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The town in the shocker “Bacurau” is fictional, a bit magical, at once ordinary and otherworldly. It’s filled with faces that have life etched in them, which helps deepen the realism. And while the story is set in the near future, it looks like the present: the charming landscapes, laughing children, crowing roosters, the grinning balladeer with a guitar. Then, the guns come out, history rushes in and a ghost pops by. (It smiles.)In the wild world of “Bacurau,” queasy humor meets razor-sharp politics and rivers of blood. An exhilarating fusion of high and low, the movie takes a shopworn premise — townsfolk facing a violent threat — and bats it around until it all goes ka-boom. Part of what’s exciting is how the filmmakers marshal genre in the service of their ideas, using film form to deflect, tease and surprise. The movie looks and plays like a western but also flirts with dystopian science fiction and pure pulp: bang, bang, splat. By the time the cult actor Udo Kier rolls up it’s clear that anything gleefully goes.It’s also obvious that the writer-directors Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles are having a good time, and they want you to have one too. Dornelles has worked as a production designer on Mendonça Filho’s movies, including his sui generis “Neighboring Sounds” and “Aquarius.” Their partnership proves seamless on “Bacurau,” which flows despite a switch-backing story that starts with a truck bouncing along a remote highway, a woman riding shotgun. The countryside is green in the way of certain deserts, but empty coffins litter the road, along with a corpse.It is quite the enigmatic opener, a variant on those puzzlers that begin with a body sprawled on the parlor floor next to a bloody candelabrum. But there’s no clever detective to put the pieces together. (You have to do that yourself.) There’s also no obvious narrative blueprint and precious little exposition. There are instead beauties, mysteries and characters, like that passenger, Teresa (Bárbara Colen), who arrives in Bacurau on the day of a funeral. As Teresa walks through the seemingly empty town, dragging a suitcase, she passes its boozy doctor, Domingas (Sônia Braga, the one and only). And then Teresa hails a man who pops a hallucinogen in her mouth.The filmmakers spend the first half of the movie introducing the town of Bacurau; they drop you in the middle of it — without an evident story — then nose around its streets and secrets. There’s a pretty white church, but it’s used for storage, and a sturdy little museum built of stone. More characters pop in, including Teresa’s sexy friend, Acácio (Thomas Aquino), who has bedroom eyes and a gun in his waistband. He may be a thief or an insurgent; it’s hard to tell. Bacurau’s younger inhabitants like to watch a recording of him executing people. It looks like a video game and this is the future, but life is still cruel, as is evident once more bloody corpses start piling up.In his earlier features, Mendonça Filho used different spaces and homes — a middle-class neighborhood, a derelict plantation, an apartment threatened with demolition — as conduits to ideas about history, community, surveillance and power. These same issues swirl through “Bacurau,” which eventually settles into a brutal, disturbing story about haves and have-nots, a social division that Mendonça Filho and Dornelles make ferociously literal. This can be read as a metaphor about Brazil (and the inequities that trouble the larger world), but like Kurosawa’s “Seven Samurai” this is also a story deeply rooted in a precisely mapped place.That place is Brazil’s backcountry or sertão and, even more specifically, a quilombo, one of the many settlements originally founded by escaped enslaved people. In “Bacurau,” the filmmakers have created a version of a settlement that Mendonça Filho, in an interview with Film Comment, called a “remixed quilombo”: “a black community, a historical place of resistance, but with some white, indigenous, trans and other inhabitants.” When, midway through, some townspeople begin practicing capoeira — a combat game that originated with enslaved Africans — they are both communing with that history of defiance and readying for a new battle.Right before things heat up, two ominous strangers ride up to Bacurau. Like latter-day cowboys, they wander into a modest store filled with hanging animal carcasses and buzzing flies, a setting that’s as unassuming as it is skin-crawlingly creepy (much like this movie). When one of the strangers asks the female proprietor what the villagers are called, her son shouts “people!” The proprietor then explains that the town is named for a bird, and the stranger asks if it’s extinct. Not here, the Bacurau woman says with a smile — it comes out at night and it is a hunter.When the fight finally arrives it’s by turns absurd and horrifying. The second half of “Bacurau” is unsparing in its violence, filled with gunfire, terror in the night and revolutionary fervor that skews pathological. There’s a bandit in eyeliner, a fierce squirt (Silvero Pereira), and a gang of Americans right out of a Hollywood blowout. After an hour of silky camera moves, amusing details and a deep sense of history, Mendonça Filho and Dornelles switch gears, fold in a homage to John Carpenter and go berserk, unleashing a nightmare that’s all the worse for being eerily like life.BacurauNot rated. In Portuguese and English, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 11 minutes. More

When a comet passes near the earth’s atmosphere in the dour dystopian thriller “Only,” it first brings falling ash and then a virus that is usually fatal to women. Millions of women across the globe perish, and survivors are forced into hiding. It’s a grim concept that “Only” embraces with fatiguing fidelity.In flashback, Eva (Freida Pinto) and Will (Leslie Odom Jr.) are depicted as a lovey-dovey couple, celebrating years together and making plans for the future. But when the pandemic strikes, Will insists they go into quarantine. He obsessively disinfects and shutters their city apartment, and protects Eva from the hostile authorities.[embedded content]The story begins on the 400th day of their sequestration. Based on the silence of her chat room for survivors, Eva may be the last woman in the world. When the police come looking for her, Eva and Will flee to the countryside, a barren landscape that at least gives them room to breathe.The writer-director Takashi Doscher forgoes apocalyptic spectacle to focus on the pandemic’s effects on Will and Eva’s romance. Too bad. Most of the scenes could have been lifted from a generic relationship drama, and it is only the couple’s conversation, not their visually desaturated world, that distinguishes them. The saving grace of this often enervating thriller is that Doscher grants time for his actors to build character and intimacy, and both Pinto and Odom offer warm, affectingly natural performances as two people facing the end of their world.OnlyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. More

“Run This Town,” a jagged, snappy procedural that splits its time between a downsizing newspaper and a dysfunctional city government, is a fictionalized account of an actual scandal. In 2013, The Toronto Star and Gawker both said their reporters had watched a video that appeared to show Toronto’s mayor, Rob Ford, smoking crack. Six months later, he admitted to having used the drug, but did not resign..Bram (Ben Platt), a young journalist who writes listicles for a Toronto news outlet, is clearly out of his depth when he meets a potential source who wants to sell him the video. The movie, which ends with Bram delivering a self-righteous, mostly unmotivated defense of his generation’s work ethic, takes a weirdly sympathetic attitude toward his stumbles.The film is much sharper at city hall, where the two other major characters work. Kamal (Mena Massoud), the special assistant to the mayor, gleefully demonstrates his reporter-stonewalling strategies to Ashley (Nina Dobrev), a new press aide. She eagerly runs interference for the mayor until he shows up at work drunk and grabs her lewdly. Damian Lewis plays Ford, whose name is not changed, in a surprisingly effective feat of prosthetics.[embedded content]Making energetic use of split screens, the writer-director Ricky Tollman shows a gift for staccato cutting and clipped dialogue, as in a spirited discussion of terminology at city hall. Tollman is savvier on such details than on the big picture: The movie never quite reconciles its assorted perspectives into a coherent point of view.Run This TownRunning time: 1 hour 39 minutes. Rated R for language, inappropriate workplace behavior and talk of drugs. More

It’s easy to mistake Hunter Conrad (Haley Bennett), the woman at the center of “Swallow,” for a mid-20th-century housewife: She dotes on her husband while wearing pearls and cocktail dresses and has a Jackie Kennedy bounce to her bob. The one deviation is playing iPhone games to relieve her ennui.Viewers will anxiously wait for the “happy” wife to crack in this feature from the writer-director Carlo Mirabella-Davis. When Hunter’s not isolated in her secluded house, she’s surrounded by suffocating stereotypes: the wealthy husband (appropriately named Richie) who doesn’t really listen; the uncaring father-in-law and the mother-in-law whose generosity carries spiky undertones of accusation that Hunter is a gold digger. (There are also hackneyed horror visuals of animal slaughter.)[embedded content]Then Hunter learns she’s pregnant. Bennett is exceptional, with an eerie, glazed-over expression that seems impenetrable; she flashes her husband a Stepford smile, disguising her true reaction. The pregnancy triggers pica, a compulsion to consume nonfood items. She first swallows a marble, then escalates to more dangerous objects — a thumbtack, a chess piece, a battery — all potentially fatal to her and the baby.Mirabella-Davis, whose crew was largely made up of women, avoids pure body-horror sensationalism as he traces Hunter’s need for control to a trauma in her past. But given how nauseating it is to watch Hunter perform increasingly perilous acts of self-harm in her prison of a mansion, neither the payoff nor the psychology behind her actions makes “Swallow” an illuminating enough addition to the woman-on-the-verge-of-a-nervous-breakdown genre.SwallowRated R for consumption of sharp objects. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. More

In classical Hollywood cinema, a rainy night rendezvous at a train station is made of shadows and cigarette smoke and romance. But times and movies have changed.The opening scene of “The Wild Goose Lake,” a new crime thriller directed by Diao Yinan, is indeed wet and dark. Our ostensible hero is a downcast young man with a near-fresh laceration on his cheek and bruised knuckles. The young woman asking for a cigarette — not the woman he is expecting, but someone he’ll have to deal with — doesn’t approach him with any pretext of seduction.And the train station is all concrete slabs and neon and fluorescent lights, nothing like the chiaroscuro of noir as we knew it. Such is the world Zhou Zenong (Hu Ge) and Liu Aiai (Gwei Lun Mei) inhabit. Zhou is a gang leader whose attempt to squash a turf war among motorcycle thieves ends in some bloody deaths (one lifts a gory beheading gag from either Fellini’s “Toby Dammit” or Herschell Gordon Lewis’s “She-Devils on Wheels,” or both). Zhou has also (inadvertently, he insists) killed a cop. A dragnet is tightening around him.[embedded content]Liu is one of the “bathing beauties” who frequents the title lake, an area replete with rickety cabins that is depicted as a bedraggled center for prostitution. (The movie is set and shot in Wuhan, a city with many lakes, and the characters speak its dialect.) Liu is the keeper of two keys: She can reunite Zhou with his long-estranged wife, or she can collect a large reward by turning him in to the police, some of whom surpass the standard level of corruption.But what Liu thinks she knows and what’s actually true start to deviate as the two characters seek to strike a bargain. The movie juggles flashbacks to the recent past with several cleverly constructed set pieces in which Zhou meets escape challenges with deadpan ingenuity. As for Liu, the core material of her heart will not, of course, be fully revealed until the last minutes — seconds, even.This movie doesn’t recycle film noir conventions so much as contrive — with a genuine sense of discovery — to locate these conventions in a realistic contemporary context. The economic impoverishment of its principals is a key motivating factor; there’s a strong implication that it steered Zhou into criminality, while Liu’s matter-of-fact approach to prostitution (revealed in a “love” scene that begins with notes of tenderness and ends with blunt retching) carries a near-tragic resignation. Diao can rev up the octane in chase and action sequences, but the movie almost always stays grounded in the physically plausible. When it doesn’t, his directorial inventiveness steps in to make us feel as if the film hasn’t strayed.One way in which Diao’s vision hews to classicism is in accepting the inexorability of fate, as film noir requires. Once we understand the full extent of Zhou’s transgressions, we know that, in the end, for him, it is what it is” Nevertheless, the movie exhilarates.The Wild Goose LakeNot rated. In Chinese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes. More

The coming-of-age dramedy “Go Back to China” largely unfolds in a toy factory, where workers nimbly piece together stuffed animals at their sewing machines. They work quickly, focusing on creating a product that can first pass inspection and, eventually, inspire joy. If only the movie that surrounds them were so deft.The film follows Sasha (Anna Akana), an aspiring designer whose life in Los Angeles is bankrolled by her father (Richard Ng), a toy manufacturer in Shenzhen. When Sasha is unable to find a job, her father cuts her off financially. What Sasha’s domineering dad wants, he gets, and he wants Sasha to return to China and start working in the family business.[embedded content]Sasha capitulates and moves to Shenzhen, where she meets her half-siblings, who struggle under their father’s supervision, and her family’s factory workers, who cower in fear of losing what little money they make. Sasha learns some self-awareness, but her journey to enlightenment drags: Even 95 minutes feels too long to spend in her company.Emily Ting, who both wrote and directed the movie, occasionally hits on an interesting image, like the workers at their stations, but the biggest trouble here is in the writing. By the time the film gets around to showing what a character has felt, they have already told the audience twice — and most likely another character has explained as well, just in case anyone missed the memo. Of the actors, only Ng resonates. His character is the least understanding and least understood, and, mercifully, Ng does not try to connect the dots between his mood swings. His performance suggests the film that might have been — one in which characters are allowed to just be, without having to explain themselves.Go Back to ChinaNot rated. In English and Chinese, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

There’s a lot of tweed, a couple of pocket squares and an old-fashioned waxed mustache in “The Booksellers,” D.W. Young’s charming documentary about the book world — or more specifically the book-as-object world, with antiquarian booksellers trying to reinvent themselves and their industry in a digital era.Anybody curious about the inner workings of unglamorous behemoths like Amazon or the ailing Barnes & Noble will have to look elsewhere. Young made the aesthetically wise choice to focus mainly on purveyors specializing in rare books or niche subjects. Some are inveterate collectors themselves. One bookseller gives a tour of his warehouse in New Jersey, where 300,000 volumes share space with taxidermied sea gulls and a masonic throne.[embedded content]Two emotional currents run through the documentary. The gloomier one involves the older booksellers who have seen their business transform, especially with the advent of the internet and then, within the last 10 years, the proliferation of smartphones.But the younger people in this film are not only hopeful but enthusiastic. (There’s a frustrating lack of identifying captions onscreen — a puzzling stylistic choice that’s also ironic, given all the anxiety about the printed word.) This new generation testifies that a long overdue diversification is beginning finally to take place. Women are getting more recognition in the industry, as are people of color. An archivist in hip-hop memorabilia collects copies of magazines like The Source and XXL.And even some of the struggling booksellers are still elated by what they do. One of them, standing amid an inviting clutter, opens up a volume to reveal a lush, life-size centerfold illustration of a fish. “Playboy,” he says, “eat your heart out.”The BooksellersNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 39 minutes. More