American small towns aren’t the only ones with deep, dark, twisted secrets beneath their bucolic facades. Rural French villages have them, too, plus the additional dangers presented by the practice of foraging for wild mushrooms, as (oddly enough) two different new films this week from veteran French auteurs demonstrate.

In director Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, the former employee of a local baker travels from Toulouse to the charming burg of Saint-Martial for his old boss Jean-Pierre’s funeral. Jérémie (Félix Kysyl), it quickly emerges, has personal as well as professional history in Saint-Martial. After spending the night at the home of Jean-Pierre’s widow Martine (two-time César winner Catherine Frot), in the bedroom once belonging to Jean-Pierre’s son Victor (Jean-Baptiste Durand), he decides to stick around for a while.

Jérémie and Victor have a romantic history, we learn as they encounter each other while scouring the forest floor for fungi. And seemingly everyone else in town is fascinated by the visitor’s ephemeral charisma as well, including Victor’s friend Walter (David Ayala) and the village priest (Jacques Develay), who becomes more and more suspicious—in both senses of the term—as time goes by. There’s a whiff of Pasolini’s Teorema in this tale of an interloper who, almost (but not quite) despite himself sets the hearts and glands of everyone he meets aflutter. But Guiraudie, despite the evidence of previous efforts such as Stranger by the Lake, isn’t that interested in tweaking bourgeois sexual sensibilities.

Misericordia has been called a neo-noir, but that’s not quite right to me. It’s more oblique than that suggests, and more of a character study than a thriller, despite the fact that, yes, murder does figure into things eventually. It’s a hard film to pin down, which is part of its appeal, in the same way that its protagonist’s passivity and vagueness allow others to project their own ideals of desire onto him. Characters, and the relationships between them, are introduced with an almost frustrating obliqueness, but that forces a level of attention to expression and physicality that is richly rewarded. (Regal Fox Tower)

Meanwhile, in another picturesque ville, this one a bit north of Saint Martial, in Burgundy, another tale of deception and mycological mishaps unfolds in François Ozon’s When Fall Is Coming. Michelle (Hélène Vincent), an octogenarian retiree, lives a quiet life, some of her few joys derived from visits by her young grandson Lucas (Garlan Erlos), who unfortunately is always accompanied by his ungrateful and unpleasant mother Valérie (Ludivine Sagnier, who made such an impression in Ozon’s Swimming Pool more than 20 years ago). On one such visit, Valérie is taken ill after eating some of the mushrooms that Michelle has foraged, which causes the daughter to cut off all contact with her ostensibly incompetent parent. Meanwhile, the son (Pierre Lottin) of Michelle’s best friend Marie-Claude (Josiane Balasko) is released from prison, begins working odd jobs for Michelle, and develops a sympathy for the older woman and an antipathy for the younger one.

Ozon revels in ambiguity here, and this is one of his stronger recent efforts—the onetime provocateur has been churning out quality features on an annual basis and with a consistently elevated craft that would make Claude Chabrol proud. As with Misericordia, there’s a noir-adjacent thriller narrative at the core of the film, but in typically European fashion, character predominates over plot. (Opens Friday, April 18, at Living Room Theaters)

Warfare: British filmmaker Alex Garland used to make thought-provoking science fiction flicks such as Ex Machina, the Hulu series Devs, and Men. (Love that last one or hate, it definitely provoked thoughts!) More recently, he seems to have caught a bit of automatic-weapons fever. First, with the increasingly prescient Civil War, and now with this ground-level, real-time portrait of What It Was Like in the war that followed the American invasion of Iraq. With its declarative, generic title, and its authenticity (co-director Ray Mendoza is a Navy SEAL veteran), Warfare joins the ranks of Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down in ostensibly deglamorizing the experience of troops in combat. This includes the de rigueur pre-shoot boot camp endured by the capable, relatively anonymous cast, the most recognizable members of which are D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (Reservation Dogs) and Will Poulter (Death of a Unicorn). Garland and Mendoza ratchet up the tension from the get-go, as a squad of American soldiers takes up a position in a private home in Ramadi, but quickly realize that they’ve been made. As Iraqi irregulars close in, a bloodbath ensues, and much of the film’s second half is devoted to the harried, anarchic efforts to get wounded soldiers out of the field of battle. By narrowing its vision to this one episode, avoiding any attempt at either characterization or obvious politics, the film, like Civil War, wants us to appreciate, in IMAX and Dolby Atmos sound, that war is hell. As a salute to Mendoza’s fellow service members and the prices they paid, and as an almost VR-level immersion in the chaos and insanity of combat, Warfare works. As “entertainment,” not so much. (Wide release)

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Sacramento: There’s a lot of heart in this buddy-comedy road trip movie starring writer-director Michael Angarano and the always adorable Michael Cera, enough that you wish there had been a bit more originality to go with it. Rickey (Angarano) is a free-spirited, mildly psychotic rascal who gets kicked out of group therapy and drops in on his domesticated, anxiety-ridden old pal Glenn (Cera). Before you know it, they’re on the freeway to the capital of California, where, Rickey tells Glenn, he intends to scatter the ashes of his recently deceased father. In fact, he’s hoping to reconnect with Tallie (Maya Erskine), with whom he had a brief encounter a year or so back. Meanwhile, Glenn’s pregnant wife Rosie (Kristen Stewart), enjoys some time alone and away from her husband’s constant worrying. If you can predict vaguely what this manic pixie and nervous Nellie learn along the way, congratulations! You’re a C+ student of narrative form. (Regal Fox Tower, Clackamas Town Center, Bridgeport Village, and Movies on TV)

The Ballad of Wallis Island: Maybe it’s just the State of the Union talking, but I’m finding myself charmed by “nice” movies that, in a more stable timelines, I’d probably dismiss as overly twee. First there was Bob Trevino Likes It, and now this cutesy British picture in which an eccentric, lonely, and kind of annoying lottery winner (Tim Key) hires his favorite musician, Herb McGwyer (Tom Basden) to play a show on the remote island where he lives. What he hasn’t told McGwyer is that (a) the show will have an audience of one and (b) he’s also invited McGwyer’s former musical and romantic partner, Nell Mortimer (Carey Mulligan), and her husband Michael (Akemnji Ndifornyen), who’ve come all the way from Portland, Oregon (!) for the gig. (Director James Griffiths also helmed the first two episodes of the Rose City-set TV series Stumptown.) McGwyer Mortimer, as the duo was known in their heyday, were apparently a two-person folk-rock Fleetwood Mac, and neither is especially pleased to see each other. Will they overcome their differences and honor their host’s rather maudlin intentions, charmed by the quirkiness of Wallis Island? The screenplay (written by Basden and Key) pulls up just shy of treacle, and the performances all feel genuine and true, which makes Wallis Island a perfectly acceptable refuge from the insanity of the mainland. (Cinema 21, Eastport Plaza, Bridgeport Village, Salem Cinema)

Portland Panorama: It’s been a few years since Portland has hosted a full-on, week-long film festival with the regional, if not national cachet that this inaugural event aims to achieve. I serve on the board of the nonprofit that is staging Panorama, so I’ll leave it to ArtsWatch’s Brian Libby to provide the rundown on what should be a very exciting eleven days for the Portland film community. (April 10-20, Cinema 21, the Hollywood Theatre, and other venues)

Also This Week

One to One: John & Yoko: If there was any question as to whether the world needed more Beatles content, the casting announcement for Sam Mendes’s upcoming four-part biopic of the Fab Four answered it with a resounding yes. Fifty-five years (to the day) after the band called it quits, public interest remains high enough, at least, to justify a documentary such as this one from Oscar-winning filmmaker Kevin Macdonald. It has a very particular, nominally fascinating focus: the experiences of John Lennon and Yoko Ono in New York City in 1972, including the only full concert performance Lennon ever gave outside The Beatles. This, oddly enough, was a benefit for the Willowbrook School for special needs children that was spurred by a televised exposé (by none other than Geraldo Rivera!) of the school’s horrific conditions. Macdonald and co-director Sam Rice-Edwards construct a kaleidoscopic montage of sights and sounds around this core that’s initially riveting but ultimately ends up with a “We Didn’t Start the Fire” vibe of throwing pop-cultural spaghetti against the wall. Abbie Hoffman, Phil Donahue, Attica, Sonny & Cher, Nixon in China, Shirley Chisholm, Billy Graham, Jessica Savitch, and many more flitter by on the screen. Jerry Rubin’s friendship with Lennon gets play, as does Bob Dylan’s least favorite garbage hound, A.J. Weberman. May Pang pops up. There are some mildly revelatory recordings of phone calls, and the performance clips of Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band have archival value, but this should cater mostly to the same audiences as the recent Daytime Revolution, which chronicled the week that John and Yoko guest-hosted The Mike Douglas Show. Which is to say, casual fans probably need not apply. (4/11, 4/13-4/15, Lloyd Center IMAX)

Tales from Grandma’s Attic: “Live accompaniment from local band Rosy Boa will breathe life into a collage of some of the most unfiltered and one-of-a-kind artifacts of the 20th century. Indeed, the films being projected are the very same strips of film that went through the cameras of peoples past, and now they’ve traversed the decades to spend an evening with you. Presented by archivists Ioana and Garrett, with films from their collection, the Nyback Archive, and the collection of Gary Lacher.” (Hollywood Theatre, 4/15)

Echoes of the Grunge Age: “Special premiere of a new film from Spider Moccasin, divided between narration and music videos, about the local Portland music scene in the 1990s at venues like Satyricon, X-Ray and La Luna, using paper cutouts and hand-drawn animation.” (Clinton St. Theater, 4/17)

On Demand

The World Will Tremble: The first half of The World Will Tremble takes place inside a Nazi death camp, but it’s the final 20 minutes of the film that are the most harrowing. This English-language, Bulgarian-made feature tells the true story of Solomon ‘Szlamek’ Wiener and Michael Podchlebnik, who escaped from the Chełmno concentration camp in 1942. Chełmno was the first such facility to come online, in December 1941, and the murders of Jews there were carried out by pumping exhaust into in the backs of vans stuffed with victims who thought they were only in for a delousing.

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Chełmno was also the first place to employ Sonderkommandos, Jewish prisoners who were coerced into burying the bodies in the middle of the Polish forest. Among them are Wiener and Podchlebnik, and among the bodies are those of their family members. Motivated by a desire to tell the world what’s happening, they hatch an escape plan that involves using a shard of glass to cut through the canvas side of their transport to the burial site and leap out. From there, The World Will Tremble is a thriller as tense as any, especially during a scene in which they seek shelter at a Polish farmhouse.

Writer-director Lior Geller, making his second feature, depicts the horror and brutality of the camp with some restraint—there’s little if anything here that goes beyond PG-13 levels. He moves the camera well, including a couple of Spielbergian oners, and only occasionally resorts to a maximalism that can blunt the impact of our heroes’ incredible heroism and endurance. As those heroes, Oliver Jackson-Cohen (who played the title role in 2021’s The Invisible Man) and Jeremy Neumark Jones aren’t asked for a great deal of range, but both convey desperation and bravery as needed.

Of course, the escapees were not successful in alerting the world to the budding Nazi genocide—at least, not successful enough. The world did not, in fact, tremble until much later. They reached safety, and spoke their truth, but it didn’t change much of anything. It’s that final sequence, in which they try to convince a doubting rabbi that mass murder is happening only a few miles away, that really hits today. “It’s the 20th century,” he says to them. “You can’t just go around wiping out entire peoples!” The ability of humanity to refuse to see what’s right in front of it has rarely been more succinctly stated.

Maybe if they’d had Facebook…? In today’s world, with the Internet allowing for exponentially quicker and more widespread dissemination of information, a story like one that Wiener and Podchlebnik told would certainly have reached the right ears and played a part in stopping the Holocaust before six million had been killed. Right? (Available for rental or purchase on most major streaming platforms.)

Also Opening

The Amateur: “When his supervisors at the CIA refuse to take action after his wife is killed in a London terrorist attack, a decoder (Rami Malek) takes matters into his own hands.” (wide release)

Drop: “A widowed mother’s first date in years takes a terrifying turn when she’s bombarded with anonymous threatening messages on her phone during their upscale dinner, leaving her questioning if her charming date is behind the harassment.” (wide release)

We’re All Gonna Die: “In the near future, everyone’s gotten used to the 10,000-mile alien tentacle that materialized in the sky, and a struggling beekeeper and a grieving wanderer must join together and take a dangerous roadtrip to get their teleported stuff back.” (Living Room Theaters)

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Repertory

Friday 4/11

• Barbie [2023] (Clinton St. Theater)
• Blue Velvet [1986] (Kiggins Theater, through 4/13)
• Bull Durham [1988] (Cinema 21, also 4/12)
• Chungking Express [1994] (Cinemagic, also 4/14 & 4/17)
• The Doors: The Final Cut [1991] (Kiggins Theater, through 4/15)
• Down by Law [1986] (Academy Theater, through 4/17)
• Easter Parade [1948] (Kiggins Theater, through 4/13)
• Harakiri [1962] (Academy Theater, through 4/17)
• Land of the Dead [2005] (Hollywood Theatre)
• Legally Blonde [2001] (Academy Theater, through 4/17)
• Sherlock, Jr. [1924] (Salem Cinema, with R.E.M. score, also 4/12)
• Showgirls [1995] (Hollywood Theatre, through 4/17)
• Weird Science [1985] (Cinemagic)

Saturday 4/12

• Dark Waters [2019] (Hollywood Theatre)
• Days of Being Wild [1990] (Cinemagic, also 4/15 & 4/16)
• Despiser [2021] (Hollywood Theatre)
• The House Bunny [2008] (Hollywood Theatre)
• In the Mood for Love [2000] (Cinemagic, also 4/15 & 4/16)
• The Neverending Story [1984] (Hollywood Theatre, on 35mm, also 4/13)
• Raising Arizona [1987] (Cinema 21)
• Robot Dreams [2023] (Clinton St. Theater)

Sunday 4/13

• 2046 [2004] (Cinemagic, also 4/14 & 4/17)
• The French Connection [1971] (Salem Cinema, also 4/15)
• Titanic [1997] (Hollywood Theatre, on 35mm)

Monday 4/14

• Bound [1996] (Hollywood Theatre)
• Nightshift [1981] (Hollywood Theatre)
• They Drive by Night [1939] (Kiggins Theater

Tuesday 4/15

• Cryptozoo [2021] (Clinton St. Theater)

Wednesday 4/16

• Bubble Bath [1979] (Clinton St. Theater)
• The Wicker Man [1973] (Hollywood Theatre)

Thursday 4/17

• The Cameraman [1928] (Kiggins Theater, with live musical score)