You’ll want to watch a Japanese martial arts musical done entirely in rap, a film made illegally by a director banned from working, and a thriller shot in a one long take — and here’s where to find them.
1. Amour Fou
Film Movement
In 1811, at the age of 34, the lauded German writer Heinrich von Kleist shot Henriette Vogel and then himself in a suicide pact. Not the obvious stuff of comedy, but filmmaker Jessica Hausner finds desert-dry humor in approaching the deaths from the point of view of Henriette (Birte Schnöink), whose sensible life of bourgeois comfort is shaken up by Kleist's (Christian Friedel) befuddling attentions and a diagnosis of a terminal illness.
Kleist's proposal that Henriette die with him is pure, biting 19th century-style negging, as he informs her that she's not his first choice, but that she struck him as a fellow unloved outsider — news to the wife and mother, who'd felt plenty loved until that point. Still, she considers his offer, because Kleist talks of love and melancholia and sure seems like a man who feels strongly and wildly, even if his desire for a companion in death actually reads like a capping act of monstrous vanity. Amour Fou zestfully slices and dices romanticism, with Hausner arranging the characters in tableaus like they're constantly and uncomfortably posing for portraits. Sentimentality about the past has never looked sillier.
Where to see it: Amour Fou just came out on DVD and Blu-ray, and is also available for rent online.
2. Nasty Baby
The Orchard
Nasty Baby starts as a sun-dappled slice of boho Brooklyn life and ends someplace much darker. The trick is all in how it slides from one to the other, setting up hints of what's to come without giving away how far it's willing to go. It is, anyway, easy to assume the movie is uncomplicatedly about investing its sympathies in its trio of main characters, a couple played by director Sebastián Silva and TV on the Radio's Tunde Adebimpe, with Kristen Wiig as the bestie with whom they're trying to get pregnant. This is the stuff earnest indie films are made of.
They're progressive, good-intentioned people who are pursuing their passions (Silva's character is an artist channeling his feelings about wanting a baby into his work) and building a family of choice in their pretty stretch of Fort Greene, Brooklyn. It's an urban paradise marred only by the presence of an unstable man (Reg E. Cathey) who's a holdover on the mostly gentrified block, a remnant of the neighborhood before it became a community of well-heeled creatives. The turn the film takes isn't a twist so much as a devastating reframing of what sort of story we've been watching, a reminder that there are serious qualifications on the inclusiveness these characters are so sure they represent. It's the kind of bold shift that makes you squirm, long after the movie's over.
Where to see it: Nasty Baby is playing in a few theaters in New York and Los Angeles and is available everywhere for digital rental.
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