Strange fruit

Preholiday M3

13th

IFC

Yes, I could have streamed this on Netflix (and you should if you're a subscriber), but (1) I'm currently getting discs from Netflix,  not streaming, and (2) I'm not an altogether rational moviegoer.

Oh, and I also wanted to see it on a big screen and among an actual audience, but in fact, the screen it was on isn't vastly bigger than the one in the bunker, and the size of the audience was only about 5 more than I usually have there.

But none of that matters. What matters is that Ava DuVernay has created a remarkable and horrible document of the way lynching has not gone away so much as evolved into inequitable laws enforced inequitably, prosecuted inequitably, and sentenced inequitably so as to evade the titular constitutional amendment's proscription against involuntary servitude. It would be a powerful call to action if the presidential election had gone differently; as it is, it's a terrifying prediction of a trend extended.

The Autopsy of Jane Doe

IFC

Well, here I was concerned that the golden age of horror films I'd been talking up was eroding. Holy crap, not so!

André Øvredal's first English-language feature (you may have seen his wonderfully wacky Trollhunter) gets us in ways we've been gotten before, but what makes the film great (yes, great)  is the brand new way it gets us: by making the slow, painstaking, ostensibly tedious process of the titular forensic procedure creepy far beyond any standard blood-and-viscera squeamishness you might bring to it.

Brian Cox's usual broadness is made for this role, and Emile Hirsch is perfectly OK, but the fresh face of Olwen Kelly is what will stick with you. I hope she isn't doomed to typecasting.

Elle

Ang

Jesus, Isabelle Huppert could give a shit what you think--we already knew that she has no fear about playing a despicable character, but she also has no fear about carrying an arguably despicable film, by veteran despicable-film maker (which is not the same as "despicable filmmaker," technically) Paul Verhoeven, and carrying it as heroically as she has carried all her nondespicable films.

Elle can fairly be described as a rape romance, though as they say on Facebook, it's complicated. I'm sure someone invested in the film's defense could make a case for its being a feminist manifesto, wherein Huppert's Michèle is only briefly a victim and is for the most part as much in control of the events of her life as she is of the events of the adolescent-boy-sex-and-violence-fantasy video games her company makes. And then there's her backstory, which strikes me as a red herring but could be served as psychological poached salmon, I suppose.

In short, it's a film I needed to see, and I don't wish I could unsee it, if only for Huppert's high-wire act, but don't try to make me watch it again.

[A footnote, which I am not making up: I dreamed the night after seeing the film that I was the willing consort of a (literally, I think) vampiric Huppert.]

Trailers

• Umi ga kikoeru (Ocean waves)--Damn, IFC loves Ghibli.
• Rester vertical (Staying vertical)--Wolves and (human) sex.
• Forushande (The salesman)--Directed by Asghar Farhadi, he of A Separation and The Past.
• Under Sandet (Land of mine)--German soldiers held in Denmark after World War II to clear mines; was the pun necessary in the English title?