​At the AFI Fest screening introduction Hugh Welchman joked that The Peasants was the second, and would probably be the last film animated by hand painting each shot frame by frame. The first, of course, was also made by him and his parter DK, the acclaimed Loving Vincent. A documentary about Van Gogh seems the perfect pair for hand painted animation in the style of its subject. For a follow-up the Welchman’s decided on oil paintings and a nearly 800 page Polish novel, Chlopi or The Peasants.

​Much of recent film has been obsessed with technology and its potential to usurp the existing order. Just this year we have seen Mission:Impossible Dead Reckoning and The Creator grapple with the dystopian consequences of an eternal march toward tech utopia. Sam Esmail is no stranger to the networks and servers that connect our modern existence, the director is, after all, the creator of Mr. Robot. With his first feature in nine years, Leave the World Behind,  Esmail supposes that technology has long since hobbled society and that the bonds between people and nature have already been frayed.

As soon as a defendant steps foot in the court room, they are put on trial for more than just the crime of which they are accused. Facts are not revealed so much as they are interpreted. Who you are and what you may be capable of are of far more importance than means, motive and opportunity. When Sandra Voyter (Sandra Hüller) discovers and reports the lifeless body of her husband three floors below an open attic window, she is thrown into a system intent on probing her marriage, her parenting and her writing as much as her responsibility for the death of her husband. In Anatomy of a Fall, director Justine Triet (Sibyl) uses the trappings of a murder trial to interrogate the stories we tell to calm the unease of uncertainty and the way those narratives interact with the truth.