So, do you want the bad news first or the good news?

The two most notable films opening this week occupy nearly opposite ends of the optimism spectrum. Each is expertly crafted, impressively acted, and laced with passionate humanity. But one shines a relentless light on a seemingly intractable global problem and the relentless cruelty that it both relies on and creates, while the other depicts a world where freedom and diversity can, at least at times, thrive in some of the least expected places.

Considering the state of things, let’s go the traditional route and get the bummer out of the way first.

It’s both a blessing and a shame that Polish auteur Agnieszka Holland’s stunning, epic immigration drama Green Border is arriving now—the latter because it’s tough to ask audiences to subject themselves to even more depressing reality, but a blessing because it demonstrates the power of cinema to address that reality. As xenophobia increases its malignant hold seemingly everywhere, this multifaceted closeup of the situation on the border between Poland and Belarus in 2021 puts human faces on the various forces at play. The film opens with an overhead color shot of a vast forest that fades to black and white, all the better to evoke the death and devastation that plagued these bloodlands in the mid-twentieth century and that seem ever poised to return in full.

Holland begins by focusing on a family of Syrian refugees from the town of Harasta: Bashir (Jalal Altawil), Amina (Dalia Naous), their three children, and the kids’ grandfather (Mohamad Al Rashi). They’re on a flight to Minsk, from which the plan is to travel into Poland and the safety of the European Union before meeting Bashir’s brother in Sweden. They’re joined by Leila (Behi Djanati Atai), an Afghan woman travelling on her own.

Almost immediately, things go horribly awry when the smugglers who have been hired to sneak them across the barbed-wire border demand additional payment and then hurriedly usher them under the fence and into Poland. Thus begins an agonizing series of reversals in which our protagonists and other migrants are tossed, shoved, and otherwise battered back and forth between two nations who want nothing more than for them to be the other country’s problem. The Belarussians and Poles they encounter, whether uniformed or irregulars, are almost comically sadistic, in one instance tossing a thermos to a desperate refugee who drinks heartily before realizing it is full of broken glass.

The one modest exception to this cruelty is Jan (Tomasz Włosok), a Polish border guard who we follow in the film’s next segment. He’s exposed to propagandistic training that depicts the migrants from Belarus as weapons sent by Putin and Lukashenko who will replace ethnic Poles if not repelled. (Sound familiar?) There’s the merest grain of truth in this, in that Belarussian president Alexander Lukashenko did actively encourage non-European refugees to travel to Belarus and then into the E.U., knowing it could destabilize those countries. Nonetheless, he begins to be haunted by what he sees and his complicity in the dehumanization of these desperate folks.

The movie’s third section focuses on a small group of activists who do what they can to help migrants. They’ve come across Bashir and Amina’s family. One tends to an infected dog bite suffered by the grandfather, while another attempts to film Bashir’s testimony. Amina prompts him to tell how he was tortured by ISIS for the crime of smoking a cigarette before sundown during Ramadan, but he angrily refuses: “They’ve been watching our stories for the last ten years! Nobody did anything.” The help these do-gooders can provide, however, is limited. After getting the refugees to sign amnesty applications, they warn them that despite this fact they may simply be thrown (in violation of international law) back across the border once the police arrive. In the middle of all this, a woman goes into premature labor and begins hemorrhaging. When an ambulance arrives, so do the authorities, and the whole group (with the exception of Leila and the family’s oldest son, who escape into the woods) finds itself right back where it started in Belarus.

And that’s just the first hour of this 153-minute film. Soon we meet Julia (Maja Ostaszewska), an apolitical psychologist who ends up taking sides after coming face to face with the two escapees. She, and the growing conscience of border guard Jan, offer the mildest of contrasts to the overwhelming nature of the problem and the sheer, dehumanizing brutality of the vast majority.

It is a testament to Holland’s experience and talent as a filmmaker, and the ubiquitous authenticity of the performers (some of whom are refugees themselves) that Green Border remains, despite being hard to stomach, a pulse-pounding, character-driven thriller. There are scenes of action and moments of suspense captured here that would be the envy of any Hollywood picture.

The kaleidoscopic treatment of this cross-border chaos is reminiscent of Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic, but with humans being smuggled instead of drugs. Holland’s work is angrier, however, less of an in-depth work of cinematic journalism than a scream into the void. After starting her career working under the great Andrzej Wajda, her four-decade directing career has made her Poland’s greatest living filmmaker. Her first big international success came with 1992’s Oscar-nominated Europa Europa, in which a Jewish boy in Nazi Germany tries to hide his identity by joining the Hitler Youth. That film, as Holland has explained, was made in the afterglow of the demise of the Soviet Union, in a period where it seemed that the lessons of World War II had been learned, and when nearly all nations accepted a moral duty to grant succor to innocent victims of conflicts and disasters beyond their control. Green Border is a slap in the face to the naivety that couldn’t imagine a retrenchment to nativism and autocracy, and therefore has thus far failed to prevent it.

There’s a brief epilogue to Green Border which jumps ahead a year to October 2022, when the Polish border opened to accept hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Instead of an uplifting reminder of what’s possible, however, it’s a scathing indictment of a system and a culture that has the capacity but refuses to accord the same welcome to those fleeing equally devastating situations but who happen to have the wrong ethnicity or religion. Sound familiar? (Opens Friday, July 19, at Living Room Theaters)

Although set in a more arid and seemingly unforgiving physical environment than Green Border, director Luke Gilford’s feature debut National Anthem follows one young man’s discovery of a chosen family that’s a paragon of unconditional acceptance. 21-year-old Dylan (Charlie Plummer, best known around these parts from Lean on Pete) lives with his single mom in rural New Mexico and serves as the primary caregiver to his younger brother. He works day labor, and one day hops in the back of a pickup that takes him to a ranch called the House of Splendor. While he hauls hay bales and sweeps stable stalls, he glimpses the incongruous figures of beautiful young women, one of whom, Sky (Eve Lindley), strikes up a flirtatious conversation. Later, he fantasizes about her wearing a revealing red, white, and blue outfit astride a horse.

The House of Splendor, it turns out, is an outpost of freedom and tolerance, populated by a collection of queer and trans folk who form a self-reliant, self-confident tribe that competes on the gay rodeo circuit. This is a thing, one of which I was previously unaware. There is an International Gay Rodeo Association. And it’s pretty glorious. In fact, Gilford based the film (co-written by Kevin Best and David Largman Murray) on his 2020 book of photographs documenting this subculture that he learned about after growing up as a Colorado cowboy.

Before you know it, Sky is applying eyeshadow to Dylan in a discount department store, and the reserved young man starts to come out of his shell in the same way Hemingway described going bankrupt—gradually, and then suddenly. On the day after first sporting makeup, he rides his first bull. And that night he’s serenaded by a decidedly uncoy Sky. Feeding him mushroom tea without his consent might be taking things a bit far. But by the time Dylan finds himself entwined in a creekside threesome with Sky and her partner Pepe, he’s clearly found his people

From Ned Sublette’s frequently covered 1981 ditty “Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly Fond of Each Other” to Brokeback Mountain, the iconographies of range life and gay life have intersected, often in ways that blend performative costuming with hardscrabble, isolated, unconstrained life on the (not always geographic) frontier, and the deep bonds that can be formed there. National Anthem is no exception: Gilford wants us to be as lyrically besotted with the scene he’s capturing as his lead characters are with each other. Gilford’s background in music video shows in the almost too-perfect lighting, and every polymorphously polyamorous participant is simply gorgeous.

The moments where conflict grumbles to life, whether from Pepe’s jealous pangs towards Dylan or Dylan’s mother’s intolerance for his burgeoning lifestyle, feel a bit perfunctory. To have ended this story on anything but an affirmation of the centrality of living one’s own true self would have been a betrayal of everything that comes before. And, in the wake of Green Border, I’m not sure I could have handled it. (Opens Friday, July 19, at Regal Fox Tower and the Salem Cinema.)

ALSO OPENING

Oddity: Irish director Damian McCarthy’s second horror feature mostly takes place about a year after the murder of Dani (Carolyn Bracken), the wife of insane asylum director Ted (Gwilym Lee), at their remote, unrenovated country home. Dani’s blind sister Darcy (also Bracken), who owns a curiosity shop and claims a psychic connection with objects, comes into possession of the fake eye once worn by the purported killer, and uses it to investigate truth behind the crime. An exercise in tone that never quite finds one, Oddity could have used a few more drafts in the screenplay process to, among other things, make its characters behave like recognizable people. Other aspects, like the way supposedly identical twins don’t resemble each other much at all despite being played by the same performer, or the way Darcy’s life-size wooden figure of a screaming man becomes a very predictable deus ex marionette, also detract from an effort that finds a filmmaker still seeking his voice. (Opens Friday, July 19, at Regal Fox Tower and other locations.)

Faye: The opening shots of this documentary profile of the famously “difficult” Hollywood icon Faye Dunaway show the star fussing and bossing around the filmmakers as they prepare to interview her. It’s not clear how she felt about including this B-roll footage in the finished product, but it’s an odd move since the movie’s main intent is to explain away Dunaway’s reputation, at least partially ascribing it to undiagnosed bipolar disorder. From there, director Laurent Bouzereau (a veteran of these behind-the-scenes docs since his days as the premier auteur of laserdisc and DVD bonus features) takes a standard route, jumping off from the famous photo of Dunaway taken the morning after she won the Best Actress Oscar for Network to chronicle her career in chronological order. Critics Mark Harris and Annette Insdorf and fellow “troublemakers” Sharon Stone and Mickey Rourke offer tributes, and there are some revealing anecdotes, including one about shooting a scene for Chinatown during which her hair wouldn’t behave. The only film I hadn’t previously been aware of but now want to seek out is Jerry Schatzberg’s 1970 Puzzle of a Downfall Child. If anything, this 90-minute overview could have used at least another hour to dive deeper into a fascinating, inscrutable screen legend. (Currently streaming on Max.)

Noir City: Portland: Three days’ worth of femmes fatale, private dicks, and painting with shadow descend on the Hollywood Theatre, hosted by Czar of Noir Eddie Mueller, who I recently interviewed. (Friday, July 19 through Sunday, July 21, Hollywood Theatre)

ALSO THIS WEEK

Friday

• D.E.B.S. [2004] (Tomorrow)
• Django [1966] (Academy, through Thursday)
• Ex Machina [2014] (Clinton)
• Grease [1978] (Kiggins, through Sunday; Academy, through Thursday)
• Phantom of the Paradise [1974] (Cinemagic, also Wednesday)
• Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl [2003] (Cinemagic, also Tuesday through Thursday)
• Tremors [1990] (Academy, through Thursday)

Saturday

• The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert [1994] (Tomorrow)
• Hedwig and the Angry Inch [2001] (Tomorrow)
• Mars Express [2024] (Clinton)
• Rent [2005] (Cinemagic, through Monday)
• Repo Man [1984] (Clinton)
• They Live [1988] (Cinemagic)
• The Thing [1982] (Cinemagic)

Sunday

• Antichrist [2009] (Cinemagic, also Thursday)
• Bound [1996] (Tomorrow)
• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind [2004] (Clinton)
• The Little Mermaid [1989] (Cinemagic)
• The Matrix [1999] (Tomorrow)
• Rubin & Ed [1991] (Cinemagic, also Tuesday)

Monday

• Gattaca [1997] (Cinemagic)
• RRR [2022] (Hollywood)

Tuesday

• Deadbeat by Dawn [1988] (Hollywood)
• Phoenix, Oregon [2020] (Salem)

Wednesday

• 1994: The Year in Videos (Hollywood)

Thursday

• Cat on a Hot Tin Roof [1958] (Salem)
• Jaws [1975] (Hollywood, on 35mm)
• Purple Rain [1984] (Salem, also Saturday 7/27)
• Songs of Earth [2024] (Salem)
• True Stories [1986] (Salem)