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In the Chinese director's third feature, the pop idol Jackson Yee plays a shape-shifting dreamer who gets lost in a densely allusive maze of stories and genres.

Hailey Benton Gates, the director of the "military-industrial-complex romantic comedy" "Atropia," recommends a few books that share a kinship with her new film, about actors working in a fake village where U.S. soldiers train.

The director's great achievement was placing real people, with real senses of humor, into the fantasies of mass culture.

A foundational 1956 study of the concept, focussed on a U.F.O. doomsday cult, has been all but debunked by new research.

This was the year that A.I.-generated content passed a kind of audiovisual Turing test, sometimes fooling us against our better judgment.

For the characters in Lee Lai's "Cannon," home is the place most resistant to real emotion.

In James Cameron's latest 3-D science-fiction extravaganza, the Na'vi family tree gets more complicated, but our sense of wonderment flattens out.

In a year when the entertainment industry embraced the artificial, extraordinary human acts--from Sarah Snook's one-woman "Dorian Gray" to Michael B. Jordan's twin turn in "Sinners"--made their mark.

A.I., of course--but there were also other, less obvious stories and trends that are going to shape how we understand the news.

The comedian tries her hand at captioning New Yorker cartoons.