As we enter into the months’-long fireworks display of summer movie season, I thought it best to take a moment to survey some of the sleepers that are currently available to see, and that offer a respite from noisy, impersonal franchise expectations. Below is hopefully a little of something for everyone.

“Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World” (Radu Jude)

Radu Jude’s satire is the rare honest movie about the deadening tedium and exhilaration of modern life. Angelica (Ilinca Manolache) is a production assistant who drives around Bucharest collecting testimonials meant to absolve a corporation’s exploitation of its workers. Underpaid, overworked and turned on by her frenetic purgatory, Angelica hops in and out of the lives of vividly-sketched working-class characters, an adventure which Jude renders into a mutating fantasia of film references, archive footage, TikTok videos, and global atrocities.

This is as close as a movie has gotten to the ways that the media bedazzles us with endless, simultaneous identities and realities while corporations run amok. Or, per J. Hoberman, Angelica is both exploiter and exploited, suggesting how skillfully society turns us against ourselves with promises that we may one day join the Gilded Age of the elite. Think a media interrogation along the lines of a Godard movie, with Paul Verhoeven’s mischievousness. (In theaters and rentable at home.)

“Unfrosted” (Jerry Seinfeld)

Given what many critics settle for, the hostile reception to Jerry Seinfeld’s “Unfrosted” feels personal. Nowhere near the worst film of the year, “Unfrosted” is a lark with a subtle bite. Mounting a pointedly ridiculous ‘biography’ of how the Pop-Tart was invented amongst a rivalry between Post and Kellogg’s, Seinfeld parodies the anachronistic nonsense that biopics often offer with a straight face.

The film’s absurdist humor is rooted in an understanding of how corporations subtly control our lives, right down to the addictive junk they condition us to eat in the morning. The jokes are highly variable, but that can be said of many comedies, and Seinfeld has shrewdly positioned himself as the straight man to a roster of gifted loons that include Jim Gaffigan, Melissa McCarthy, Amy Schumer, Hugh Grant, and Jon Hamm in a role that’s too amusing to reveal. (On Netflix.)

“The Last Stop in Yuma County” (Francis Galluppi)

 This film is a pastiche of the 1990s-era movies that were themselves pastiches of 1950s-era noirs. Think “The Desperate Hours” via “From Dusk ‘Til Dawn” but milder. A bunch of underrated character actors are stuck in a diner with bank robbers who’re laying low until the gas station next door receives another shipment of fuel to get them out of a dusty desert town. Tensions mount.

Richard Brake is the head bank robber, and he, a reliable and under-sung veteran of modern genre films, very much suggests Humphrey Bogart’s more feral and desiccated son. Jim Cummings is a schnook caught in an extreme situation, and his unexpected reaction steers “The Last Stop in Yuma County” out of the realm of pastiche and into darker waters. If you’re looking to scratch a crime-movie itch, you could do much worse. (In theaters and rentable at home.)

 “Problemista” (Julio Torres)

I have a limited tolerance for movies about young people trying to get a foothold in the working world, despite the years that I put in as an unemployable, vaguely creative type myself. But Julio Torres’ “Problemista” is an inventive and dryly funny film with memorable surreal flourishes and a lovely role for Tilda Swinton. Torres, presumably playing a gloss on himself, moves from El Salvador to New York City with dreams of becoming a toymaker, where he meets Swinton’s widow of sorts.

Swinton’s husband, poignantly played by RZA, was cryogenically frozen after being diagnosed with a fatal cancer. Soon, Swinton enfolds Torres into her efforts to sell RZA’s paintings to pay for the cryogenic freezing. It’s not as convoluted as it sounds, as Torres homes in on the odd-couple situation between the leads, and his observations on immigration and the hiring practices of corporations give “Problemista” a heat that leavens the whimsy. Torres is one to watch. (Rentable on various streamers.)

“Infested” (Sébastian Vanicek)

 In this promising French creature feature, Vanicek gives the premise of “Arachnophobia” the “Aliens” treatment. A rare spider is snuck into a low-income apartment complex, gets loose, and produces offspring that grow to the size of the spidery “Alien” face-hugger and beyond.

The bad news: the interpersonal tension that one encounters in, say, “Night of the Living Dead” (an obvious influence), is barely on display here. The good news is that the special effects are outstanding and evocatively utilized by Vanicek, who also proves himself quite adept at exploiting the sort of confined setting that was at the center of the recent, similarly themed “Evil Dead Rises.” Sam Raimi apparently agrees, as Vanicek is slated to direct the next “Evil Dead.” (Available to stream on AMC+ and Shudder.)

“The Feeling that the Time for Doing Something Has Passed” (Joanna Arnow)

This movie, another exploration of young-adult frustration in which the filmmaker presumably plays a version of themselves, is in a darker register than “Problemista.” Joanna Arnow plays a character in her early 30s who works a dull office job in a passive-aggressive environment while exorcizing her frustrations with a sex life in which she serves as a submissive for various men. Very dry comedy of despair and miscommunication ensues.

The sex scenes are realistic and feel like the bad sex that I’ve been seeing in a half dozen movies a year for the last half dozen years. Bad sex is in right now in the art film sector, as is the stilted monotone in which Arnow has her characters speak. These devices, somehow smugly and defensively stultifying at once, feel like a way for a young filmmaker to evade the messier contradictions of actual life. Lena Dunham is an obvious influence, but Dunham takes bigger risks. That said, some of the comedy here still stings. Arnow is still another one to watch.  (Now playing at Movieland.)

“Blackout” (Larry Fessenden)

 The films of indie horror-movie maverick Larry Fessenden are an acquired taste. They are eerie and poignant rather than scary, and wear their humanist shagginess as a badge of honor. Fessenden might be the closest that we have to a living successor to the socially-minded George A. Romero, though Romero at his fiercest played harder ball. Anyway, “Blackout” is in the Fessenden tradition, bending the tropes of the werewolf movie so that they can accommodate an essay on corporations’ blasé attitudes toward the environment (which Fessenden also addressed in “The Last Winter”) as well as a story of addiction and daddy issues.

Like the vampire, the werewolf is readymade for addiction metaphors. With these creatures, it’s barely even subtext: they began as humans and succumb to the power of an innate hunger. Alex Hurt is the struggling artist, aspiring activist, and blossoming wolf man here, and he has a wounded quality that recalls, well, William Hurt, his father. Fessenden cannily sneaks photos of Alex with William into the film, purposely driving us to wonder how much of this character is fictional and how much is an exorcism of Alex’s own demons. That’s the best part of “Blackout,” along with its poetic artisanal special effects. Fessenden could’ve kept the eco-parable this time out, but this movie is still haunting. (Available to stream at home.)