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Rains Over Babel had the audience at the Miami Film Festival in the palm of its hand from literally the opening shot, an absurdly elaborate, Terry Gilliam-esque setpiece populated by two semi-mythical, queer-coded beings. In the first ten minutes, we have fierce queens on the prowl, buildings crumbling with Biblical amounts of flooding, a gamble with Death, a bottle smashed over someone's head - and a talking salamander. If that sounds unfocused to you, I promise you're wrong: it's laser-focused. This is a film that knows exactly what it's doing, and never slows down.

It boggles my mind that this is a FIRST FEATURE. So assured. So fierce. So funny. Literally every single performance is fine-tuned for the character and the camera. Queer joy, trans joy, and general bad-assness abounds.

In a Q&A, the director confirmed that the final shot is a direct homage to Wong Kar-Wai's Fallen Angels. I'm in heaven.

U to U was a completely unique production, far ahead of its time, more like a sort of proto-social media showcase for kids' creative work than a traditional TV show. It incorporated elements of game show, radio-style call-in show, and variety show, but its beating heart was the repeated invitations for kids to send in creative work-drawings, sculptures, board game designs, writing, videos-via the mail or the internet (using the Prodigy online service).

It's worth looking this up on YouTube-it was one of a kind. It occupied a place and time when the world was newly connected, video editing made it possible to remotely colocate kids in both live interaction and time-delayed messaging.

I'm told that it ran for two seasons; I'm curious what kind of audience it attracted.

28 Hotel Rooms is in some ways a formalistic movie -- the structure of the film and its cast are highly unusual and constrained. But rather than feel confining or artificial, this allows an intense focus on the actors and their performances.

These performances are so true, and so devoid of stagey or film-y artifice, that it makes other movies about romance feel false in comparison. There is no "saying the perfect thing at the perfect time" to the seduction between the leads, as there is in so many other movies. Instead, you see charisma that mirrors how charisma really operates among real people.

The same thing with their communication and difficult emotions: they are presented in a loose, real, palpable way, without being dressed up or made to have artificial consequences.

The only false note, for me, was the final scene; I didn't totally buy it.