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An action-packed adventure with a 90’s backbone awaits viewers in Netflix’s The Electric State starring Millie Bobby Brown and Chris Pratt.

The film also features the voice work of Alan Tudyk, Anthony Mackie, Brian Cox, Jenny Slate and more. Based on the graphic novel by Simon Stålenhag, the film watches Michelle (Brown) and Keats (Pratt) venture into the dangerous Exclusion Zone and the heart of artificial intelligence firm Sentre to try and rescue Michelle’s brother. The politics of robots vs. humans fall to the side as each of them has their own robot companion, and they meet more on their adventures to track down Christopher (Woody Norman), who Michelle was told died in a car accident that also took the lives of their parents.

Several 90’s needle drops play in many different scenes from the more sentimental ones to the high-adrenaline ones. Some are performed by a piano-playing Taco robot.

Tales from Planet Kolkata.The essay film has always been a shapeshifting entity. It is an offshoot of the documentary mode that fully employs the potential of montage, with various texts and personal reflections interfacing and proposing new ideas, much like written counterparts. It’s a genre that defies immediate and digestible definition in most cases, with Dziga Vertov, Chris Marker, Harun Farocki, Agnès Varda, Thom Andersen, and Orson Welles employing different strategies in their respective canonical examples. In the United Kingdom, the yearly Essay Film Festival champions and explores the form, often incorporating study days and seminars. This year, the festival presented three densely structured and unique films by Ruchir Joshi, an Indian cultural writer and novelist. In the early 1990s, Joshi produced two short essay films focused on the Indian cities of Ahmedabad and his hometown of Calcutta, and an expansive feature concerning the nomadic Baul musicians in West Bengal.

Get in touch to send in cinephile news and discoveries. For daily updates follow us @NotebookMUBI.NEWSNext year's Sundance Film Festival has received permission from the Park City Council to be seven days rather than 11. The festival will also have limited capacity in theatres to address public health concerns. Recommended VIEWINGEvery Thursday in August, MoMa is streaming selections of historic films from its collection in a series titled Film Vault Summer Camp. In episode 1, collection specialist Ashley Swinnerton introduces The Flying Train and Great Actresses of the Past.In a new video essay for Little White Lies, Luís Azevedo explores the role of kitchens in the films of Pedro Almodóvar.From Netflix, the official trailer for Charlie Kaufman's psychological thriller I'm Thinking of Ending Things, adapted from the bestselling novel by Iain Reid. Recommended READINGAbove: Ja'Tovia Gary by JerSean Golatt for the New York Times. For the New York Times,...

Kino Lorber presents its fourth volume of forgotten or obscured film noir remnants with a trio of three titles from noted directors. With this set spanning 1946 to 1955, once again there’s an evident trajectory of diluted elements and attitudes as the cynicism and misanthropy was eroded or folded over into more palatable narrative aesthetics by the end of the 1950s Although none of these three titles represents the best work of either their directors or notable leading stars, each features its own little noteworthy kernels worthy of admiration.

Calcutta (1946)

John Farrow directed a wide variety of features in a career spanning four decades, but he contributed one of noir’s most enduring specimens with his 1948 classic The Big Clock (remade in 1987 as No Way Out).…...