Indie Roundup: ‘Holy Motors’

There are some movies that you can get a pretty clear read on the first time you see them, even if other dimensions reveal themselves later. Then there are movies like Leos Carax’s “Holy Motors” that are so strange, so willfully enigmatic that they pretty much demand multiple viewings.

Carax burst onto the world cinematic scene at a mere 24 years old with his 1984 feature debut, “Boy Meets Girl.” He went on to make a series of pungent, occasionally cloyingly French, frequently brilliant movies during the ’80s and ’90s like “Mauvais Sang” (1986), “The Lovers on the Bridge” (1991), and the controversial “Pola X” (1999). Carax hasn’t really made much since the turn of the millennium except the standout segment of the omnibus flick “Tokyo!” I’m not really sure what happened to him in the intervening time, but he seems to have disentangled himself from whatever had been creatively holding him back in the past. “Holy Motors” feels like the exhilarating yawp of an auteur unchained.