The Future

Starts off strong, with a few promising threads of urban whimsy lingering through the halfway mark, but eventually gets mucked up in a gummy cloud of rue and melancholy, not to mention magic realism. Maybe I would have liked it better if I had seen it before Take This Waltz, which strikes me as a much more engaging and detailed (also, yes, more conventional) tour of some of the same territory. But The Future is a hard film for me to dislike, in part just because some of Miranda July's deep thoughts about aging are familiar to me, but also because her critique of annoying hipster archetypes seems painfully self-aware.