The formal wrinkle in describing the plot of Failed State is that Dale is actually Dale. The deliveries the film shows him making are actual deliveries to actual clients, mixed in with lightly devised moments, mixed in with more rigidly-constructed narrative beats.

In Ovid, New York, the feature film debut of Vito A. Rowlands, transmuting Ovid and his various meandering Metamorphoses through locales and locals more familiar to his own life, the Belgian-born, Greenpoint-based filmmaker handily articulates the form in which myth finds a most welcome and restless bedmate: the disparate motion of light, body, and time we call “cinema.”