Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe in Antichrist

A trio of impressive art films open this weekend in the Bay Area—all featuring memorable images and some showy performances. Although not every film is for every taste, there is much for discriminating cinephiles to admire.

The Beaches of Agnes This delightful documentary—perhaps the year’s best—showcases French filmmaker Agnes Varda who is, at age 80, as impish as ever. Taking a look back on her life in cinema, her marriage to Jacques Demy, and her family, Varda has created a memorable and fascinating self-portrait. It is the fitting end to a glorious career. (Varda claims this will be her last feature-length film, though she will continue to make shorts). Analyzing how her life and work are inextricably intertwined, The Beaches of Agnes features wonderful interviews and film clips—but it is Varda’s playful personality that truly engages and emerges here. She addresses issues of love, sex, film, sand, mirrors, aging and more with such grace that audiences will be both enchanted and awestruck.

Bronson This intense, spellbinding true story about the British prisoner, not the American actor. Born Michael Peterson, Britain’s most famous prisoner renamed himself Charlie Bronson in one of his many bids to become famous. And it turns out he achieved his goal. Peterson/Bronson was sentenced to seven years in jail for a post office robbery but served 30+ as his violence tendencies kept him imprisoned for years. His story is told in a style that can only be described as operatic. As this nude, bald, mustachioed, muscular man fights guards or other men, excerpts from Verdi and Wagner flood the soundtrack. In a series of surreal episodes, Bronson, in clown makeup, narrates his life story from a stage to appreciative audience. He fancies himself to be a comedian, and a sequence in which he plays two parts in a dialogue is masterful. The film’s energetic first forty minutes—which lead up to his release from prison—are extraordinary, and if the pace isn’t matched in the film’s second half, the escalating violence keeps things from becoming boring. Director Nicolas Winding Refn imbues his taut film with cheeky dark humor—a sequence of Bronson strangling an inmate at a mental hospital is gleefully presented—and Bronson provides an astonishing showcase for its star, Tom Hardy. The actor gives himself body and soul to this difficult, troubled character, and yet still manages to make him incredibly sympathetic.

Antichrist Lars Von Trier’s pretentious portrait of grief opens with an operatic slow motion, black and white prologue during which a couple’s child witnesses a primal scene (his parents having sex, literally) and then dies in an accident. The wife/mother (Charlotte Gainsbourg) feels guilty and suffers an “atypical grieving pattern” and her palpable mourning overtakes her. Her husband (Willem Dafoe), a therapist, tries to cure her, but he may be crossing the line and her strongest coping mechanism is sex.  When the couple head out to a cabin in the woods—“Eden” it’s ominously called—they battle elements of good and evil and she eventually does some very nasty, physically painful things to him and herself.  (Both episodes involve genital mutilation, but wait, there’s more!) Von Trier’s film, which will stun audiences who dare to see it, is full of some impressive Hieronymus Bosch-like visuals, and a pair of brave, nervy performances from Gainsbourg and Dafoe. But there are also some very silly moments, as when a fox says, “Chaos Reigns,” or when Dafoe talks his trying psychobabble about a pyramid chart of her grief. Whether the characters and/or viewers can decipher all the themes and signposts in Antichrist is open to debate. Whether they want to is another matter. Von Trier is to be commended for making such a challenging piece of cinema, but that does not mean it’s a good film.