Or, stay in tonight

A few mid-year notes on intriguing new (and/or recent) releases that have missed local theaters, but are available for spring/summer streaming.

As usual, a good many foreign language films of special note have arrived locally solely via these electronic and digital routes (I count at least eight so far); as have three distinctively artful documentaries and three (or maybe four) offbeat variations on movie westerns. Plus, a characteristically uncategorizable film by a major writer-director of the 1980s/90s (Alan Rudolph) is currently hiding in plain sight on demand.

Ray Meets Helen

The new film by Alan Rudolph (Choose Me, Trouble in Mind, The Moderns, etc.), is a pleasingly eccentric and ramshackle comedy-drama with two septuagenarian stars (Keith Carradine and Sondra Locke) in the title roles. It’s a very Rudolphian mixture of romantic comedy, quasi-existentialist bull session and old-fashioned romantic rapture. Mistaken identities, love triangles, lost dreams, a suicide, gang violence and quite a lot of stolen money are also in the mix, as are piquantly paradoxical characters played by Keith David and Jennifer Tilly. It’s a thoroughly uncommercial endeavor, and that’s part of its special charm. (Xfinity, DirecTV)

Les Cowboys

A 2015 French production in which the daughter of a cowboy-hatted family of country music enthusiasts disappears at a Wild West fair in Eastern France. The setting is contemporary, but writer-director Thomas Bidegain works a variation on the plot of John Ford’s classic The Searchers—as the young woman’s father (an intense François Damiens) and, subsequently, her younger brother “Kid” (Finnegan Oldfield) launch a years-long quest to find her. The cultural and political conflicts of present-day Europe figure crucially in the search as well as in the quietly radical personal dramas that play out among the family members. A character known only as “The American” (John C. Reilley) plays a prominent role in the second half of the film. (Netflix, Amazon Video)

The Ballad of Lefty Brown

A flavorsome but not always coherent blend of “revisionist westerns” and old-fashioned “cowboy movies.” In director Jared Moshe’s scenario, the hero figure (Peter Fonda) is shot down early on and it falls to his grufty and somewhat ineffectual sidekick (Bill Pullman, shaggy and uproarious in the title role) to bring the bad guys to justice. And there’s nothing simple about any of that: The dead man’s widow (Kathy Baker), an alcoholic lawman (Tommy Flanagan), a politician and fledgling megalomaniac (Jim Caviezel), and a teenage admirer of dime-novel heroics (Diego Josef) have variously conflicting claims on what Lefty can or cannot do. (Amazon Video, DirecTV)

Paradox

Though it’s amusing enough as a half-comic western with music, it wouldn’t be entirely accurate, or fair, to call Paradox nothing more than a 70-minute music video in western dress. As a movie, western or not, it is rambunctiously slapdash. Neil Young, guitar in hand, plays The Man in the Black Hat. He has a showdown with “Red”(Willie Nelson) on Main Street and instead of shooting it out, they rob a bank—a seed bank. Nelson’s sons, Lukas and Micah, both members of Young’s current band, are on hand as characters named Jailbait and The Particle Kid, respectively. Daryl Hannah, who appears briefly in a particularly romantic segment, is credited as writer and director. Be that as it may, Paradox rides high on much the same quality of homemade exultancy that marks films that Young has made under his “Bernard Shakey” aegis. (Netflix)

Just for the record: the foreign films alluded to in the intro are Aki Kaurismäki’s The Other Side of Hope (Finland), Jaco Van Dormael’s The Brand New Testament (Belgium/France), Albert Serra’s The Death of Louis XIV (France/Spain/Portugal), Claire Denis’ Let the Sun Shine In (France) and Hong Sang-Soo’s Right Now, Wrong Then (South Korea). The documentaries include Bertrand Tavernier’s My Journey Through French Cinema (France), Agnés Varda’s Faces/Places, and Ross Lipman’s Notfilm (U.S.), on the subject of Samuel Beckett and Buster Keaton. All are available to stream via one or more online or cable/satellite services.