I Wanna Gig Like Common People

People-watching in New York, poking around gorgeous apartments... location scouting must be a dream job, no? First-time filmmaker Paula González-Nasser spent six years knocking on strangers' doors and charming her way into private spaces. The Scout, her quietly enthralling corrective of slowly accumulating indignities, follows her exhausted stand-in (Mimi Davila) as she races through a day to find TV-pilot interiors. Shot in wide, patient frames that mirror a scout's wandering eye, this modest yet poetically observed dramedy about the emotional labor of transactional relationships finds the universality in banal frustrations.

In all their thrift-store glamour and art-school misfit energy, Pulp were never really Britpop. They were older than the Gallagher brothers and Damon Albarn, weirder, more sexually uneasy, more interested in class resentment and social humiliation than in swaggering. Reflectively narrated by the still gangly, theatrical and capable-of-making-a-massive-arena-feel-intimate frontman Jarvis Cocker, director Garth Jennings' scrapbook concert doc Pulp: What Do You Do For an Encore? captures the band touring behind "More," their first album in 24 years. For the die-hard fans, this is hardcore—but newbies should also find it booty-shakingly joyful.

Predictably, I gravitated toward Adult DVD's self-titled debut LP based on the novelty name alone. The Leeds six-piece have been building a following for years (two EPs, slots at Glastonbury and Green Man, a genuinely baffling level of fame in Japan) and have finally bottled their live chaos. It's impolite dance-punk dressed in warped synths, jungle-adjacent breakbeats, and Harry Hanson's sneering, character-driven vocals. The songs are populated by coffin dodgers, cowboys losing it in the supermarket, and conspiracy theorists, all rendered with silly-smart lyrics that point out the hypocrisies in our ridiculous modern society.

Three to See at the 64th New York Film Festival. NYFF (through Oct. 12) kicks off tonight with James Gray's Paper Tiger. A recommended trio I've seen: the exclamation point in Tony Gilroy's Behemoth! promises spectacle and instead delivers a graceful, low-key study of a conflicted cellist (Pedro Pascal), the kind of intelligent, grown-up drama we claim we want and then don't show up for. It trusts its audience, unlike the overdirected, emotionally fraudulent Tár. Satirist par excellence Radu Jude's The Diary of a Chambermaid moves Mirbeau's novel to contemporary Bordeaux, where a Romanian au pair endures passive-aggressive French intellectuals and a meta-theatrical subplot commenting on its own source material. And Sandra Wollner's Everytime, an experimental drama about grief that eerily bends time (and your senses!) as a family travels to Tenerife, was easily my favorite film at Cannes. Maybe that's a tough sell, but see it anyway.