It’s only early September, but the Halloween horror glut is already beginning to congeal. (Actually, it’s a little hard to tell, thanks to the increasingly hypoxic stranglehold the genre has on American film distribution, but I digress. More on the State of Cinema below.)

Of the three new frightful flicks debuting this week, the most original, interesting, and scary was the one with the tiniest budget and the lowest profile. That would be the deceptively named Booger. Director Mary Dauterman’s first feature is not, as one might fear, a disgusting, mucus-based piece of body horror, but a darkly comic, smartly acted allegory about grief, loss, and hairballs. Booger, you see, is the name of the cat that Anna (Grace Glowicki) and her best friend/roommate Izzy (Sofia Dobrushin) adopt shortly before Izzy’s sudden and unexpected death. When Booger escapes out their New York City apartment window after biting Anna, she becomes obsessed with finding the feline. Before long, the poor girl finds herself becoming uncontrollably fascinated by small birds, sporting increasingly sharp teeth, and, yes, coughing up some grody gobs of black fur.

It’s something of a Gen-Z version of Nightbitch, the Rachel Yoder novel (and upcoming Amy Adams film) about a new mother who turns into a dog at night to escape her tedious maternal existence. But Dauterman’s film has a slant of its own, as Anna’s physically transformative experience contrasts with her refusal to emotionally process Izzy’s death. It’s largely a one-woman show for Glowicki, and an impressive one at that, conjuring a twitchy passivity in Anna that feels like a genuine trauma response while it also leans into her surreal dilemma. There are a pair of nice supporting performances, one from Marcia DeBonis (who was also great in Sometimes I Think About Dying) as Izzy’s mother and another, briefer one from the always welcome Heather Matarazzo as a kindly pet shop owner. At barely 75 minutes, Booger is smart enough, in catlike fashion, to do what it does and let you be on your way. (Opens Friday 9/13 at Living Room Theaters)

Which is more terrifying: teenagers or old people? Sadly, we don’t get any closer to answering that age-old riddle by watching Here After and The Front Room, each of which demonizes one of those demographics. Even more sadly, both are lazy, ham-fisted efforts that squander the efforts of talented leads. Connie Britton (Friday Night Lights, The White Lotus, etc.) deserves better than the role of Claire, an American who teaches English in a picturesque Italian city. (On the other hand, she did presumably get a trip to a picturesque Italian city out of the deal.) Claire’s teenaged daughter Robin (Freya Hannan-Mills) is a violin prodigy who suffers from selective muteness. When Robin is severely injured in an accident, Claire’s prayers are answered and she is revived after being declared dead for several minutes. In classic monkey’s paw fashion, however, the resuscitated Robin seems to have had her switch turned to “evil.” She begins speaking again, but most of what she says to her mother is downright rude, and that’s the least of her quirks. Turns out, to no one’s surprise, that some buried trauma in the kid’s backstory is responsible, and Claire will have to come to terms with a terrible decision she made years earlier. If you can make it to the final act of this dreary drama, there’s a nicely staged set piece that gives Britton a bit of a chance to shine. But it doesn’t come close to justifying the previous 80 minutes.

More skillfully crafted, but also more off-putting, is the directing debut of Max and Sam Eggers, the twin brothers of auteur Robert Eggers (The Lighthouse, The Northman). I’m not saying that their film The Front Room wouldn’t have been picked up by boutique distributor A24 without the family connection, but I’m not not saying it. In it, onetime teen sensation and pop star Brandy Norwood, in her most prominent acting role in years, gives a compelling performance as the very pregnant Belinda, whose husband Norman (Andrew Burnap) finds out that his estranged father has died. Despite Andrew’s qualms, the couple takes in his ailing stepmother Solange (Kathryn Hunter, who was so memorable as The Witches in Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth), at least partially so that she keeps them in her will. To put it mildly, Solange is not the ideal house guest, insisting on using the planned nursery as her bedroom and inviting her creepy prayer group over to meet. There’s also the matter of the crumpled certificate of membership in the Daughters of the Confederacy that pops up. (Belinda is Black and Norman is white.)

Once Belinda gives birth, Solange ramps up her campaign of elder terror, culminating in acts of willful mattress befoulment that bring back unpleasant memories of M. Night Shyamalan’s similarly, grossly gerontophobic The Visit. Dealing with aging relatives is one of those nearly ubiquitous traumas that don’t really need to be cartoonishly exaggerated to be effectively disturbing. Neither is the anxiety and exhaustion of new motherhood. And yet the Eggers boys force their heroine, besieged by a baby who won’t stop crying and a racist stepmother-in-law who won’t stop shitting the bed, to endure enough abuse to get us to the abrupt and underwhelming end of The Front Room’s 94-minute running time. It can’t come soon enough. (Currently playing at the Hollywood Theatre, Regal Fox Tower, and other locations)

It’s probably not good form to fail to mention the week’s best new film until this far down the page, but consider it a special treat just for you for making it this far. The Belgian pair of Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon have produced a series of whimsical, heartfelt fables over the last several years, and their latest, The Falling Star, is a delightful continuation of that trend. In it, a former political radical named Boris (Abel), on the run for decades, is working as a small-town bartender when a stranger with an artificial arm shows up and makes an attempt on his life. Realizing he’s been found out, Boris and his two cohorts (Kaori Ito and Philippe Martz) decide on the obvious course of action: they’ll find a lookalike, Dom (also Abel), drug and abduct him, and force him to stand in at the bar in case the vengeance-seeking gunman returns. Meanwhile, Boris takes Dom’s place in the home he shares with his estranged wife, Fiona (Gordon). The classic mistaken-identity setup leads to an increasingly zany series of deadpan slapstick shenanigans, accentuated by the physical contortions that Abel and Gordon have demonstrated throughout their careers. (They met while studying theater and movement in Paris, and have been partners ever since.)

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The Falling Star isn’t as wide-eyed as Abel and Gordon’s previous films, which include The Fairy and Lost in Paris. There’s more than a hint of political consciousness, and a whim of film noir to the narrative. The Keatonesque vibe and the unexpected, synchronized dance numbers keep things from getting too serious, and the writer-director-star duo, as ever, manage to imbue even the silliest of situations with an aura of human longing for connection.

Here’s where we come back to the State of Cinema I mentioned up above. This charming, smart movie is playing on exactly one screen in the entire Northwest, at the Kiggins Theater in Vancouver. I love the Kiggins Theater, and I’m grateful that they are giving moviegoers an opportunity to see The Falling Star on the big screen. But it’s a troubling indicator of Portland’s once-thriving independent film exhibition scene that, for instance, two of the city’s most justly beloved indie theaters, the Hollywood and Cinema 21, are devoting precious real estate to Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (and, in the Hollywood’s case, the aforementioned The Front Room). Now, I feel sure that the excellent folks who operate and program those venues would rather be screening more diverse, eccentric, and, frankly, interesting films than a warmed-over legacy sequel and a mediocre horror flick. But the folks who used to buy tickets for new arthouse movies just haven’t, presumably, made it financially feasible for them to do so. Less surprising but equally frustrating is the lineup this week at the corporate-owned Regal Fox Tower, once upon a time downtown Portland’s ground zero for movies like The Falling Star. Opening there this Friday are (a) the right-wing pseudo-documentary provocation Am I Racist?; (b) the studio thriller Speak No Evil; and (c) Kevin Smith’s latest stab at a return to relevance, The 4:30 Movie. (None of which, for what it’s worth, were made available for review.) They’ve also got Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, The Front Room, and Deadpool & Wolverine, in case you were lacking in options for those titles.

This isn’t a Portland problem, of course, and the city and state are still blessed with a bevy of boutique exhibitors who try their damnedest to provide alternatives to the pop behemoths that, regardless of their quality, tend to suck all the oxygen out of the cultural conversation. Not to be blunt, but the problem, if you’re someone who regularly reads this column and yet consistently waits for things to show up on Hulu or Netflix, might be you. (Falling Star opens Friday 9/13 at the Kiggins Theatre)

STREAMING PICK

Watching movies at home is, of course, perfectly acceptable when the movies in question are ninety years old. That’s the case with the films in the Criterion Channel’s new featured collection “Rebels at the Typewriter: Women Screenwriters of the 1930s.” Most of these sixteen titles were produced in the pre-Code era, when studios had the freedom to churn out more provocative content than they would once Will Hays took them to task. Female characters, especially, were allowed to be complex, flawed, and licentious, and it should come as no surprise that many of those characters were written by female screenwriters.

Among the certified classics included are 1933’s star-studded Dinner at Eight, the 1937 weepie Make Way for Tomorrow, and Jean Harlow’s 1932 breakthrough, Red-Headed Woman. But the lesser-known titles can be just as entertaining.

George Cukor’s 1932 showbiz drama What Price Hollywood? is a proto-A Star Is Born in which a waitress at the Brown Derby (the adorable Constance Bennett) gets discovered by an alcoholic director (Lowell Sherman, who also directed movies including Mae West’s She Done Him Wrong and Katherine Hepburn’s Morning Glory). She proceeds to eclipse his fame, along the way marrying a narcissistic polo star played by Neil Hamilton, eventually best known as Commissioner Gordon on the Adam West Batman series. It’s an early example of the sort of Tinseltown cynicism that would find full expression in things like Nathaniel West’s novel Day of the Locust, with a swan song performance from Sherman, who died of pneumonia two years later at the age of 46.

Finishing School, released in 1934, is a more typical pre-code programmer. Teenaged, intentionally named Virginia (Frances Dee) is deposited at a posh finishing school by her haughty mother (Billie Burke, aka Glinda the Good Witch) to learn all the important skills a society lady needs, i.e., how to greet British royalty and which fork to use during which course. She had nothing but goody-two-shoes intentions, but falls in with a rebellious crowd led by equestrian-obsessed Ginger Rogers and finds herself in Dutch with headmistress Beulah Bondi. When she falls in love with the med student moonlighting as a hotel waiter who saves her from a date rape, both mom and schoolmarm disapprove. The scenes of booze-fueled debauchery have a nasty edge to them, and Dee, who would go on to star in Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked with a Zombie, gives her character some depth.

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The real find, however, is 1933’s Midnight Mary, in which the stunning Loretta Young, sitting in her attorney’s office during jury deliberations following her murder trial, recounts the events that led her to this point. The movie’s a socially conscious exploitation pic, as a poverty-stricken, orphaned Mary gets unjustly convicted of shoplifting and shipped off to reform school. She then escapes, turns to prostitution as a 16-year-old, falls in with a criminal gang, gets redeemed by a rich lawyer (Franchot Tone), gets a secretarial job, then gets ensnared by her sordid past—all in the first 45 or so minutes! A breakneck pace, Depression-era fatalism, great supporting work from the invaluable Una Merkel, and, most of all, the luminous visage of Young make this a winner that holds up decades later. It’s bracing to see the 20-year-old Young, best known for her wholesome 1950s TV image and as a card-carrying Hollywood conservative, dig into such seamy material. (All films currently streaming on the Criterion Channel)

ALSO THIS WEEK

Join or Die: In 1995, political scientist Robert Putnam wrote an essay that was published in The Atlantic Monthly called “Bowling Alone.” It argued that so-called “social capital” in America has been in a precipitous decline as fewer and fewer people joined civic organizations or participated in group activities such as bowling leagues. Expanded into a book in 2000, it remains an influential work, especially in light of the increasing cultural and political polarization that has occurred in the last twenty years. This documentary revisits, in the post-January 6 world, whether and how it’s possible to reverse this trend. The filmmakers, Pete and Rebecca Davis, score some high profile interviews, including with Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, Pete Buttigieg, and Hillary Clinton, as well as Putnam himself, still cheerfully encouraging us to join as many clubs as we can at the age of 83. Maybe he’s got a point. (Sunday, 9/15, Clinton Street Theater, 1 p.m.)

ALSO OF NOTE

FRIDAY 9/13: Director Alan Rudolph’s 1980 rock’n’roll road movie Roadie stars Meat Loaf himself as Texas’s most prized roadie. Blondie, Alice Cooper, and Roy Orbison also appear, as does Art Carney! (Hollywood, 7:30 p.m.)

FRIDAY 9/13 through THURSDAY 9/19: In Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s landmark 1999 J-horror Cure, a Tokyo cop investigates a bizarre series of murders committed by people who claim they were being controlled by outside forces. (Academy Theater, check website for times)

SATURDAY 9/14: POW Girls, the youth program of the Portland Oregon Women’s Film Festival, celebrates its 10th anniversary with a free screening of some of the best work to come out of the program over the last decade. (Hollywood, 2 p.m.)

SATURDAY 9/14: Tribute is paid to the late Alain Delon with a screening of his most iconic role, Jef Costello in Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 masterpiece Le Samouraï. (Hollywood, 6:30 p.m.)

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SATURDAY 9/14 through Wednesday 9/18: A new 4K restoration of Wim Wenders’s haunting 1984 drama Paris, Texas, written by Sam Shepard and starring Harry Dean Stanton (in perhaps his finest role), Dean Stockwell, and Natassja Kinski. (Cinema 21, check website for times)

SATURDAY & SUNDAY 9/14-9/15: The efforts of the participants in this year’s Portland 48 Hour Film Project, all written, shot, and edited over the previous weekend, will be showcased over two days. (Clinton Street, 3 p.m. & 7 p.m. Saturday, 5 p.m. Sunday)

SATURDAY 9/14, SUNDAY 9/15, TUESDAY 9/17: Cinemagic’s series of directing debuts continues into a second week, including Paul Thomas Anderson’s first feature, 1996’s Hard Eight, featuring a great performance from the late Philip Baker Hall, plus nice work from John C. Reilly, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Samuel L. Jackson. (Cinemagic, 9:15 p.m. Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday & Tuesday)

SUNDAY 9/15: The Catalyst Film Collective and Women in Film—Portland present Rise: A Community Cinema Showcase, a selection of short films made by their members, connected by themes of resiliency and self-knowledge. (Cinema 21, 6:30 p.m.)

TUESDAY 9/17: The latest opportunity to sample the seemingly endless variety of cinematic oddness culled from the Dennis Nyback Archive comes as two programming teams improvise their selections over the course of the evening. (Clinton Street, 7 p.m.)

TUESDAY 9/17: The inspiration for, and creation of, the state-of-the-art studio in Greenwich Village that was the brainchild of the legendary guitarist is chronicled in the documentary Electric Lady Studios: A Jimi Hendrix Vision. (Hollywood, 7:30 p.m.)

WEDNESDAY 9/18: 1970s Hollywood disaster movies don’t come any more star-studded than 1974’s The Towering Inferno. Paul Newman! William Holden! Faye Dunaway! Steve McQueen! Fred Freaking Astaire! (Also, O.J. Simpson…) A new restoration on the Hollywood’s biggest screen should be hot. (Hollywood, 7 p.m.)

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WEDNESDAY 9/18: Church of Film presents Flower Storm: Animation in Iran, a selection of experimental works created over the last several decades. (Clinton, 7 p.m.)

THURSDAY 9/19: The Oregon Media Production Association presents Cine/Seen 2024, a collection of shorts from Oregon-based filmmakers that highlight the contributions of underrepresented and underserved artists. (Hollywood, 7:30 p.m)