Favorite April/May Films from Sci to Fi to Doc
Preliminary thoughts on the new Boots, plus some classics
I've recently been reflecting on the obsessing overlap between speculative and documentary genres. There are so many films these days that, even if not explicitly in the sci-fi or nonfiction camp, share many of the same themes and tropes. And this was especially true for my favorite new-to-me films from the last two months, across eras and genres. Here is a list of my 10 recent faves, split vaguely across generic categories.
The Specular Spectacular
I Love Boosters by Boots Riley, 2026
I hope to have something longer written about this film soon, but it's fair to say that if you liked Sorry to Bother You, a film that practically defined a generation, you will probably like this film. Tune-Yards does the music and Merrill Garbus brings a brassy, deranged clownish energy to this slapstick story that name-drops dialectical materialism. A stylish, rollicking good time that is a Marxist fable, falling slightly more into the realm of fantasy than magic realism.
Sîrat by Oliver Laxe, 2025
This isn't necessarily fantastical or magical, but there is something profoundly uncanny and dystopian about this film and a man looking for his lost daughter at a Moroccan rave. The electronic music pulsing through the film provides a perfect ambiance for the powerful abstraction of this story. It almost makes me forget that the protagonist is the villain from Pan's Labyrinth!
Specular Fiction by Coleman Collins, 2024
I saw this short, science fiction essay film at an exhibit on Afrofuturism at the Hammer, and found it profound and affecting. There is something decidedly Chris Marker-influenced about this narrative, in which the artist and his partner bring one “image” with them as they're displaced by war and climate collapse. See it if you can!
Funny… But Not “Ha-Ha” Funny
A Poet by Simon Mesa Soto, 2025
Somehow this film is deeply disturbing and simultaneously… uplifting? A deadbeat, alcoholic poet and absentee father decides to mentor an impoverished local girl with a knack for poetry. The story is a critique of the exploitative nature of the culture industry, but it is also a story about redemption, and the director tests, and fundamentally affirms, our ability to empathize with the most truly cringe-inducing human being I've seen in film in years.
The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Maki by Juho Kuosmanen, 2016
What happens when a world-famous Finnish boxer, about to compete for the title of best in the world, suddenly falls in love just a few weeks before the fight that would define the rest of his life? This is the most uplifting anti-sports sports film I've ever seen, and, like most Finnish cinema I've seen, is suffused with a peculiar neo-realist, minimalist whimsy that is both bleak and life-affirming.
Time That Remains by Elia Suleiman, 2009
I've been meaning to see this Palestinian film for years, and was so surprised by the Wes Andersonian editing for a subject so clearly decolonial (i.e. Israeli apartheid and Palestinian resistance). The film is allegorical and quasi-biographical, and while it occasionally lapsed into overly cutesy reflexivity, even the period-specific mise-en-scène alone is worth it.
Non-Fiction from Avant to Doc
Zemlja za nas by Karla Crnčević, 2024
I've talked about this film so many times on this Substack, and recently published a piece about it in Collateral, so there's not much else to say except: see it if you can, and discuss it (with me, with others, with your local leftist group) when you get the opportunity!
Best of Luck with the Wall by Josh Begley, 2016
You can watch this 6 minute film, entirely shot in Google Earth, for free online, and it is absolutely worth your time. Ostensibly a film about the location of the wall Trump has hoped to build along the southern border, the film is about the fascinating and mercurial topography of the border itself, and the impossibility and quixotic nature of its construction. It needs no exposition; the geography alone speaks for itself, and speak it does.
The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist by Daniel Roher, 2026
I went into this documentary expecting very little, and in the end I greatly enjoyed it. I wondered whether it would be a good teaching tool, and think it would be especially interesting as a film to discuss with college freshmen across disciplines. The director got access to an extraordinary number of very famous people on all sides of the AI discourse, from the hyper-utopian (Sam Altman, resident AI sociopath) to the hyper-doomerist (Eliezer Yudkowsky). The film almost gets it right in the end, but succumbs to a liberal nothing-ism that brings the viewer to the brink of an actually interesting leftist solution to AI. The ADHD-esque quick editing and entirely-analog stop-motion is especially fun— unsurprising given that it is produced by one of the directors of Everything Everywhere All at Once!
Maintenance Artist by Toby Perl Freilich, 2025
Have you heard about Mierle Laderman Ukeles, the feminist New York artist who became the NYC Sanitation Department’s first artist-in-residence? Did you know she invented her own position? This doc isn't especially unique in the formalist or aesthetic sense, but it didn't need to be: describing Ukeles’s fascinating artwork and career is arresting enough!
All for this week. Until next time,
xo-J