The French New Wave gets a lot of credit for the disaffected-lovers-on-the-run subgenre, but if you look a little further into the Euro canon, you get some darker, more gutsy takes. Carlos Saura is one of Spain’s smartest and greatest filmmakers, with hard-to-categorize classics like Cría Cuervos and Peppermint Frappé that deal with pre- and post-Franco cultural anxieties. In this portrait of nihilistic street urchins on a crime spree, a young waitress leaves the straight-and-narrow for a delinquent car thief in a sort of Spanish Rebel Without a Cause. But it’s not just for show: During the shooting of the film, two of its nonprofessional actors were arrested for separate incidents, a bleak reminder of the film’s depiction of real-life social malaise. – Lina Fisher
Sept. 12-13
