Mamas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Coyotes

An offbeat hybrid of animation and live action, Meriem Bennani and Orian Barki's autofictional delight Bouchra renders New York City as a CGI-veneered zootopia of anthropomorphized bears, lizards and cows. A lesbian Moroccan filmmaker (presenting as a bipedal coyote, voiced by Bennani) traces her creative blocks and love-life woes to unreconciled tensions back in Casablanca. Launched from a real-life phone conversation between Bennani and her mother (where the unspoken is what they orbit), this profoundly stylized, strangely sexy exploration of cultural and familial exile is pounding on the fourth wall with a fist of reckoning.

More autobiographical reconciliations incoming with Catalan-born auteur Carla Simón's tender ache of a film, Romería, which asks the weighty question: who were our parents before we were born? Having lost hers to AIDS-related complications as a child (addressed in her first feature Summer 1993), Simón radiantly channels herself through teen orphan and aspiring filmmaker Marina (Llúcia Garcia), on a pilgrimage to Spain's Galician coast to track down her estranged paternal clan. Buried shames tumble out of the subtly chaotic reunion, but so does catharsis, as Marina's parents grace her imagination in an earthily sensual fantasy sequence.

French-American duo Pearl & The Oysters craft breezy, retro-futurist pop (think of Stereolab's space-age lushness and sun-drenched Beach Boys melodies, served in a high-stemmed cocktail glass), but the dreamy vibes mask their anxieties on "Monkey Mind". Named for a Buddhist concept of restlessness, their warmest album yet was written in direct response to the L.A. wildfires, Trump's second inauguration and our collective digital malaise, soft-rocking through the other side of their melancholy with jazzy synths and weightless Tropicália.

If You're Chasing Trends, You're Already Too Late. What did the execs learn from the runaway successes of Obsession and Backrooms? "Scrape Reddit and YouTube for the next blockbuster wunderkind." The correct lesson was right in front of them: audiences are desperate for stories that don't feel incubated in a boardroom. Liminal anxieties have been alive on social media for years, and there are countless versions of the Monkey's Paw fable, but the films born of these ideas felt fresh in a stagnating, IP-overstuffed culture. In the late '60s and '70s, Hollywood's pricey flops led to the "film brats" (Coppola, Scorsese, Schrader) taking over the system… until the paradigm shifted again (Spielberg, Lucas). The cycle never ends, but the writers and directors with staying power are always steps ahead of the suits. You can't reverse-engineer originality.