Problemista

Julio Torres had an audience well before he stood behind a camera: he wrote sketches for 'Saturday Night Live' and created 'Los Espookys' for HBO with Fred Armisen and Ana Fábrega. 'Problemista' is his first film as a director, he wrote it and he stars in it, and A24 produced it with Emma Stone and Dave McCary among the producers. Torres drew on his own years as a Salvadoran immigrant.

Alejandro lives in Bushwick and dreams of designing toys for Hasbro, and he pitches it ideas like a smartphone for Cabbage Patch Kids. For now the wages come from an archivist job at FreezeCorp, a company that freezes artists without yet having the technology to revive them, and his task is to watch over the body and the work of Bobby, a painter of giant eggs who climbed into the pod banking on success later. One slip with the backup generator leaves him jobless and with thirty days to find someone to sponsor his visa.

In walks Elizabeth, an art critic and Bobby's wife, who promises that sponsorship if he puts together an exhibition of her frozen husband's thirteen paintings. The arrangement rests on her word alone, and her word changes by the day. Meanwhile Alejandro can't legally be paid a penny, so he sublets his bedroom and takes whatever cash work Craigslist turns up to cover the lawyers. Isabella Rossellini narrates the whole thing like a fairy tale.

Shooting started in New York in November 2021, with Fredrik Wenzel behind the camera and a score by Robert Ouyang Rusli. The release was set for August 2023 and the actors' strike pushed it back to 1 March 2024, a year after the film had played SXSW. A24 opened it in five cinemas and widened it to nearly four hundred, for a final take of around 2.7 million dollars.

The cast also holds Tilda Swinton as Elizabeth, RZA, Greta Lee, James Scully and Chilean actor Catalina Saavedra as the hero's mother. It picked up two Independent Spirit nominations, for best first feature and best first screenplay, and American reviewers warmed to it far more than the British ones did. British cinemas never got it: it turned up here straight to digital on 8 July 2024, and you can rent or buy it on Prime Video and Apple TV.

• Comedy