Sometimes it can seem as if the distinction between the films that show up on Oregon theater screens and the films that premiere on streaming services is essentially random. This week, for instance, an unheralded Quebecois thriller and an offbeat comedy from New Zealand roll into cinemas, while a startling American indie debut and a crowd-pleasing action flick pop up on TVs. All four are at least worth a look, but the real surprise is Red Rooms, the fourth feature from French-Canadian director Pascal Plante.

This dark, compelling psychodrama opens on the first day of the trial of Ludovic Chevalier (Maxwell McCabe-Locas), who has been charged with the horrific murders of three teenaged girls. Their torture and killing was broadcast live on the “dark web” into so-called Red Rooms for the benefit of voyeuristic sadists. A woman has waited outside the courthouse all night to get a seat in the spectator’s gallery. She’s a fashion model named Kelly-Anne (Juliette Gariépy), and she’s obsessed with Chevalier. Recordings of two of these internet snuff films have been recovered, but may not be sufficient to prove beyond a doubt that Chevalier is guilty.

Kelly-Ann, we learn, lives alone in a sleek but barren luxury apartment and possesses a high level of computer hacking skill. Other than that, she’s a cipher, and Gariépy’s unnerving stillness draws you in. She soon meets another serial killer groupie, an enthusiastic proclaimer of Chevalier’s innocence named Clementine (Laurie Babin), and for a while the pair almost become friends. All of this is, of course, highly objectionable to the families of Chevalier’s victims, as well as to Kelly-Ann’s employers once her dark devotion becomes public knowledge.

Chevalier himself remains even more enigmatic than his fans—he’s a silent, implacable figure in the courtroom and, blessedly, we never have to witness any of his crimes ourselves. (The verbal descriptions and snippets of audio we are subjected to are more than sufficient.) As the trial progresses, Kelly-Ann’s perspective begins to subtly shift, especially when the prospect of obtaining the one missing video emerges. How far will she descend into the back alleys of the Internet, and what motivates her to do so? Those are the questions that give Red Rooms its momentum.

We live in a media landscape that is riveted, unhealthily so, by heinous crimes and their perpetrators. The upcoming Joker: Folie à Deux appears to take a star-studded stab at exploring these fascinations, but it’s likely that Red Rooms will prove to be the more incisive, even at its Cronenbergian emotional distance, exploration of the phenomenon. (Opens Friday 9/6 at Regal Fox Tower and Bridgeport Village.)

It took me a little while to get into My First Film, which is actually the second feature directed by Zia Anger, but ultimately this metafictional memoir weaves its various levels of artifice and reality into a compelling tapestry and marks the emergence of a promising talent.  Years ago, Anger, with the help of friends and family, made a movie called Grey about a pregnant young woman who embarks on a journey to confront the mother who abandoned her as a child. That effort, while it failed to get distribution (or even a run on the festival circuit), serves as the inspiration for My First Film.

Anger, who also created a performance piece based on this misadventure, here presents an objective correlative for herself in the form of Vita (Odessa Young), who embarks on the making of the retitled Always All Way, Anne Marie with the same chutzpah and self-absorption that Anger clearly sees herself as having exhibited while making Grey. If that’s all My First Film was, it would be just one more example of the self-loathing narcissism and humblebragging about failures that dot the microbudget cinematic universe.

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Fortunately, as the director shifts between past and present, fiction and reality, she also documents a particular moment in the history of American independent film. Set just after the global economic crisis of 2008, as filmmaking technology achieved a new level of accessibility and affordability, My First Film captures a feeling that anything is possible as well as the realization that nothing is guaranteed. And I haven’t even mentioned the fact that the film kicks off with a mime performance by Anger’s mother that’s a tribute to menstruation. Unclassifiable and unique. (Streaming on MUBI starting Friday 9/6; screens at the Tomorrow Theater on Saturday 9/21.)

Now here’s something you don’t see every day: A story about a tennis coach, his career and marriage ruined after he’s the victim of a hit-and-run, who enlists a mysterious woman to teach him the psionic powers he needs to track down the silver Toyota Corolla that destroyed his life. The Paragon was shot in New Zealand by director Michael Duignan for $25,000, and it’s a delightful, deadpan oddity that gets a lot of bang for its buck.

Our hero, Dutch (Benedict Wall) is at the end of his rope when a telephone pole flyer leads him to Lyra (Florence Noble), a psychic mentor who determines that Dutch is in fact a hyperdimensional being of great power. She’s willing to help him track down that Corolla, as long as he helps her retrieve a powerful artifact called the Paragon from her evil brother Haxan (Jonny Brugh). (It’s a long story.) With cheap but inventive visual effects, and tongue lodged firmly in cheek, The Paragon is the sort of cinematic mongrel that could only come from quirky minds Down Under. It makes a strong bid for cult status, and should be a blast with an enthusiastic crowd. (Hollywood Theatre, Friday 9/6 and Sunday 9/8)

I’ll always have a soft spot for director Jeremy Saulnier, whose Oregon-shot thriller Green Room led indirectly to one of my favorite interviews of all time, with the one and only Patrick Stewart (who played against type as the leader of a band of neo-Nazis). Prior to that, he made the grim, effective Blue Ruin, but in recent years he’s kept a low profile. Rebel Ridge, his first feature in six years, fits his pattern of running violent genre tropes through a socially conscious lens. Here the issue is civil asset forfeiture, the process by which many law enforcement agencies fatten their coffers by seizing the property of people charged with, or even just suspected of, criminal activity. Aaron Pierce (The Underground Railroad) stars as Terry Richmond, who arrives on bicycle to the Southern town of Shelby Springs with a wad of cash in his backpack that’s intended to bail out his cousin, who’s been arrested on a minor drug charge. Terry, who’s Black, is immediately harassed by the local cops, who drum up an excuse to relieve him of that cash.

Terry ends up teaming with a courthouse clerk named Summer (AnnaSophia Robb) to get to the bottom of the corruption endemic in the police department run by Chief Sandy Burnne (Don Johnson, embodying humid sleaze in a way that recalls his iconic work in The Hot Spot). As he’s done previously, Saulnier salts his realistic, muscular action flick with plot points that give the effectively staged fight scenes the flavor of righteous justice being served. Although it runs a bit long at over two hours, Rebel Ridge is a well-balanced mixture of brawn and brains. (Streaming on Netflix as of Friday 9/6)

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The Grab: I caught this truly eye-opening documentary last year at the Bend Film Festival, and it’s disappointing that it never had an Oregon theatrical release. Director Gabriela Cowperthwaite (Blackfish) tackles an issue of such global import that it can seem like the plot of a James Bond villain. In fact, the reality is more mundane and insidious: the ongoing efforts by national actors (including Russia, China, and Saudi Arabia) to corner the market on finite global resources including land and water. Following the efforts of the Center for Investigative Reporting, Cowperthwaite exposes both specific instances—the acquisition of a huge American livestock company by a state-owned Chinese corporation—and broader trends—Russia’s invasion of wheat-rich Ukraine—to demonstrate that food security could well be the defining issue of the next several decades, especially considering the rising effects of climate change. If you need any more convincing, the film covers a venture founded by Blackwater’s Erik Prince (brother of former Education Secretary Elizabeth DeVos), which uses mercenary tactics on behalf of China to secure resources in Africa and elsewhere. (Available to stream on demand through all major platforms)

Lover of Men: Was Abraham Lincoln gay? And if so, does it matter? Those are the twin questions at the heart of this pointed but somewhat amateurish documentary, which revisits evidence of the sixteenth (and greatest) President’s intimately close relationships with other men, including Joshua Speed, with whom he lived for several years during his early legal career and exchanged affectionate correspondence with throughout his life. These relationships have been discussed by historians at least since C.A. Tripp’s biography The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln in 2005 (which was, predictably enough, lauded by Gore Vidal). Of course, there’s no way to pin down Lincoln’s sexual preferences with certainty at this point, but given other evidence of early radicalism (including atheism) that he learned to avoid expressing as he rose in political station, it’s not out of the question. One thing seems true, at least: Lincoln has always been a more complicated and progressive figure than the two-dimensional rail splitter and Union savior the old history books depicted. (Regal Fox Tower, Friday 9/6 through Sunday 9/8)

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