Remember Henry Fool? In Hal Hartley's sequel of sorts to his 1997 opus, titular heroine Fay Grim embarks on a quest to discover the “unbelievable truth” about that fool Fool, with whom she had a son years ago. As an implacably devoted wife and mother, the unsinkable Grim (delightfully played by Parker Posey, channeling Louise Lasser in the venerable seventies faux-soap Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman), with an overflowing bag of groceries clutched to her chest, finds herself enmeshed in an ever-tightening web of clues, crimes, and international espionage that take her from the kitchen table to the Bosporus Straits via the top hotels and boudoirs of Paris. Applying his inimitable mix of tragicomic melodrama and machine-gun dialogue, Hartley pays homage to Fassbinder's brave heroines, Godard's cinematic wit, and the screwball universe of Howard Hawks in this epic for our twisted times. Employing the talents of several members of Hartley's prodigiously gifted thespian corps, Fay Grim features the stone-faced James Urbaniak (as Simon Grim, the “garbageman/poet of Woodside, Queens”), Elina Löwensohn (as the mysterious Bebe Konchalovsky), Thomas Jay Ryan (reprising his role as pompous prose peddler Henry), and Jeff Goldblum (as CIA lead operative and arch-villain Agent Fulbright). Filmed in stunningly saturated high-definition color, the angular, oblique optics of Fay Grim cast a bright beam of light upon the darkness of our days.