“We wanted viewers to feel like they were washed up, panting on another shore somewhere having just had a brush with drowning in a tempest of narrative,” is how Canadian director Guy Maddin described his latest feature (co-directed with Evan Johnson), The Forbidden Room, which played this year’s New York Film Festival. And indeed, Maddin’s 11th feature is exhausting. Essentially an anthology film with a Russian nesting-doll structure, The Forbidden Room sprouts narratives out of narratives, flowing from one seeming tangent to the next with Maddin’s familiar silent-movie aesthetic (the narratives were generally based on titles and synopses “lost” movies often dating back to the ‘20s). A crew in a submarine that’s running out of oxygen attempts to extend their collective lives using the air pockets in flapjacks. A lumberjack attempts to rescue a woman from a cave-dwelling tribe called the Red Wolves. A man’s ghost attempts to teach his son how to trick his mother into believing that the man never died. There is a vampire banana, a virgin sacrifice, a character known as “Squid Thief.” It blends together deliriously in transitions that emulate the decay and melting of celluloid.

At last, we've reached it: the MILF stage of Jennifer Lopez's career. If you have eyes and the sense of what must happen to keep sex selling, you predicted this. However, practically none of us could have predicted that Lopez would reach this rite of passage via the heaping serving of frequently nonsensical pulp that is The Boy Next Door, a domestic thriller with erotic-thriller aspirations directed by Rob Cohen (The Fast and the Furious) and written by former lawyer Barbara Curry. But like a celebrity who must continually acknowledge her ass that just won't quit, this movie is what we have to work with.