Under the Silver Lake

Mitchell's shaggy, divisive neo-noir sends an aimless slacker chasing a vanished neighbor through a Los Angeles riddled with hidden messages, secret societies, and pop-culture conspiracies that may be revelation or may be the delusions of a man with nothing better to do. It is deliberately overstuffed and unresolved, a hypnotic, paranoid wander through the city's myths and its rot. Andrew Garfield plays entitlement curdling into obsession. It is a film about the human hunger to find meaning in noise, and about Los Angeles as the capital of beautiful, empty signs. It frustrates on purpose, and rewards a certain kind of patience.