Lars von Trier has never been shy to burnish his reputation as the malevolent puppet master of his protagonists’ misfortune, but never quite so literally as in this playful documentary. One of the great films about filmmaking, The Five Obstructions is a reflexive marvel of cinematic problem solving.

Conjuring a claustrophobic vision of post-nuclear Poland, Piotr Szulkin lends his satirical eye to the weaponization of religion as a means of social control. A utilitarian triumph of ramshackle world-building, O-Bi, O-Ba is a hallucinatory examination of apocalyptic anxieties in the atomic age.

Drawing on Jewish legend, this Kafkaesque work of speculative science fiction is the debut feature by one of the great visionaries of the 20th century. From a nightmarish world of gods and monsters, Piotr Szulkin forges a modern Prometheus as a potent allegory for Poland’s Communist experiment.

Taking inspiration from Pasolini’s La Ricotta, Piotr Szulkin closes his “Apocalyptic Tetralogy” with an anarchic riff on the Passion of Christ. The funniest of the four films, Ga-Ga: Glory to the Heroes is a rich sci-fi allegory that puts the European colonial project in its satirical crosshairs.