A deep-rooted desire for a variety of cinematic experiences led me away from the bright multiplexes of my Orange County burg and into the smaller, less brightly lit buildings that bore the name of Laemmle, L.A.’s art house theater chain. This is what I found:  

Tokyo. A recent example of the anthology film, Tokyo is comprised of three shorts by three directors, and connected only by a common locale: the metropolis of the title. Michel Gondry’s segment begins absorbingly with an aspiring filmmaker and his girlfriend attempting to secure an apartment while crashing at a friend’s place. It takes shape only in the final few minutes, at which point it descends into surrealism, offering the jarring visual of a girl transmogrifying into a chair. The middle segment, by Leos Carax, is an invigoratingly strange political parable about a red-bearded, cross-eyed, long finger-nailed imp that emerges from the sewer to wreak havoc on the population. Opening with a striking extended shot set to the original Godzilla theme music, it progresses surely and unpredictably to a bizarre climax, culminating in a prankish visual gag. The third segment, helmed by Bong Joon-ho, about a recluse who falls in love with a pizza delivery girl, doesn’t add up to much, but it’s done with an artist’s eye. The sum total of the three works amounts to an entertaining, well made, but ultimately disjointed omnibus.  

The Limits of Control. Jim Jarmusch has long been a trusted name among cinephiles, although his status as a trailblazing American independent filmmaker has dimmed with the passing years. It’s somehow fitting that his most approachable work, Broken Flowers, should be followed by his most inaccessible. In The Limits of Control, the trance-like pace is so measured that the film is constantly in danger of tipping over into tedium. The sparse story involves a stoical criminal of unknown intent (the princely Isaach De Bankolé) who travels from city to Spanish city where he waits (and waits, and waits) for orders from a procession of odd contacts (played by such indie dependables as John Hurt, Tilda Swinton, and Gael Garcia Bernal) until they lead him to the lair of a crazed, evil capitalist (Bill Murray, in what’s surely his least charismatic role). The ritualistic repetition of visuals (two cups of espresso placed side by side) and lines of dialogue (“You don’t speak Spanish, right?”) amounts to a kind of game in which the audience is invited to participate, not unlike trying to fit together pieces of a puzzle whose picture is unclear. By the end, the picture remains unclear. Jarmusch’s visuals are so assured (and so lustrously photographed by Christopher Doyle) that they overshadow, or at least divert some attention away from, his off-putting hipster’s tone, his horny adolescent fixation with a mostly nude femme fatale (Paz de la Huerta), and his pothead’s grasp of continental philosophy.

Adoration. Another art-house stalwart, Atom Egoyan, registered nothing more than a blip on the box office chart with Adoration, an elegantly patterned drama about a precocious high school student encouraged by his English teacher to create a fictional account of a portion of family history—with tragic results. Egoyan, a Canadian director of Armenian descent, is a strong candidate for the most serious filmmaker working in the English language. Serious as in grave, solemn, severe. The human warmth one invariably finds in his films lies buried beneath a thin covering of ice (sometimes literally, as in The Sweet Hereafter). This one strikes me as prime Egoyan, visually precise (which include elegantly sliding camera moves and a muted palette), meticulously written. (Notice the semi-comical altercation between a cabbie and a tow truck driver over a sack lunch—a scene worthy of David Mamet.) In light of these assets, the aforementioned seriousness and iciness are grudgingly overlooked.

Fados. The most novel experience I’ve had in a movie theater this year came in the form of a musical called Fados from Spanish director Carlos Saura. Unrecognizable as documentary, play, or concert film, its only precedents seem to be two earlier Saura experiments, Flamenco and Tango. With only the briefest of introductions in which to educate the viewer, Saura fashions a celebration of the musical genre known as the fado, a sort of Portuguese ballad typically mournful in nature. Songs are performed by unnamed musicians, vocalists, and dancers. The choice of setting (a soundstage sparsely but tastefully decorated) is theatrical, but the explorations within that setting is purely cinematic, drawing on a developed feeling for space, light, and movement. (Rare that a film of such beautiful sounds should be accompanied by such beautiful sights.) If some of the songs last a little longer than you’d like, you can’t fault Saura for wanting to preserve a musical tradition that is obviously near and dear to him.