In order to effectively explore both sides of Mats’ life, the film uses eight years’ worth of in-game dialogue alongside animations created inside of WoW to recreate important moments from his life. There’s playful flirting and guild in-fighting, but the most arresting scenes involve the real-world impact Mats had on his fellow roleplayers, including helping a mother better connect to her son. But while he became a source of strength and joy for his WoW companions, Mats largely kept his own struggles a secret.

Ibelin is a film that uses every tool at its disposal in an attempt to capture the totality of someone’s life, both IRL and online, and manages to do so beautifully. The doc was also one of several Netflix acquisitions at Sundance, so it’ll hopefully be streaming soon. —AW

Do you ever wonder what the likes of Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers do all day in between slashings? In A Violent Nature is just for you. It’s a classic-style slasher with a premise — troubled kid turns into an unstoppable killing machine, proceeds to haunt campground — that feels ripped right out of any number of Friday the 13th knockoffs. It’s the kind of movie where it’s hard to tell if the goofy dialogue is intentionally campy or not.

But what makes In A Violent Nature stand out in such a crowded genre is its viewpoint: you see the entire movie unfold from the villain’s perspective. And it turns out that they don’t do much at all; the film is a lot of walking around through the forest, occasionally scoping out prospective teens to kill, with brief punctuations of extreme violence.

This has a transformative effect on an otherwise derivative film. In A Violent Nature has no score, so for the most part you’re listening to the soothing sounds of nature as the killer lumbers through the woods, almost like Norwegian slow TV but horror. And the camera stays close behind the villain for most of the movie, reminiscent of third-person action games like Resident Evil. This lets the movie lull you into a false sense of security before dropping a particularly gruesome kill — which ends up hitting even harder given how intimate the view is. —AW

Were it not for lawyer-turned-entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt, SiriusXM Radio would not exist as we know it, and there would not be nearly as many people living full lives while successfully managing their pulmonary hypertension as there are today. Though many of the companies Rothblatt founded have already changed the world in demonstrably significant ways, director Peter Sillen’s documentary Love Machina tells the story of how Rothblatt and her wife Bina have committed their lives to researching experimental technology meant to immortalize people by digitizing their consciousnesses.

Simply looking at the first iteration of Bina48, the robotic bust modeled after the real Bina and outfitted with limited chatbot-level speech capabilities, it’s hard to imagine her becoming the kind of android one would think of as a true facsimile of a human being. 

But through its chronicle of how the robot’s potential has evolved in step with the development of technologies like ChatGPT, Love Machina provides a fascinating look into the Rothblatts’ minds, and tries to make their vision of the future seem like something worth really mulling over. —CPM

While the general premise of co-writer / director duo Sam and Andy Zuchero’s Love Me shares a number of similarities with Pixar’s Wall-E, the new film’s story is far more interested in unpacking what it would actually mean for a self-actualized robot to experience human feelings. Set thousands of years in the future when seemingly all organic life on Earth has long since gone extinct, Love Me tells the tale of how a solar-powered buoy (Kristen Stewart) makes contact with a satellite (Steven Yeun) in a way that puts them both on a path to transcending their original intended functions. 

It’s because of the buoy’s first encounter with the satellite (a Voyager-like repository of human history left orbiting the planet) that the buoy (a machine meant to collect information about the ocean) starts to turn its camera upward in hopes of striking up a conversation. And it’s because of the satellite’s broadcasts about how it was built to assist any living beings that it might one day encounter that the buoy teaches itself to speak. And when the satellite opens up its massive archive of the internet to the buoy in order to confirm that it’s actually a person the way it says it is, the buoy’s ability to think its way through a CAPTCHA test is its first step toward discovering what it means to exist.

Like its two main characters, Love Me transforms in fascinating ways as it moves from a beautiful but desolate CGI physical world rendered in gorgeous detail to the more nebulous, initially low-resolution reality of a metaverse game that only exists for the buoy and the satellite. It’s in that reality that Love Me reveals itself to be both a clever comedy and an imaginative drama about the messiness of defining one’s self in relation to social media. —CPM

Even though powerfully graphic, honest portrayals of gay sex are an important part of Finnish-British writer / director Mikko Mäkelä’s sophomore feature Sebastian, the most provocative thing about the film is the way it contrasts the beauty of creating art shaped by personal experience and the business of commodifying one’s identity in pursuit of fame.

With every new piece of short, erotic fiction that 25-year-old writer Max (Ruaridh Mollica) shares with his peers for feedback, they become increasingly resolute that he has an unmatched talent for turning interviews with actual sex workers into the kinds of gripping, subtle dramas that the publishing world needs more of. But as much as it pleases Max to be respected for the authenticity of the voice he writes in, he works hard to keep secret the truth of how his work is inspired by his own experiences as a sex worker. 

As it pulls you back and forth between Max’s two lives, Sebastian’s story challenges you to understand how both sex and sex work can be empowering modes of self-discovery when decoupled from shame. Max’s secret work is both cathartic for him and helps him create worlds on the page that feel real, because they partially are. But Sebastian also highlights how important it is to understand the intentionality behind creating art like Max’s — art that’s only honest to a point and also gunning for acclaim for its rawness. —CPM

When developer The Software Toolworks first published Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing in 1987, it created an iconic video game character whose name would go on to evoke powerful memories of afternoons spent in high school computer rooms for millions of people across the globe. Though countless people have come to love Mavis for her confident smile and passion for touch typing, the story of Renée L’Espérance, the Haitian-born store clerk who became the face of the Mavis Beacon franchise, is far less known. 

But with Seeking Mavis Beacon, filmmakers Jazmin Renée Jones and Olivia McKayla Ross seek to shine a bright light on L’Espérance’s life by unpacking the complicated story of how she was forced to fight to protect her image from the software company that had no idea it had created a Black pop cultural icon.

Through a series of interviews with Mavis Beacon’s developers, tech historians, and members of L’Espérance’s family, the investigative documentary digs into how — more than merely being Mavis Beacon — L’Espérance has always been a person with her own story to tell. And the documentary illustrates how some of that story is a textbook example of the many ways in which tech and entertainment can reinforce societal biases that people don’t always realize they’re absorbing. —CPM