Amalia Ulman’s Magic Farm(2025).

Montreal/Paris/London/New York/Berlin/Chicago/Seoul/Amsterdam/Mexico City/Tokyo/Vancouver/Los Angeles. In the Day-Glo light of the mid-aughts, that slogan of American soft power swung off canvas tote bags everywhere. The message was optimistic: the world has no boundaries—at least, if you’re wearing American Apparel.

Magic Farm, the sophomore work of Argentine director Amalia Ulman, is that millennial dream fruited and fermented. Her characters work at a VICE-style gonzo web show, pal around with Chloë Sevigny, and proudly blaze a trail through the world, totally unaware that the trail they’re proudly blazing has already been paved and advertises Monday–Friday street-side parking.

Ulman’s grifters end up in the Argentine countryside chasing a tip that doesn’t exist. Quickly, they resolve to fabricate one—unconcerned with the ethics behind writing their own reality and indifferent to the townspeople’s actual lives, which, of course, have far more depth: the nearby farmland is routinely crop-dusted with a pesticide that’s resulted in a sickly, cancer-addled population. The Americans despair over crushes, bugbites, jobs, and the imagined pain of creating something revelatory out of nothing. Can magic be manufactured? Or does it, like factory-farmed corn, salmon, or cattle, end up tasteless, even cancerous?

Personal childhood heartthrob Alex Wolff (passing around a business card replete with the American Apparel font) swings between braggadocio and romantic ruin. Immediately, he is entranced by local soubrette Camila del Campo, a stunner who scampers up trees to post thirst traps. Chloë, his more mature love interest, is the hostess of the show. She is paraded around by the traveling circus, desperately unhappy with the cage she built. Meanwhile, Joe Apollonio swoons in the presence of Guillermo Jacubowicz, the good-natured hotel owner, culminating in a sexually tense but doomed laundry-washing. As an actress, Ulman is the most reserved of the bunch, playing a pregnant translator caught between the locals and the Americans.

As a director, Ulman is anything but reserved, excelling at tender moments of personal inadequacy, allowing characters to snip themselves down to the quick. She moves the camera with a sense of boundarylessness: the viewer is placed on the head of the dog, is shot into the air, and takes a ride around on a motorcycle. Unironically, boundarylessness is what killed American Apparel: their CEO, Dov Charney, was eventually ousted for sexual misconduct. The stores in Montreal/Paris/London/New York/Berlin/Chicago/Seoul/etc. closed one at a time, and then suddenly. The world, after all, is not edgeless. Magic Farm’s hapless protagonists may be oblivious to their surroundings, determined to cocoon themselves in the safety of their own problems—but, Ulman ensures, we are not.

—Nicolaia Rips

In The ADHD Muses, Bernadette Van-Huy—better known as the eponymous member of the art collective Bernadette Corporation—takes on the “fake theme” of ADHD. As to what makes the theme “fake,” I’m nonplussed. Perhaps it’s just a refusal to commit to an idea. The movie starts with jazz, but it’s all downhill from there.

The test group for this ironically engaged theme—which tracks with the collective’s interest in pouring identities into prefabricated forms and isn’t a terrible premise in the abstract—are two young women whose lack of apparent talent isn’t allowed to get in the way of the filmmaker’s affectionate curiosity about them. One of them, Marika Thunder, is the daughter of painter Rita Ackermann, a longtime associate of the filmmaker’s. A significant portion of the film is shot in what appears to be Ackermann’s studio, where Thunder and Tessa Gourin, an aspiring actress, woodenly recite scenes from Pulp Fiction or a Christopher Walken monologue that, like the title Annie Hallscrawled on an otherwise blank wall, don’t make themselves any more interesting than the average spazzed shoutout. Choppy editing doesn’t make the film kinetic or even lively. The older, figurative painter Eric Fischl gets name-checked—I guess he’s on the attention-deficit spectrum, as they say—and it’s a sign of how dull The ADHD Muses’s proceedings are that I would have welcomed an interview about his dusty work by the time the Mean Girlsscene recitations started.

A long shot of Gourin walking along East Eighty-Sixth Street and interior-monologuing about her life so far and an extended studio visit with Thunder both fail to inspire. Gourin: “A really interesting fact about me is I’m always early.” If there was a script for the film, SMALL TALK!would be the header (and footer) on every page.

The outro to the film features an omniscient narrator offering a curious meditation on clock time, implying a thematic connection to the women’s personal orientations, but it’s a little late to be retrospectively tacking on a long view that the director’s subjects themselves lack. If there was a guiding concept behind the film, maybe it should have felt a bit more real to Van-Huy before she pressed RECORD.

—Paige K. Bradley