Chris Marker's Level Five, a multilayered effort—experimental film, historical documentary, love story—from 1997, has finally come to the US, much like Eric Rohmer's A Summer's Tale and Alain Resnais's Je T'aime, Je T'aime, two other French films that never saw a stateside run until this summer. As with Resnais's time-travel film, Level Five arrives from the past to consider the past, since Marker built it around Battle of Okinawa, and the director, like the Japanese citizens who took their lives in 1945, is no longer with us (Marker died at 91 years old in 2012). In the film, Catherine Belkhodja plays programmer Laura (the name's a nod to the Otto Preminger noir), who inherits an incomplete video game about the Okinawa tragedy from her late partner. By working on the game, she keeps his memory alive—she talks to it like Joaquin Phoenix talks to his operating system in Her—while developing a deeper understanding of the Okinawans who chose death over defeat. Level Five shares little connective tissue with previous video-game films like Tron, and it's more challenging than La Jetée, Marker's best-known work (which inspired 12 Monkeys), but it confirms Marker as cinema's most empathetic essayist. by Kathy Fennessy