The work of Swedish ad director-turned-auteur Roy Andersson defines the term sui generis. With their faded color palette, episodic structure, and pasty-faced, slow-moving actors, theyโ€™re more like live-action comic-strip panels than traditional narrative features. For those with morbid sensibilities, theyโ€™re also quite funny. A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, the third film in a trilogy about the human condition, coalesces less neatly than Songs from the Second Floor and You, the Living, but the absurdity of modern life remains the name of Anderssonโ€™s game. The film begins with two vignettes involving a heavyset man struggling to open a bottle of wine and a dying woman refusing to relinquish her purse, while the third section revolves around passive-aggressive novelty toy salesmen Sam (Nils Westblom) and Jonathan (Holger Andersson). Supporting characters include a ferryboat captain, a lonely old man, and a dance student and his instructor. The camps donโ€™t interact with each other, but rather with WWII barmaids, 18th-century kings, and whatever else the 72-year-old director can pull out of his hat. If the results are less satisfying than the previous entries in the trilogy, thereโ€™s nothing like an Andersson film, in which every scene has been painstakingly crafted for maximum visual impact. recommended