“Kamikaze ’89” (1982), directed by Wolf Gremm, Brooklyn Academy of Music, opens on June 3Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder performed his last screen role in this adaptation, released the year he passed away, of Swedish crime writer Per Wahlöö’s 1964 novel “Murder on the Thirty-First Floor.” Despite being directed by Wolf Gremm, it is very much a Fassbinder film, or at least in the same orbit: Many of his frequent collaborators participated in the project, including the actors Brigitte Mira and Günther Kaufmann and the cinematographer Xaver Schwarzenberger. But it’s the presence of Fassbinder in the lead role that devours everything around it. The drab dystopian vision of Wahlöö’s novel is filtered through the soft focus of the disco era, which means that the film, while following the book’s plot relatively closely, also gives us Fassbinder as a detective wearing a leopard-print suit attempting to solve the mysterious crime committed at the top of the equally mysterious high-rise. The movie is being presented in a new 4K digital restoration and boasts, among many other fine attributes, a wonderful score by the late Edgar Froese, of Tangerine Dream. “The Fits,” directed by Anna Rose Holmer, Metrograph, opens on June 3One of my favorites among the movies I saw at New Directors/New Films earlier this year was Anna Rose Holmer’s extraordinarily confident and accomplished debut offering, about a young African-American girl’s shift out of adolescence in Cincinnati. Eleven-year old Royalty Hightower gives as stunning a first performance as I’ve seen in many years as Toni, a tomboy who spends her time after school with her older brother and his friends, all boxers. She discovers a dance troupe practicing down the hall and, intrigued, begins to immerse herself in their regimented routine when, all of a sudden, young girls in the corps start fainting without explanation. “The Wailing,” directed by Hong-jin Na, IFC Center, opens on June 3Only a few weeks after being screened at the Cannes Film Festival, South Korean filmmaker Hong-jin Na’s ghost-horror epic is opening in New York City. A major hit in South Korea, the film follows a bumbling police officer as he investigates the horrific deaths that begin after a strange man settles in the woods outside the small town. With its combination of tense setups, horrific violence, and bouts of comedy, it’s reminiscent of the work of Bong Joon-ho, especially “Memories of Murder” (2003). There are moments down the stretch when the film seems to be spinning out of control, especially as the cast expands to include shamans, priests, ghosts, and assorted townspeople. But by this point, it has already hooked you with its strange accessibility. And then it turns on the weird, the grotesque, and the wonderful. “The Thoughts That Once We Had,” directed by Thom Andersen, Anthology Film Archives, opens on June 3In his latest essay-film, Thom Andersen (much of whose other work will also screen at Anthology, in a parallel series) has produced a tricky piece that, on its surface, looks almost brazenly simple. The work, which I wrote about briefly when it screened in the Art of the Real series earlier this year, purports to be a history of cinema that expands upon the ideas propounded by the theorist Gilles Deleuze. But it quickly departs from being simply a lecture, drawing connections and engaging confrontations in an almost free-form way, as if Andersen had put it together in an extended burst of creative energy. Not all the pieces fit together at first, or maybe at all. And there are long stretches where you’re left wondering how this relates to Deleuze, or to anything else. That said, “The Thoughts That Once We Had” is always interesting, especially in those moments in which Andersen pulls new meaning out of something we’ve seen countless times before, causing us to reevaluate our ideas of how cinema works. “Suburbia” (1984), directed by Penelope Spheeris, Film Forum, June 3Penelope Spheeris’s kids-on-the-skids film, made immediately after her remarkable documentary “The Decline of Western Civilization” (1981), is a continuation of the director’s fascination with punk as a representation of, and resistance to, a world that is falling apart. The film follows the Rejects, a loose community of teenage dropouts who spend their days riding around in beat-up cars, listening to Rodney on the Roq, and stealing food from rich families to bring back to their squat. After a violent scene at a club, the group is attacked by the town’s stiffs, who see them as a threat to the social order. The film contains questionable moments of sexism and homophobia, but it also shows great empathy toward the kids, who, we learn through a series of tender scenes, come from a variety of damaged homes. Spheeris doesn’t totally identify with her characters, but she understands them, and it’s this understanding that elevates the film above its genre trappings. “Suburbia” screens as part of the “Genre Is a Woman” series, running at Film Forum through June 16.
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