High Life

High Life is almost an anti-science fiction movie, a work that has affection less for the visual character of the sci-fi genre than for what that imagery can yield toward such classic Denis themes as isolation and exploitation.

We begin, after all, on a slow-gliding shot of a garden. Which is itself the food source on an unremarkable looking spaceship that looks like a backup battery pack phone charger. Robert Pattinson, an actor I still find mostly a blank stare, carries the picture with that blankness. Denis’ best work has been with expressive actors who carry in them an element of essential strangeness, which makes High Life an outlier of sorts.

Pattinson is quite affecting as Monte, a prisoner on spaceship where prisoners are on a mission to a black hole. (The idea is to harness the black hole’s power for use as an Earthly energy source.) The prisoners think they’ll win their freedom, but the whole thing is a kind of perverse double-cross that ends badly.

Denis gives us the narrative out of order — itself a kind of double-crossing of story that allows her to brush past the sci-fi conventions and get to the oddities of humans in space.

The twist involves both Juliette Binoche and the sexualized science. Binoche’s character, coyly named “Dibs,” is running experiments on the death row prisoners.

Monte got convicted for, as a child, killing his best friend over a dog. And Monte certainly has the monotone and saltine pallor of someone who’s been on death row that long. By the time Denis’ stirring ending flashes before us, we’ve been sat alongside Monte long enough to have never actually seen his crime.Thus we feel a deep, unusual-for-Denis ambivalence toward what he and his companion may or may not be soaring into.

High Life — THREE STARS

Directed by Claire Denis

A24

110 min.

Clouds of Sils Maria

Longevity for a star of stage and screen often means sticking around long enough for someone to ask you to do something you’ve already done. This is the case for Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche), the aging actor at the center of Olivier Assayas’ latest film, “Clouds of Sils Maria.”

Maria is the kind of character Assayas thrives on — stressed, centered but unsure of herself, ever searching for something she can’t quite express. Her big break came at the age of 19, when she starred in a play about two women, one older and one younger, whose tortured love affair exists as but a stepping stone for the younger to get what she wants (Maria played the younger). Now, Maria is asked to play the older character in a revival of the play. Assayas loves this sort of turnabout, and the film focuses entirely on the psychodrama of the pre-production.

Maria’s life, from what we are shown, is empty but for the presence of her always-on-the-ball personal assistant (a “chore whore” as Julianne Moore’s character in “Maps to the Stars” might say), Valentine, played with refreshing naturalness by Kristen Stewart. The dymanic between Steart and Binoche is worth the price of admission. Stewart seems to bring out a stern fire in Binoche that at times resembles that of a wise old (sexy) grandmother. In turn, Stewart has a splendid lack of calculation here, an ease with the verbal aspects of the role that earned her a Cesar award.

As Valentine helps Maria rehearse, the lines between characters and reality become confused. It’s unclear whether Maria is aware of this, is the engine of it, or even cares. Unfortunately, it’s also unclear whether Assayas cares. He is a director who loves complicated head games, overcranking them to the point of tedium. “Coulds” is filled with the meta on top of meta on top of meta refractions that offer a whole semester’s worth of discussions in a film analysis seminar. Here, though, a lot of it, while fascinating in the moment, feels decorative.

The best aspects of “Clouds” take films like “Persona” and “All About Eve” as touchstones. Assayas’ love of moody mysteriousness keeps him from coming close to the pure poetry of those films. He is a filmmaker of tremendous intelligence and a keen eye, but in “Clouds” we’re being handed so many ambiguities that their ultimate purpose feels half-thought-out.

“Clouds of Sils Maria” — TWO STARS

Directed by Olivier Assayas. Rated R. Les Films du Losage, Filmcoopi Zurich, Artificial Eye, IFC Films. 123 min.