Planetarium (2016)

Planetarium is the kind of movie that feels like a séance itself: candlelit, alluring, and just uncertain enough to keep you leaning forward, listening for what might be real. Rebecca Zlotowski turns 1930s Paris into a dreamlike corridor between art and illusion, where the camera, the stage, and the spirit world all seem to share the same thin air, and Natalie Portman and Lily-Rose Depp make the sisterly bond both intimate and quietly volatile. The pleasure here isn’t in tidy answers but in the film’s haunted imagery and velvety atmosphere, as a visionary producer’s obsession with capturing the unseeable starts to blur desire, performance, and belief. It’s not for viewers who need every thread neatly tied—its ambition can feel deliberately elusive—but if you’re in the mood for a richly textured, mysterious period fantasia, this one lingers like perfume on a coat long after you’ve left the theater.

Planetarium wants to be a dreamy, pre-war Paris fever dream about faith, fraud, cinema, and desire, with two sisters’ séances colliding with a producer’s obsession to bottle the supernatural on film. The problem is it often feels like it’s drifting rather than building: scenes are gorgeously moody but the story can come off unfocused, with mysteries that blur into confusion instead of tension. If you’re expecting a tight mystery, a satisfying supernatural payoff, or real narrative momentum, this may test your patience. Still, Portman and Depp have an intriguing, fragile chemistry and the period atmosphere is striking, so it can work if you’re in the mood for style, mood, and ambiguity over clarity and catharsis.