Cult animator Bill Plympton’s hand-penciled expressionism is most recognizable from his shorts, likely because his deadpan, spatial-distorting sight gags often can’t sustain momentum in feature form, almost by design. Yet his beautifully creepy fifth film, the 2008 Idiots and Angels, somehow transcends this limitation and proves his most fully realized yet, a grim fairy-tale comedy about a truculent businessman who discovers angelic wings sprouting from his back. Told without a word of dialogue, the mean bastard undergoes a spiritual awakening as his new appendages thwart his every transgression, a humiliating rise-fall-and-rise tale that affects a bar owner and his salsa-dancing wife, a conniving surgeon, and a town full of arson victims. Less concerned with gags than nimble storytelling and wide-screen aesthetics (every brooding corner of the frame is blotted in monochromatic noir hues), Plympton mines elegance from the utterly gonzo. (NR) AARON HILLIS

May 13-18, 9:30 p.m., 2011