The French filmmaker Catherine Breillat has always pushed the envelope when it comes to depictions of sexuality on the page and screen. At 17, she wrote a novel that was banned for readers under 18. At 24, she had a small role in Bernardo Bertolucci’s infamous Last Tango in Paris. At 28, her anatomically explicit directing debut, 1976’s A Real Young Girl, was banned following its premiere and not granted a proper release until 1999, the same year that Breillat’s film Romance starred porn actor Rocco Siffredi and featured scenes of unsimulated coitus.

Now in her mid-70s, Breillat continues to tilt at what she perceives as puritanical windmills. As evidenced by her latest film, Last Summer, however, she’s more interested these days in probing the psychology behind erotic desire than in the mechanics of the acts themselves. This isn’t to say that movies such as 1988’s 36 Fillette or 2001’s Fat Girl aren’t, at least in part, insightful looks into the morass of female adolescence, but to acknowledge that the shock factor of those efforts could detract from their substance.

Anne (the excellent Léa Drucker) is a successful, fiftysomething attorney who works on behalf of abused girls, and the second wife of the older, wealthy Pierre (Olivier Rabourdin). They live quite comfortably with their young adopted twin girls, until Pierre’s troubled teenaged son Théo (gifted newcomer Samuel Kircher, the son of Irène Jacob) comes to stay with the family. Sullen and lithe, a nasty version of Timothée Chalamet, it doesn’t take him long to catch Anne’s eye.

As we watch the relationship between the pair zigzag toward a physical encounter that’s clearly a terrible idea, it’s up to Drucker and Kircher to make their characters’ self-destructive choices feel inevitable, or at least understandable. They don’t completely succeed, but once the carnal Rubicon is crossed, both their passion and their (or at least her) paranoia at being found out ring true. There’s a third-act semi-twist that I wish had been given more time to percolate before the movie’s anticlimactic (pun intended) final scenes.

Last Summer is Breillat’s first movie based on another film, in this case the 2019 Danish film Queen of Hearts, which may explain why it feels more polished and less raw than is her norm. And the taboo at its core is one that’s been treated in other recent films, most notably Todd Haynes’ May/December. Following medical and financial difficulties that beset Breillat in the early 2000s, it’s heartening to see this uncompromising figure back in the game, with her first film in a decade, even if it doesn’t, for better or worse, pack the perverse punch of yore. (Opens Friday, July 12, at Regal Fox Tower)

ALSO REVIEWED

It wasn’t until after I’d seen Longlegs that I learned that director Osgood Perkins is the son of Anthony Perkins, and then the movie made a little bit more sense. Not a lot more, mind you. It’s a 1990s-set thriller about a gifted young FBI agent pursuing a seemingly uncatchable serial killer, and if that sets off your Hannibal Lecter proximity alarm, you’re not alone. Here we have Lee Harker (Maika Monroe, whose breakout role in It Follows is now, shockingly, a decade old), a recent Quantico grad who turns out to possess at least some level of psychic ability. This gets her assigned to the case of a mysterious maniac known as Longlegs, suspected over the past few decades in a series of family annihilations even though there’s no evidence he was physically present at any of them.

Partnered with a more experienced agent (Blair Underwood), Harker travels through realistically gloomy (if British Columbia-filmed) Oregon landscapes gathering clues, among them creepy life-sized dolls, a Zodiac Killer-style secret code, and, of course, some light Satanism. Once the titular terror is tracked down, he’s embodied by Nicolas Cage, encased in enough makeup and prosthetics to pass for Furiosa’s Immortan Joe. At least, they say it’s Nicolas Cage in there, but if he’d been swapped out for Johnny Depp during a scene or two, who’d know?

Perkins is a committed visual stylist, and there are plenty of moments in Longlegs that stir unease. The film effectively shifts from a round-cornered 16mm-style square frame to a more traditional widescreen look, and the soundscape is dutifully disturbing. But the kitchen sink approach to tossing in genre tropes is wearying, and the inability of any character (excepting Underwood’s) from behaving in a recognizably human fashion gets frustrating fast. (These FBI agents demonstrate terrible law enforcement tactics!) The novelty of seeing Cage commit to another gonzo performance is minimal, and Longlegs’ mincing mien is too reminiscent of Lambs’ single biggest flaw, the queer-coded Buffalo Bill.

As per usual, distributor Neon has done a bang-up job making Longlegs looks like the next stage in the evolution of elevated horror. But with too many of its questions unanswered, and too few ideas of its own, audiences may prefer going in without such lofty expectations. (Opens Thursday, July 11, at multiple locations.)

No, Skywalkers: A Love Story is not an adaptation of some ReyLo fanfic. Rather, it’s a portrait of Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus, two camera-ready Russian daredevils who independently, and then together, engage in what’s known as “rooftopping.” Generally, this involves climbing even higher than a tall building’s roof, onto whatever spire or antenna presents itself, and then capturing the vertiginous moment in, of course, a selfie. There must be a biological quirk that allows some people to climb, without wires, nets, or common sense, into these predicaments voluntarily and without voiding the contents of their bowels and/or bladders. From where I sit, and pardon the French, these two are fucking nuts.

But they’re in love, photogenic, and funded by NFT sales, so clearly nothing can stop them as they embark on their grandest quest: to scale the second-highest skyscraper in the world, the 118-story Merdeka in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It’s been said (and, in this documentary, repeated several times) that true love requires complete trust, and I suppose there’s no greater trust than letting your partner lift your lissome frame above his head while standing on a piece of scaffolding a third of a mile in the air. Directors Jeff Zimbalist and Maria Bukhonina, relying heavily on GoPro and drone footage captured by their subjects, lean into the personal drama between Angela and Ivan, which gives things a voyeuristic reality-show feel at times.

Have no doubt, however: the draw here is the stunning, gut-plummeting, first-person imagery that allows you, the viewer, to vicariously experience the wonder and the terror on which these two thrive. Ordinarily, I’m a huge proponent of the big-screen experience, and it’s great that Netflix is releasing Skywalkers on IMAX screens for a week. But considering I could barely handle it on my iPad, I think I’ll sit this one out. (Friday, July 12, through Tuesday, July 16, Lloyd Center IMAX)

A pair of equally out-there movies about protagonists trapped in bizarre environments and forced to deal with supernatural weirdness screen this week. They were made decades apart, but they share a certain dream logic operating within a genre framework. The Vourdalak is based on an 1839 vampire novel in which a French diplomat (Kacey Mottet Klein), following an attack on his carriage in the Balkans, takes refuge in the manor of a local family led by the patriarch Gorcha. Gorcha himself is absent, having gone to fight the Turks and leaving instructions that if he returns more than six days hence he should be refused entry, for that would mean he had become a dreaded, undead vourdalak.

Of course, when he does return, bearing the severed head of a Turk, his family ignores Gorcha’s warning, despite the fact that he has a skeletal visage and is played by a life-size marionette. Our hapless Gallic protagonist, stranded until he can procure a horse but also not disappointed to be in proximity to Gorcha’s lovely, free-spirited daughter, soon becomes witness to a variety of stylishly rendered bloodshed and chaos. Director Adrian Beau (who also provides Gorcha’s creepy voice), making his feature debut, conjures an Old World, matter-of-fact surrealism reminiscent of Luis Buñuel and, especially, the Polish director Walerian Borowczyk (Immoral Tales, The Beast). The result is a sly, dark-humored fable that predates Bram Stoker by several decades and demonstrates the timelessness of vampiric mythos. (Wednesday, July 18, Cinema 21, with director Adrian Beau in attendance. Free screening.)

Made forty years earlier in Soviet-era Estonia, 1979’s Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel sees another ostensible authority figure stuck in a veritable madhouse. Police inspector Glebsky arrives at the hotel of the title in response to an anonymous tip. Although nothing seems amiss, Glebsky and the rest of the residents are stranded by an avalanche, and when bodies start appearing, Glebsky is on the case. This is far from a straightforward piece of Agatha Christie-style whodunit, however: from the get-go, there’s something eerie, even otherworldly, about some of the victims and/or suspects. The movie is based on a novel by brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, another of whose works was adapted by Andrei Tarkovsky for his film Stalker. Director Grigori Kromanov imbues the proceedings with a quasi-Lynchian vibe, and there’s plenty of Soviet-era attempts at a Western, synth-laden atmosphere, making this is a fascinating relic. (Wednesday, July 18, Clinton Street Theater)

DISC OF THE WEEK

A true revelation, Eureka’s Blu-ray set Prison Walls: Abashiri Prison I-III presents the first three of an 18(!)-film series produced in Japan in the 1960s. In the initial, black-and-white installment, Ken Takakura (in a star-making turn) portrays a sympathetic yakuza sentenced to a term at Abashiri Prison, an actual facility built in the 1800s and located in the windswept, mountainous terrain of Japan’s northernmost island, Hokkaido. It’s basically the country’s version of Alcatraz, famously escape-proof (other than the fascinating figure of Yoshie Shiratori—rabbit hole alert!) and surrounded by such an inhospitable environment that it would be foolish to try.

Intent on serving his time peacefully, our hero Shinichi (Takakura) instead gets swept up in an escape plot led by cellmates less inclined toward the rehabilitative path. Director Teruo Ishii, who helmed the first ten entries in this series, culminates the action of Abashiri Prison in an impressive action sequence where Takakura and his arch-enemy are manacled together, Defiant Ones-style, and trying to outrun their pursuers on a hand-powered railcar through a precipitous downhill run of track.

The second and successive entries, all in color, are leaner, more crowd-pleasing efforts. They also seem to leave the prison itself behind as an actual locale and follow Shinichi on his post-incarceration adventures. In Another Abashiri Prison Story, he and a sidekick end up involved in the aftermath of a jewel heist and deal with a variety of offbeat characters. And in Abashiri Prison: Saga of Homesickness, he meets up with some former criminal comrades whose efforts to go straight are complicated by the appearance of old foes.

On his commentary track for Abashiri Prison, Japanese cinema expert Tom Mes discusses the jaw-dropping popularity and rapid production of the series. In 1965, three films in the Japanese box office top ten were Abashiri Prison movies, and the same was true the following year. Once their popular appeal was apparent, these things were churned out, with as little as three weeks from the beginning of production to the movie’s release. Much like the parade of B-movies from Hollywood’s Studio Era, the results are efficient and entertaining despite the pace. (You can see the same thing in other long-running Japanese film series such as the Zatoichi films.) Mes also has interesting things to say about Takakura’s career—which included four Japanese Best Actor awards and a memorable role in Ridley Scott’s Black Rain—especially the way he subverted traditional cultural notions of masculinity.

One hopes that Eureka will be able to package the rest of the Abashiri films in the future. They may not be quite worthy of the deluxe treatment present here (all three films have informative commentary tracks) but if they’re as fun as the first three the effort would be very worthwhile.

ALSO THIS WEEK

Dead Media Hour: “A special screening of rare skateboarding films from the 1960s hosted by Stephen Slappe of the Dead Media Hour archive. Two early classics, Skaterdater (1965) and Rouli-roulant, a.k.a. The Devil’s Toy (1966) will be projected in glorious 16mm film. A never-before-seen collection of beautiful home movies filmed by East Bay skateboarders in Oakland and Berkeley in 1965 will also be shown. Originally shot on silent 8mm film, a high-definition scan of these amateur movies will be accompanied by Slappe adding context to their history and significance as well as live 45 record spinning by DJ Lazerwolf, all deep cuts from 1965.” (Thursday, Tomorrow)

REVIVALS

Friday

• Blazing Saddles [1974] (Academy, through Thursday)
• The Devil Wears Prada [2006] (Tomorrow)
• Guys and Dolls [1955] (Kiggins, also Saturday)
• The Parent Trap [1998] (Kiggins, through Monday)
• Ran [1985] (Academy, through Thursday)
• River’s Edge [1986] (Academy, through Thursday)
• Trainspotting [1996] (Cinema 21, also Saturday)
• Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell [2008] (Hollywood)

Saturday

• The Bride of Frankenstein [1935] (Clinton)
• The Elephant 6 Recording Co. [2022] (Tomorrow)
• Network [1976] (Cinema 21)
• Sweet Charity [1969] (Hollywood, also Sunday)
• White Chicks [2004] (Hollywood)

Sunday

• Fantastic Planet [1973] (Clinton)
• Like Water for Chocolate [1992] (Hollywood)
• The Little Mermaid [1989] (Cinemagic)
• Richland [2023] (Tomorrow)

Monday

Rope [1948] (Hollywood)

Tuesday

• Blood Junkie [2010] (Hollywood)
• Solaris [1972] (Clinton)

Wednesday

• Jaws [1976] (Hollywood, in 35mm)

Thursday

• Dredd [2012] (Hollywood)
• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas [1998] (Clinton)