We are obsessed with our own destruction. Somehow, perhaps, we know we can’t keep cutting down rainforests, driving vehicles with single-digit MPGs or allowing Disney to keep unleashing clones of Raven and Miley upon us. How do these societal fears of worldly limits curbing our unlimited desires manifest themselves? In fiction. The big screen. Lots of CGI.

I attended exactly three films put on by Cornell Cinema last year. In descending order of theater packedness: The Dark Knight; Waltz With Bashir; L’Enfant Sauvage. The first of these films was, well, awesome — as in the biblical sense of the word (not the contemporary, frater-natural lexicon). Waltz With Bashir was gripping — as in this graphic-novel looking thing gripped my throat and coerced me into caring about a massacre I had never heard of. L’Enfant Sauvage was boring — as in I was bored. The 18th Century frog doctor and his feral friend left me squirming in my seat before the Twizzlers and popcorn were all eaten.

Horror films and Hollywood have had a relationship that’s more like a romantic comedy. They met, they courted, there were ups, there were downs and then years of neglect and ball-and-chain treatment, and now no one even knows why they were even together in the first place … “I don’t even know you anymore!” says Hollywood. Horror Film replies: “You used to have taste! Now you’re this completely different person that doesn’t care about anything!” Leave it to the movies to be the Woody Allen character in the relationship.

Revolution is all about style.

That’s one of the lessons to be gleaned from The Baader Meinhof Complex, an excellent new film by German director Uli Edel playing this week at Cornell Cinema. In a humane and haunting manner, the movie traces the rise and fall of the Red Army Faction, which for much of the late ’60s and ’70s sought to violently enact a Marxist awakening in West Germany. Against a finely orchestrated shower of bullets and bombs, the urgency, hope and hypocrisy of those years is played out.

Starting this past Saturday, Level 2L of the Johnson museum is playing host to an unusual yet thought-provoking film installation. Looking Pretty for God, a documentary by Omer Fast, explores an unlikely relationship: a photo shoot and a funeral home. Fast, an Israeli filmmaker who recently won the 2009 Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art, challenges conventional media’s portrayal of reality. Toying with the distinction between audio and visual media in Looking Pretty for God, Fast uses interviews with funeral home employees as a means to narrate footage of a photo shoot of children. At the Johnson until Jan. 24, this pseudo-documentary may not impress you at first, but its provocative motivation gradually becomes a fun puzzle to solve.

Califone came to Cornell Cinema Friday night with a new kind of ghost story. The Chicago-area band, headed by Tim Rutili, has been enjoying critical acclaim since their self-titled release in 1998. Their music combines folk, rock and pop with a distinctively experimental edge that can suck you in with the different angles and approaches to sound and song. For this performance, however, Califone was equally concerned with both their instruments and the screen behind them. Rutili wrote and directed the just-finished All My Friends Are Funeral Singers, a film following fortuneteller Zell (Angela Bettis) and her housemates, a collection of ghosts who date, play music and play charades together while waiting for passage into the next realm.

The word “blue” can evoke a serene image of peace or the inner turmoil of despair. Both a color and a feeling, blue is the centerpiece for multimedia artist Jennifer Reeves’ When It Was Blue, a film that the artist showed at Cornell Cinema Friday night. Blue, which deals with the dangerous situation of our global environment, successfully creates a piece of art that simultaneously dazzles the eyes and rattles the brain with its images of a world at war with itself.

The newly-renovated Cinemapolis theater in downtown Ithaca continued its pattern of excellence last week when it premiered The Cove, winner of the 2009 Audience Award at the Sundance Film Festival. The Cove was only shown at two locations in New York State — and Ithaca, being the wonderful eco-friendly hippie-fest that it is, had local activists who conspired to premiere the film and to hold a follow-up discussion. You’ll all be sorry when you leave Ithaca, just you wait.

A long time ago in a galaxy that looked an awful lot like southern California, the science-fiction genre was completely redefined when George Lucas’s Star Wars hit the big screen. Since then, sci-fi films have come with a certain set of expectations: alien planets, eye-popping special effects, nerdy fan conventions where even the biggest Star Wars geek wouldn’t be caught dead … (I was 10 years old, OK? Get over it.) Basically, science-fiction has become more of an industry than a movie genre, concerned more with the marketability of action figures and video games from a summer blockbuster than with the film itself. But this is all about to change thanks to the arrival of Moon, the first feature film by Duncan Jones (David Bowie’s son).

Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips (known musically as Dean & Britta) brought Andy Warhol’s Factory to Cornell Cinema on Friday night. The duo provided the musical accompaniment for 13 Most Beautiful… Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests. Together with the Andy Warhol Museum, Dean & Britta put together a set of songs to accompany 13 four-minute, black and white silent screen tests shot by Warhol in the mid-1960s. Playing both original compositions and cover songs, the band’s distinctive pop aesthetic seemed to be influenced by 1970’s punk rock (think a pleasant Joy Division/David Bowie combination).