‘Oh Belinda’
Dilara (Neslihan Atagul Dogulu) is carefree and cruising: Her acting career is going well and she has hot sex with her hot boyfriend, Serkan (Serkan Cayoglu). One day she’s hired to star in a shampoo commercial where she plays Handan, a married woman in a traditional marriage. It’s not Dilara’s dream job but it’s a handsome paycheck so she goes along with the hassle of having to wash her hair over and over in a shower.
And then Dilara wakes up as Handan in Handan’s world. She is saddled with a hapless husband, Necati (Necip Memili), and two young children; Serkan has no idea who she is, and neither do her friends and fellow actors. Directed by Deniz Yorulmazer, this Turkish film starts off as a lighthearted, fairly conventional alternate-reality romp as Dilara is now expected to cook for an extended family, work a full-time job and take care of children, while also trying to act. But “Oh Belinda” (the title refers to the shampoo brand) gets darker, and more unsettling, as our heroine sinks deeper and deeper into her predicament — the film is not afraid of certain implications having to do with marital expectations, for example. Keeping it all together is the charismatic Atagul Dogulu, who delivers a terrific performance no matter which world she’s in.
‘Time of Roses’
Cinema history is old enough that we have reached years once thought to be so distant that directors associated them with far-fetched futuristic visions. But now we can see what the future holds when it has become our present or even, in the case of Risto Jarva’s “Time of Roses,” our recent past. The film came out in Finland in 1969 and the United States a year later, and it takes place in 2012. (The enterprising indie company Deaf Crocodile is presenting a crisply restored version of this long-unavailable gem.) Of course, it’s amusing to watch an early 21st century in which people have sex on transparent inflatable beds, use voice-activated computers and speak on video phones (two out of three ain’t bad).
The Finland of 2012 has emerged as a seemingly idyllic country from which conflict has disappeared. Jarva’s lead character is a smug enforcer of the status quo, Raimo (Arto Tuominen), who’s fixating on Saara (Ritva Vepsa), a woman who died 36 years earlier, in 1976 — are you following? He decides to make a film about her by casting, “Vertigo”-like, a doppelgänger named Kisse (Vepsa again). But all is not what it seems in the futuristic paradise: There might be hidden social unrest, not to mention that Raimo’s reconstruction of history syncs up with the ever-changing boundaries of truth and reality we are facing. All that, and the movie looks like a stylish Mod fantasia, too.
‘Executive Order’
Antônio (Alfred Enoch, who played Dean Thomas in the “Harry Potter” films) and André (the musician Seu Jorge, best known in the United States for “The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou”) have sequestered themselves in their apartment and they’re not going out. You can understand why: The government of near-future Brazil has decided to forcibly send Black citizens (now referred to as “high melanin”) on a one-way trip to Africa as a corrective to slavery — the new policy is codified in Executive Order 1888, named after the year Brazil officially abolished that practice. The two men resist the idea, to put it mildly, and since André is a blogger (“It’s coming back,” he says) and Antônio is a lawyer, they are used to politics and amplifying their causes. Quickly a resistance movement emerges to counter the efforts of the new Ministry of Return, with some members of the Black underground, including Antônio’s wife, Capitu (Taís Araújo), holed up in an “Afro-bunker.”
Lázaro Ramos’s satire often hits wide, but at its best it bares welcome teeth: a bureaucrat (Adriana Esteves) is all too happy to follow orders and round up her fellow citizens; a woman snitches on neighbors so she can secure their apartment for her daughter. The film juxtaposes these lowly practices with the contributions of Black citizens to Brazil in a manner that is both often funny and effectively emotional.
‘The Outwaters’
At its best, cosmic horror makes viewers feel as if they are tiny, powerless creatures facing something — a being, a concept, Lovecraft’s beloved non-Euclidean geometry — whose scope is so great that it is disconcertingly, disturbingly hard to grasp. What’s startling about Robbie Banfitch’s found-footage fever nightmare is that it achieves this on a budget of just $15,000. The sound design alone is terrifying sophisticated: The first scene, which features a call to 911 and blood-curling screams, is best experienced (or endured) on headphones, and the sonic tapestry only gets more evocative from there.
Four friends (Banfitch, Angela Basolis, Michelle May and Scott Schamell) drive out to the Mojave Desert to make a music video. It all goes to pot. But how? Why? “The Outwaters” is not for those looking for tidy narratives. There might be time loops but perhaps that is just the feeling of a viewer (all right: me) being discombobulated. Portals seem to figure, too, but there are no keys. And yet the movie exerts the pull of weird art at its finest: You can’t stop watching.
‘We Are Living Things’
There have been many stories of earthlings looking up at the stars, searching for signs of alien life. Chuyao (Xingchen Lyu) and Solomon (Jorge Antonio Guerrero) are two such people, scrutinizing the sky while friends and family think of them as oddballs. What differentiates Antonio Tibaldi’s film from those that have featured such observers before is that Chuyao and Solomon are immigrants, living in New York far from their homelands of China and Mexico: They, too, are aliens. Tibaldi never treats them as “other,” though: His film might be slightly austere, but it is also patient, empathetic — an atmosphere greatly enhanced by the warmth of Luca Bigazzi’s cinematography.
By day, Chuyao works in a nail salon; by night, the quietly threatening Tiger (Zao Wang) dispatches her to fetishistic encounters with various clients (he has implanted her with a tracking chip similar to the ones used for pets). She is in between worlds, just like Solomon, who does odd jobs and develops a fascination for Chuyao, whom he clearly sees as a kindred spirit. Following in the footsteps of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” the two protagonists of “We Are Living Things” end up on the road. What they are searching for might be out there, or it might not. The one thing they have found for sure is each other.
