Kathryn Bigelow’s underappreciated Strange Days features a line that goes something like “The issue isn’t whether you’re paranoid. The issue is whether you’re paranoid enough.” Although that film is set in 1999, it’s an aphorism that would work equally well in Stéphan Castang‘s fun, violent, high-concept Vincent Must Die, as a punchy summation of post-pandemic — rather than pre-millennial — nervousness and malaise. Who among us has not gazed in dismay at a world that’s not just increasingly bad-tempered, but seems to hold against each one of us some focused, individual grudge?

Let’s not be quite so declarative as to insist there are only two types of cinephile, but among the many varieties that exist, there are those who have never managed to connect with Hong Sang-soo‘s ongoing movie project, and those who can watch a minutes-long sequence of Kim Min-hee petting and feeding an already portly cat, and think ecstatically “This is cinema!”

What would a monk want with a gun? Bringing wisdom and a streak of wry humor to his Bhutan-set sophomore feature, The Monk and the Gun, director Pawo Choyning Dorji teases any number of possible answers to that question over the course of a droll, shrewdly satirical fable, in which Western values crash against a seemingly intransigent (but potentially more enlightened) South Asian culture.