内容摘要：Sukuram Tamang, 50, stands with his goat in front of where his house once stood after it was damaged by recent landslides in Melamchi, northeast of Kathmandu, Nepal, on Saturday, Sept. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha)

Sukuram Tamang, 50, stands with his goat in front of where his house once stood after it was damaged by recent landslides in Melamchi, northeast of Kathmandu, Nepal, on Saturday, Sept. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Niranjan Shrestha)

“Universal Language,” scripted by Rankin, Ila Firouzabadi and Pirouz Nemati, lightly juggles a handful of characters we intermittently check in with. That includes an adult tour guide (Pirouz Nemati), whose attractions include the site of “the Great Parallel Parking Incident of 1958.” There are also two girls (Rojina Esmaeili and Saba Vahedyousefi) who find a banknote frozen in ice. A character named Matthew Rankin (played by Rankin) is traveling to Winnipeg by bus to visit his ailing mother after departing his bureaucratic job in Montreal. Oh, and there are turkeys. Lots and lots of turkeys.Rankin’s film, his second following the also surreal “Twentieth Century” (2019), is propelled less by narrative thrust than the abiding oddity of its basic construction, and the movie’s slavish devotion to seeing it through without a wink. As the movie moves along in formally composed shots, something wistful takes shape about the possibilities of connection and of insurmountable distances.

I’ve twice now seen “Universal Language,” a prize-winner in Cannes’ Directors Fortnight last year that was shortlisted for the best international Oscar, and I still barely believe it exists. Rankin’s movie, in melding two worlds, risks taking place in neither, of letting its cinephile concept snuff out anything authentic. But while I’m not, at the moment, begging for a subsequent French New Wave movie set in Saskatchewan, I’ve not gone long without thinking about “Universal Language.” I guess Rankin’s movie dream has filtered into those of my own.“Universal Language,” an Oscilloscope Laboratories. release, is not rated by the Motion Picture Association. In Farsi and French. Running time: 89 minutes. Three and a half stars out of four.As they so often do in Marvel Land, worlds collide in

But in this refreshingly earthbound iteration of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the collision isn’t a matter of interplanetary strife. “Thunderbolts” has been touted as the unlikely meeting of two of the dominant forces in 21st century American movies: Marvel and A24.This isn’t a co-production, but much of the creative team and many of the stars have ties to the indie studio. “Thunderbolts” is directed by Jake Schreier, who has directed many episodes of the A24 series “Beef,” and was written by Joanna Calo (also a “Beef” veteran) and Eric Pearson (a Marvel veteran). The connections go further: cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo (“A Ghost Story,” “The Green Knight”), editor Harry Yoon (“Minari”) and a score by the band Son Lux (“Everything Everywhere All At Once”).

Some trailers for “Thunderbolts” have highlighted these connections, perhaps in hopes of a little A24 auteur cool rubbing off on Hollywood’s superhero factory. It’s also a sign of how rough things have gotten for Marvel that, after a string of misfires, it’s leaning on the studio behind

for its latest would-be blockbuster.Opposition factions are using social media to urge people to not vote Sunday, arguing that casting votes legitimizes Maduro’s government. But voters have grown accustomed to opposition leaders promoting boycotts on and off for years without delivering the promised change.

The strategy is destined to fail again without unanimity.“The government has co-opted some opposition (parties) and there’s other opposition that are just tired of this strategy that’s never worked,” said David Smilde, a Tulane University professor who has studied Venezuela for 30 years. “So, what you are going to have is a partial boycott, which means the government is going to cruise to victory and can say, ‘We had elections, the opposition didn’t participate.’ It’s going to backfire on the opposition.”

Associated Press writers Aamer Madhani in Washington and Jorge Rueda in Caracas, Venezuela, contributed to this report.Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at