So we’ve lately started watching short films (MUBI has a bunch of them, as does Criterion) for times when a full movie seems like too much, but we want to watch something more real than Guy Fieri.

An Urban Allegory is a collaboration between Alice Rohrwacher and street artist JR. I’ve talked about how much I like Rohrwacher’s movies recently; but you may have forgotten that JR collaborated with Agnès Varda on Faces, Places — the two of them went around to French villages and he printed up giant murals of people’s faces and pasted them to buildings and silos and whatever else while Varda did her Varda documentary thing.

I was wondering what his role would be in this collaboration; I won’t spoil the story (which starts with a ballerina and her kid, and goes into unexpected places), but suffice it to say that it becomes very obvious at a certain point. It’s a good little film, working in Rohrwacher’s familiar numinous mood, propelled along by a pulsing atonal score.

Reality+ is by Coralie Fargeat, whose The Substance is in theatres and award talk right now. The premise here is that you can get an implant that will cause you to see anyone with the implant (including yourself) as super-attractive. But you can only use it 12 hours a day. And so a schlubby dude gets one, and when he meets a super-attractive woman, they end up going on dates. But of course, the fact that she sees him as attractive means that she’s also got the implant.

One thing that’s incredibly effective is that the attractive people are genuinely too attractive. They kept looking borderline-CG to me, and I don’t know if they were actually CG-juiced, or if they just cast the most modelly models ever.

Anyway, the time limit plays into the story, with some Cinderella-inspired bits; and of course the disconnect between appearances and reality ends up being made very clear. It’s all pretty good, up until an ending that’s too obvious and also too implausible.