This tepid but sincere attempt to remake Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind is a solid failure but it does feature a couple good performances, particularly a star-turn by young, gawky but sexy Québécois actor Théodore Pellerin as the dreamy, moonstruck wannabe-boyfriend of the female alien-human hybrid, and to a much lesser degree, Percy Hynes White as his younger skatepunk brother, whose facial expressions at discovering Pop Tarts in a grocery bag are priceless.

There are some pretty special…

I'm not sure which is more tedious — watching this interminable, pomo-mannerist atrocity or reading someone like David Ehrlich, who seems to have never graduated film school, write about it.

At least director Josephine Decker shows some awareness of how pretentious her "characters" are and so a lot of what happens or doesn't happen could pass as satire or auto-critique (the ostensible subject of the performance art that spills over into the occasional realist passages within the movie, its best…

I can't imagine anyone who reads sci-fi more than casually, or even someone who's seen a decent number of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes, and especially anyone who's read Richard Powers' prescient and emotionally rich Galatea 2.2, or perhaps a reasonably informed average user of modern computers, to do anything but scoff and laugh at Spike Jonez's superficial attempt to speculate about artificially intelligent agents in, what? The near future? An alternate universe? Inside his head? Every time someone…