MIRANDA PULLS IT OFF

“The Future” by Miranda July The director-actress Miranda July is also a short-story writer and artist, which means words like “fey” crop up in reviews of her films. For every critic who loved “Me and You and Everyone We Know” (2005), another was put off by its whimsy. The doubters won’t be glad to hear that the follow-up, “The Future”, features a talking cat, the Man in the Moon and someone with the psychic power to stop time in its tracks. July and Hamish Linklater play a Gen-X couple coasting along in low-stress jobs in LA, where they’ve been “gearing up to do something incredible for the past 15 years”. They’re finally forced to engage with life by the prospect of domestic responsibility. A baby on the way? Not quite. In their world, responsibility means owning a cat. But if the characters are as flaky as July’s detractors accuse her of being, the film examines their mid-youth crisis with compassion and wit. Its questions aren’t relevant just to hipsters with painstakingly unkempt hair, but to me and you and everyone we know.