You might not expect that sweet, 2008 robot romance WALL-E to be part of the Belcourt’s Bleak Week. Andrew Stanton’s animated, mostly silent love story between the titular trash compactor and a slim-thick droid was another Oscar-winning achievement from the Disney/Pixar alliance. But remember, this adorable tale is set against a dystopian backdrop where the planet is a desolate trash heap and the people are slothing it up in a spaceship — rocking color-changing jumpsuits, developing cankles, and buzzing around in souped-up flying gamer chairs, each of them living in their own virtual bubble. (Just writing that sentence made me miss the good ol’ days when sci-fi movies got the future wrong.) Since this screening is scheduled between a Béla Tarr film and the black-and-white version of The Mist, I guess the theater wanted to give marathon audiences something colorful (and hopeful) in the middle of this monochrome misery. Nevertheless, WALL-E still presents an unsettling, gluttonous glimpse of what could happen if we keep living through our mobile devices, regularly ordering Uber Eats, refusing to touch grass.
5:30 p.m. at the Belcourt
2102 Belcourt Ave.
