a coming-of-age tale about an 11-year-old boy (Thomas Doret), his bicycle and one very kind stranger (Cécile de France).

Thrive, a two-hour documentary that screens Friday at the Performance Space in La Tienda, sells itself as an optimistic vision of a utopian future marked by “free energy,” freedom from oppression and spiritual awakening. But on its way to depicting this dream-world, filmmakers Foster and Kimberly Carter Gamble, who have a home in Santa Fe, deliver a horrifying and cynical version of the real world, while also espousing a blend of paranoid conspiracy theories and right-libertarian propaganda.

It’s 1984. Our hero is Boy (James Rolleston), a plucky kid living in an isolated New Zealand town with his younger brother, Rocky (Te Aho Eketone-Whitu), four younger cousins and their grandmother, who cares for them.

Filmmakers, filmgoers, students and academics have debated for years about what makes a film. Is it a series of uninflected images strung together? Tightly choreographed camera moves?

Watching WE, Madonna’s latest terrible directing effort, it’s difficult to know exactly for what she was striving. An old-fashioned romance? A softhearted take on Wallis Simpson, a woman with whom she clearly identifies as a misunderstood figure?

Spanning eight turbulent years, Declaration of War (La guerre est déclarée) nods at Shakespeare in the lead characters’ names, but then the rest of the film is all French.