Choosing which horses to sell becomes awkward after you have spent time choosing the markings on their legs. Rival Stars Horse Racing gives you coats, dilution colors, patterns, and names with which to make its animals feel like yours. Then the stable fills up, and selling becomes a practical option. A pasture offers an escape from that decision, accommodating horses you want to keep without using valuable stalls. It recognizes a small, persuasive feeling: an animal can have exhausted its competitive usefulness without exhausting your interest. Breeding gives that interest a future. The next foal inherits appearance and performance characteristics,...

The song playing during an argument in an elevator becomes essential listening for the five musicians of 5G. Thrown back to 1995, they must recreate the circumstances of their displacement to get home, which means finding that recording without the convenience of a working phone. Director Facundo Scalerandi gives this German-language comedy an appealingly practical problem. A band already struggling to make music together now needs to track down somebody else's song, identify its creators, and get hold of a cassette. Finding the right tune has become a shared responsibility. That connection gives the time travel a useful relationship to...

Amy's employers bring up her contract and her condition in the same conversation. She is researching a cure for lung cancer, but the workplace discussion makes her sound like a difficult asset to manage. Howard J. Ford's Zip Wire briefly finds something uncomfortable here: an institution can depend on a person's intelligence while treating her needs as an inconvenience. MyAnna Buring's scientist has knowledge her financiers want. The terms under which she gets to remain a person seem less settled. Her laboratory routines complicate that relationship. Amy wears rubber gloves, needs assistance handling objects, and takes the stairs with her...

Cenir is ready to put a million reais behind her knowledge of her daughter. Asked to identify something Karina has said, she confidently selects an ambition to become an heiress. Wrong answer. It is an efficient little reversal: parental certainty makes the setup, and the child supplies the correction without having to argue. The boast is funnier because Cenir has volunteered such an enormous sum. Nobody needed to raise the stakes quite that high. She brought her own humiliation budget. The actual betting in Netflix’s Brazilian reality competition Mom Knows Best? is less reckless. Nine mothers make predictions about their...

When the parents leave Vidya Mutth, some of the boys cry. Admission to this revered Hindu school in Varanasi has required travel, an examination, and anxious waiting; now the adults can take their pride home while the children must stay. During the entrance test, the handheld camera moves through the bustle surrounding Guru Avimuktesh, who oversees selection himself. Acceptance feels momentous before we know much about the education being offered. Pankaj Johar and Sunaina Kapoor’s documentary Disciples lets the departure register as a child might experience it: a family achievement whose immediate cost is the family’s absence. For twelve-year-old Satyarth,...

Lucien gives the family dog an RPG battle system and a role in helping its humans through life's decisions. The joke depends on a change of scale: a format associated with quests and conflict becomes a way to remember the place an animal held in a household. That household belongs to Ellie and Lucien, an elderly couple in Bordeaux whose 57 years together provide the material for Mydear.exe. Their shared interest in games gives Lucien a language for making Ellie a gift. He puts that language to affectionate use. His work as a bicycle postman becomes a simple side-on cycling...