“This film’s worth lies in the devastating, cumulative power of its images, building to an intensely hallucinogenic mushroom trip toward the third act that turns the entirety of the film into a series of nightmarish Rorschach blots.” – Warren Zhang

Starting today, the AFI Silver Theatre and Cultural Center will host the 26th annual European Union Film Showcase, featuring a wide selection of European films making their Washington premieres, including these three gems:

A Field in England

If you’ve always thought 17th century combat in film was too sanitized, director Ben Wheatley (Sightseers) has a grim, awe-inspiring treat for you. A Field in England, ostensibly about a couple of deserters on a doomed treasure hunt, is one of the more consistently bleak and startling depictions of war in recent memory, from its dim, black and white cinematography to its grimy and terribly unsanitary costuming.

For such an otherwise dreamy experience, someone making A Field in England paid a lot of attention to era-accurate garb and banter, even though the film is content with letting its period trappings exist in the background. Plot also often takes a backseat to mood, characterization and roundabout chitchat.

This film’s worth lies in the devastating, cumulative power of its images, building to an intensely hallucinogenic mushroom trip toward the third act that turns the entirety of the film into a series of nightmarish Rorschach blots.

A Field in England is rough around the edges; the precisely doled out surrealism can’t quite overcome a plodding, too-sparse opening, leading to a somewhat dull middle third. Yet it’s impossible to deny such visual and aural splendor. Even when A Field in England is at its bleakest and most impenetrable, the images and sounds are never less than stupendous.

The Last Black Sea Pirates

For a group of potbellied men without an actual ship, the subjects of the documentary The Last Black Sea Pirates come surprisingly close to being a group of actual modern-day pirates. Unlike the desperate Somalians from A Hijacking and Captain Phillips, these pirates hew to the romantic ideal of pirates from days long past — scandalous rapscallions united by a common love of the sea in their hearts and actual treasure to hunt.

Lest you should think that these Bulgarian pirates are actually living out the dreams of an 8-year-old, The Last Black Sea Pirates does a good job of capturing both the pirates’ genuine zeal and the tragic patheticness of their futile quest for gold.

Trouble comes when word reaches the pirates that the government is planning to build a tourist resort on their otherwise untouched island. The Last Black Sea Pirates sadly proves to be a more prophetic title than expected when the news slowly disintegrates this ragtag team of dreamers and schemers.

In the end, despite sometimes making fun of its subjects, The Last Black Sea Pirates emerges as a celebration of these men struggling to deal with a rapidly changing world and the soon-to-be-developed island they call home.

This rich tapestry of human stories is told like a long, wonderfully humorous shaggy-dog story, filled to the brim with salacious asides, that ends on a perfect note of happiness tinged with deep melancholy.

2 Autumns, 3 Winters

American independent romantic comedies are so commonplace that the sheer novelty of watching one in French is almost enough to make 2 Autumns, 3 Winters noteworthy in itself. It’s weirdly fitting to see a genre that has co-opted so much from the French New Wave movement in the hands of a Frenchman.

The basic story here is not particularly interesting; ennui-filled 30-something-year-old Parisians wander in and out of existential and physical crises and love affairs while struggling to make a livelihood out of vague artistic inclinations.

Fortunately, 2 Autumns, 3 Winters wraps its story thoroughly and completely around a series of monologues delivered by the characters directly to the camera. In lieu of traditional dialogue or cinematic conventions, action unfurls and flows through a mix of voice-over and soliloquy.

At first, the structure feels more gimmicky and obtrusive than genuinely worthwhile. But the cumulative effect of the monologues in concert with the grainy 16mm cinematographic process is a movie that, though the story technically starts in 2009, feels absolutely rooted in the modern world.

The vibe is perched somewhere between YouTube and Instagram; like the current generation of YouTubers and Internet celebrities, the film’s characters feel far more comfortable describing, at length, the struggles of recovering from a stroke and the virtues of AMC’s The Walking Dead to a camera than a real person.