Violent Fury and Crushing Despair <3

Buster Keaton begat Jackie Chan, who begat The Raid, which begat John Wick. You're now caught up on the kinetic lineage of stunt coordinator-turned-filmmaker Kenji Tanigaki's Hong Kong action brawler The Furious ("Huo zhe yan"), an electrifying cult classic in the making. Actor and martial artist Xie Miao stars as an ordinary dude whose young daughter is taken by traffickers, an admittedly perfunctory chase plot that exists to launch a mind-blowing barrage of physicality pushed to its thrashing, heaving limits. For a sense of scale, imagine the climbing zombie hordes of World War Z, but instead of CGI slop, they're exquisitely choreographed fighters using anything in front of them as weapons.

It took 12 years for M.C. Schmidt (one half of techno-glitch luminaries Matmos) and Baltimore experimental pioneer John Berndt to finish their sonically profound, sweetly accessible debut collaboration "Cloud Machines" — an electronic "love letter" to two of their shared influences: the otherworldly fantasy comics of French artist Mœbius, and the '70s team-ups between ambient minimalist Brian Eno and German avant-krautrock duo Cluster. Synthesizers, trombones, insects and fragmented samples build a hazy, unpredictable world, like a hug from a friendly alien who is genuinely trying to understand human anatomy.

The American Cinematheque's fifth edition of "Bleak Week: Cinema of Despair" is well underway in Los Angeles, but some of this year's curated series of gloomy, traumatic, downright nihilistic masterworks can be experienced in 73 more cities this month (including in Canada, UK and Latin America). Shatter your senses with the Soviet antiwar nightmare Come and See! Devastate your family with the back-in-the-news nuclear fears of Threads! Go on your first and last date while ugly-weeping through the Italian neorealist tragedy Umberto D.!

Film Programming is a Deeply Imperfect Science. As a younger person, I was attracted to movies that were clever. Getting older, no less myopic in my subjective opinions than anyone else, I now gravitate toward bold personal expressions. Filmmakers who cut themselves open and bleed their thoughts, feelings and fears onscreen, that's my jam. But when I'm curating for a festival like Cucalorus, I split the difference between what resonates with me and what I think my audiences will savor. My point being: never be hard on yourself if your project doesn't get into your dream fest. There are a dozen factors dictating what makes the limited cut, including programmer fallibility. Nobody gets it "right" every time.