Now that there’s a little breathing room between Mardi Gras and Jazz Fest, you may want to catch up on some interesting and offbeat videos. Among the more enticing:

The Vanishing is as pure a psychological thriller as you will find anywhere, with a plot that is altogether engrossing and ultimately very wicked indeed. Comparable to Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window or Vertigo, The Vanishing revels in its paranoia and depravity.

Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu is mesmerizing as a calculating family man leading a secondary life as a sociopath. His deliberate evil lodges deep inside you and will not release its unsavory grip until long after this fitful movie has ended. Gene Bervoets plays the obsessed husband who has inexplicably lost his young wife while stopping for gas at an innocent border crossing. Johanna Ter-Steege, in a brief but painfully drawn performance, conveys the lead-in to terror that is effectively built by writer Tim Krabbe. Director George Sluizer’s shots are always innovative and visually stunning. And the music by Henry Vrienten is hauntingly correct. The whole vehicle is calculated to scare and move audiences forward at a breakneck pace but on a cerebral level. The Vanishing succeeds on every level, achieving claustrophobic proportions by film’s end. (***)

For something a little lighter, might I suggest that you try James Lapine’s Impromptu, a delightfully witty comedy of manners with an all-star cast and offering a magnificent performance by Judy Davis.

Davis plays George Sand, the strong-willed French novelist with a penchant for disdaining her femininity. She smokes cigars. When she happens upon a man whose horse has just broken its leg, she casually takes a gun and lays the poor beast to rest. When told that she promised to love a particular fellow forever, she callously replies, “I didn’t promise to succeed.” Sand, a self-described “resurrected wreck,” moves through her life selfishly but with purpose. That is until she meets Frederic Chopin, played with delicate charm by Hugh Grant. And once a letter from Sand to Chopin, in which she professes that she loves him exclusively, strongly, and steadfastly, falls into the wrong hands, the fireworks of this implosive comedy begin. A tongue-in-cheek Dangerous Liaisons, this droll piece of film-making also contains good performances from Mandy Patinkin, Bernadette Peters and Julian Sands. (***)

For those who just can’t seem to get enough Carnival, there’s always Marcel Camus’ marvelous 1958 classic Black Orpheus. This film remains one of the great musicals of all time, a vivacious evocative film full of color and naturalistic celebrations that are very infectious indeed. It is a romantic/musical/drama set against the rollicking excess of the carnival in Rio de Janeiro. Starring Bruno Mela as Orpheus, a black streetcar conductor who meets his Eurydice, a simple country girl played by the stunningly beautiful Marpessa Dawn. The problem is that both lovers are being stalked: Orpheus by his jealous fiancee and Eurydice by the surreal specter of Death. All of this fits together in a funny, happy, sad, ultimately life-affirming film of uncommon resonance. (****)

Definitely not for the whole family is Andy Warhol’s production of Frankenstein. Made in the early 1970s, Frankenstein offers black humor at its blackest. It unfolds as kind of a Jeffrey Dahmer instruction video; at one point Baron Frankenstein, after he has just had sex with one of his cadavers, turns to his assistant and says, “To know death, Otto, you must first **** life in the gall bladder.” Udo Kier is a nicely offbeat Baron Frankenstein with an accent tilting strongly toward parody. Frankenstein also stars Monique Van Vooren and Joe Dallesandro, who speaks in his usual Brooklynese accent even though this is supposed to be Europe in the 19th Century. As I said at the beginning, this film is not for everyone, especially the squeamish, but it does offer an unusual art take on the macabre real-life proceedings just completed in Milwaukee. (**)

Joel and Ethan Coen’s Barton Fink is one of the strangest mainstream films in recent years. Fink swept the top three awards at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, winning Best Film, Best Director and Best Actor. While those accolades may slightly oversell the film, there’s no denying the obvious delights in this nightmarish descent of a playwright-cum-screenwriter’s journey through 1940’s Hollywood. John Turturro is simply great as Barton Fink. He is capably surrounded by John Goodman (in his best role to date), John Mahoney and Judy Davis. The Coen brothers, who previously made Blood Simple, Raising Arizona and Miller’s Crossing, again show their versatility and creativity in this life-out-of-control yarn. Check into tile hotel with Barton Fink and you too will be shown the mind of a writer.