Film enthusiasts can find more on New Blu-rays

For those who were unable to make it to this year’s Fargo Film Festival, two movies released to Blu-ray March 8 by Kino-Lorber Video should prove satisfying. Both had little theatrical play beyond the rounds of film festivals last year.

Sebastian Schipper’s rather audacious slice-of-life heist thriller “Victoria” is most impressive for its concept, the logistics needed to carry it out, and its sustained performances without a single cut. It hopes to involve the viewer as a participant in the story by following one girl’s experiences over the course of two-and-a-quarter hours. It begins shortly before dawn, playing out in real time in one long, uninterrupted take from beginning to end.

The first hour or so sets up the characters, as Victoria (Laia Costa), a recent immigrant to Berlin from her native Spain, meets four rather grungy local men while dancing and drinking in a flashy nightclub. They convince her to come with them as they wander aimlessly around the city, and then must go off to an appointment with a local gangster who wants them to pull off a robbery he’s planned out.

Unfortunately the film really plods its way through much of the first hour, but of course the single-take concept eliminates the possibility for editing the dull parts. Luckily the last hour and a half picks up both pace and tension dramatically, once Victoria commits to accompanying these rather shiftless hoods to their meeting as their driver. It soon becomes quite gripping and much more involving, with the plot's quick turns of events and limited point-of-view.

The digitally-shot widescreen (2.35:1) picture on the Kino/Adopt Films Blu-ray looks pretty good considering the circumstances it was shot in (mostly at night in dark rooms and on dark streets), and its dark look is part of its style. It goes in and out of focus, often intentionally, and camera shadows or reflections are occasionally visible. Audio is not bad but dialogue often seems muffled, especially when characters are not facing the camera. There are no bonus features.

VICTORIA on Blu-ray -- Movie: B / Video: A- / Audio: B+ / Extras: F

Winnipeg filmmaker Guy Maddin has attended the Fargo Film Festival in the past, and has spoken to the audience about his eccentric style and subject material. His latest effort, “The Forbidden Room” (2015), like many of his works, incorporates his love of early cinema with his peculiar, darkly satiric, and downright weird creativity.

This time he applies his comically absurdist sense of the surreal to an adventure-mystery plot of men trapped in a submarine, which serves as a framework for several unrelated plots as the men relate various strange stories of their own experiences and/or dreams and/or fears while trying to locate their elusive captain.

And framing this driving plot is a droll monologue about how to take a bath, written by no less than the poet John Ashbery, inspired by a lost film by cult exploitation director Dwain Esper.

Shot mostly in Paris and Montreal before live audiences, “The Forbidden Room” is really a collection of several short films inspired by and/or remaking a wide range of genre films from around the world and intermingled together. Many are silent, some are sound, some “part-talkie,” with Maddin cutting between different stories and back to the framing story.

The commentary reveals that what may appear to be cross-cutting is actually a deliberately organized nesting structure of three separate acts containing stories within stories within stories, rather than each story building to a climax simultaneously.

The effect is like a half-insane collision of David Lynch, Monty Python, and Nobuhiko Obayashi, especially the latter’s amazingly delirious “Hausu” (1977), filtered and enhanced through Maddin’s own oddball vision. At 119 minutes, “The Forbidden Room” sometimes drags in its celebration of over-the-top imagery and obscure in-jokes, but it is always intriguing.

During and shortly after production of “The Forbidden Room,” Maddin shot even more recreations of lost films, which should be available later this year in an interactive online project called “Seances” by the National Film Board of Canada.

Kino’s Blu-ray of “The Forbidden Room” admirably reproduces Maddin’s intentionally “distressed” film look, which moves from grainy black and white to various styles of color, including the now-obsolete two-color Technicolor and Cinecolor used in the 1920s and 30s. Frequent jumps in action and changes of picture sharpness and title fonts effectively simulate the reconstruction of lost films from assorted surviving fragments in various stages of decay. In other words, what you see on the screen looks exactly the way Madden intended and took great pains to achieve digitally.

Likewise the sound cannot be judged by 21st-century standards as it is an homage to the early days of movies, switching from well-recorded musical accompaniment over silent-movie sections with intertitles to “all-talkie” segments that have primitive-sounding scratchy audio.

Bonus features include an illustrated booklet with two very interesting essays, including one by Maddin himself describing vividly how he shot 69½ short films for the “Seances” project in 70 days during a transcontinental journey aboard a prison train! On the disc there’s an enjoyable audio commentary by Maddin with co-director/co-writer (and former student) Evan Johnson, as well as a couple of abstract experimental shorts, and two trailers.

THE FORBIDDEN ROOM on Blu-ray -- Movie: A- / Video: A / Audio: A / Extras: B