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Early on in “Adulthood,” siblings Meg and Noah Robles suddenly — and unhappily — learn why they never got to have a dog growing up.

It’s not because their parents didn’t think they could handle the responsibility or because dogs can be messy. It’s because there was a body walled up in the basement.

“How could our parents act like nothing ever happened?” Noah Robles asks. “That’s worse than the killing. It’s not, but still. They called it the ‘playroom.’”

That 30-year-old corpse will soon unleash a suburban comedy of errors as the bungling brother and sister — raised on TV police procedurals — try to find a way out of this mess without losing their freedom or precarious lifestyles.

“I wrote for two seasons on ‘Blue Bloods.’ I know how cops think,” says Noah Robles, a wonderfully childlike loser played by Josh Gad. His man-boy is a failed screenwriter in an Alamo Drafthouse T-shirt with maxed out credit cards.

Director Alex Winter and screenwriter Michael M.B. Galvin combine for a pitch-perfect black comedy that has a nifty satirical edge, inverting the movie convention of discovering that the kids are monsters.

Meg — played with lovely comic timing by a languid Kaya Scodelario — brings her young children to a dangerous payoff meet because she couldn’t get child care and loses her cool when she’s mocked for missing a yoga class. “Have a good day. Make good choices,” she tells her kids even as she clearly doesn’t.

Not long after the body in the basement is found, more bodies start piling up, as does the extortion, sword play, swirling detectives and so-called heavies who look the part even if they’re really lambs. If you liked “Fargo,” “Adulthood” is for you. It’s all about the noose slowly tightening.

“Once we do this, there’s no going back, Meg. Even years from now you’ll think about it when you’re trying to get to sleep,” the brother tells his sister as they decide what to do about the body. “It’ll pop in your head at random times.”

Winter keeps the tension tight but nicely steps off the gas for some neat touches — like a conversation between the siblings about moving on that’s set against a child’s flag-football game — while both Gad and Scodelario take turns being the strong one.

He offers advice about not leaving evidence while moving a dead body — “You should put some towels down” — and she juggles mundane tasks like Zoom meetings and checking her son’s glucose levels with slamming a hammer into someone’s skull, like just another task for stressed-out parents these days.

Fitting for a movie with an actual skeleton in a closet, “Adulthood” is about legacy and how we become our parents. It’s also about recognizing that our parents are human and complicated.

Very rarely do such movies end well. They peter out or ramp up the violence to absurd and pointless levels. “Adulthood” finds the sweet spot and lands the thing perfectly. If you think Meg and Noah are monsters, what would you do in a similar situation? There are probably monsters like that everywhere. They even might be in the foldable chair next to you at the flag football game.

“Adulthood,” a Republic Pictures release that opens in select theaters on Friday and streams on Sept. 23, is rated R for “violence, language throughout, drug use and brief sexual material.” Running time: 97 minutes. Three stars out of four.

There weren’t many Black students at the Royal College of Art when Joy Gregory was a student in the 1980s, but she did study alongside artist and Blk Art Group founder Keith Piper, who was putting together a Black photography exhibition. “He asked me if I would submit some work,” says the 65-year-old artist.

Piper had liked her work, which explored themes of colonialism, beauty, gender and race. However, her submission was rejected by the organisers on the basis that it simply wasn’t Black enough. “You have to recognise the political climate at that time around practice and making a mark and I was basically taking pictures of flowers,” says Gregory. “For me, you have the right to make whatever work you want. By shutting down what can and cannot be, you start to censor yourself. I was a bit pissed off, thinking: why should you pander to what people think you should be and sit within the box that they’ve created?”

Understanding the capabilities of photography has always been of great importance to Gregory, who was given the £110,000 Freelands award in 2023. It’s a journey that began by experimenting with lots of self-portraits. Her 1990 work Autoportrait is perhaps what she is best known for. It’s a set of nine individual black-and-white self-portraits, each one uniquely angled. “I think for years people thought that was the only work I had ever made,” she says.

Gregory’s body of work spans media ranging from still life to portraiture to film to textiles and explores identity, cultural memory and linguistic traditions. More than 250 of her works will be on display at her retrospective Catching Flies With Honey at London’s Whitechapel Gallery from October. Visitors to the show can expect to see series such as The Blonde, which examines Eurocentric ideas of beauty and Language of Flowers, inspired by the Victorians’ symbolic use of flowers to communicate messages.

She’ll also be debuting a piece that has taken two decades to make. “The new commission, if I ever manage to pull it off, looks at research I’ve been doing since 2003 on endangered languages. I’ve been working with a single community and family for over 20 years. A lot of people that I worked with on it have died, and they expected something to happen eventually, so it was important to have some sort of object to show to the community.”

Born in Bicester in England in 1959 to Jamaican parents, Gregory was creative from a young age. She painted, drew, made clothes and read at least one book a day. “We lived near a bindery, so when the company would throw books out that had mistakes, they would end up in a dumpster and I would pick those books out and sit and read them.” She got her first camera for her 18th birthday, which she says cost her family “all the money that they ever had”.

Gregory’s dreams have always been simple: “My aspirations were about making good work.” Since the early days, she has prioritised innovation. Be it cyanotype or salt printing, photography techniques are as important as the subject matter in creating a memorable, singular image. “With digital, everything can be absolutely perfect all the time. But I’m interested in the idea of human intervention,” says Gregory. “Each one of these prints being unique and not repeatable. The perfection becomes about the human touch.”

Joy to the world: five works from the Whitechapel

Memory and Skin, 1998
“Memory and Skin was the first major commission that I had. It was about exploring the relationship between Europe and the Caribbean. Having grown up in a Caribbean family in Europe, you become bilingual, bicultural. It was about being able to look between the two, [and explore] people’s assumptions about Europe and what they thought of the Caribbean.”

The Fairest, 1999 (main image)
“I got on to the idea of: why would anyone want to become blond? I chose some people from European and non-European backgrounds to talk about what it was like being blond and that became the film The Fairest.”

The Blonde, 1997–2010
“In 1998, there were suddenly a lot of non-European people with blond hair,” says Gregory. “Be they from Asia, Africa or the Caribbean, they were turning the notion of what it is to be a blond on its head. Blond had always been seen as something very European, but it was also about being an object of desire, feeding into the whole Marilyn Monroe thing. There were furious rants on chatrooms about these people betraying their race, but they were playing with the idea of being able to choose your identity, which was really fascinating.”

The Handbag Project, 1998-present
“These are handbags I brought back from South Africa. When I got back to London, I just wanted to do something very physical, and salt printing is a really interesting process. You coat the paper with salt, dry it, then coat it with silver nitrate. Each time you make a print, it would be a surprise when you put it out in the sun.”

Language of Flowers, 1992-2004
“The reason for using cyanotype for Language of Flowers is because it was Victorian language and a Victorian process. [English botanist and photographer] Anna Atkins used cyanotypes and photography, and put plants on to sensitive paper as a way of recording what was present in the world at that time. Everything is so fragile, and it’s interesting how we’re always looking for permanence as a way of holding on.”

Catching Flies With Honey is at Whitechapel Gallery, London, from 8 October to 1 March.

NEW YORK — France announced Wednesday that it has selected the Iranian director Jafar Panahi’s Palme d’Or-winning drama “It Was Just an Accident” as its submission to the Academy Awards.

The selection gives an Oscar pathway to a film that Iran was certain not to select itself. Panahi, who has spent much of the last 15 years either under house arrest, banned from travel or incarcerated, made “It Was Just an Accident,” like his previous films, in his native Iran without government permission.

Only countries can make submissions for the Academy Awards best international category, a process that has drawn criticism for allowing authoritarian regimes to dictate which films are eligible for one of the most contested Oscars. A year ago, Germany submitted “The Seed of the Sacred Fig” by Panahi’s friend and countryman, Mohammad Rasoulof. In April, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences tweaked its rules to allow filmmakers with refugee or asylum status to be represented by a country not their own.

“It Was Just an Accident” is Panahi’s first film since he was released from jail two years ago, following a hunger strike. He edited the film in France, co-financed it with a French company and, for the first time in more than a decade, traveled out of Iran to premiere the film in May at the Cannes Film Festival. There, it won the festival’s top award and was acquired by Neon, which is planning an awards campaign.

“Let us join forces,” Panahi said when accepting the Palme d’Or. “No one should dare tell us what kind of clothes we should wear, what we should do or what we should not do. The cinema is a society. Nobody is entitled to tell what we should or refrain from doing.”

“It Was Just an Accident” is a revenge drama in which a group of former prisoners find the man they think could have been their torturer in prison. But because they were blindfolded while jailed, they struggle to be sure. Panahi drew from his own experience imprisoned in Tehran.

“It was the experience of all these people I met in prison, mixed with my own perception and experience,” Panahi said in an interview in Cannes. “The fact of never seeing the face of your interrogator is everyone’s experience.”

France selected Panahi’s film over several shortlisted films including Richard Linklater’s French-language ode to the New Wave, “Nouvelle Vague,” Rebecca Zlotowski’s “A Private Life” and the animated feature “Arco.” In recent years, France has sometimes been slammed for its choices. It passed over Justine Triet’s “Anatomy of a Fall” in 2023, though it was nominated for best picture, and skipped Céline Sciamma’s acclaimed 2019 drama “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.”

Despite having one of the most robust and respected film industries, France hasn’t won the international Oscar since 1993 with “Indochine.”

The 98th Academy Awards will be presented on March 15, 2026, in Los Angeles.