If, like many North Americans, you were pleasantly surprised by the Muay Thai martial arts stylings of Tony Jaa in Prachya Pinkaew’s films Ong-Bak and The Protector, you really gotta see the director’s latest, Chocolate, which brings back the Thai boxing and slathers it in a whole new layer of weird. Basically, it’s an action movie like his other films, but instead of starring a buff young dude, the film features… an autistic teenage girl. Who also happens to kick some serious ass.

The protagonist, Zen, played by newcomer Yanin “JeeJa” Vismitananda, is the child of an ailing mother, formerly the girlfriend of a gangster. To pay for her medicine, Zen sets out to collect debts from Mom’s days as a loan shark (it’s kind of confusing but you’ll keep up). Doing so involves lots of jumping, kicking and general awesomeness. The movie is definitely in questionable taste, but it doesn’t play Zen’s condition for laughs and puts an interesting, to say the least, twist on the genre. It’s a lot of fun and the stunts choreography is just incredible. It’s too bad this never got a chance in theatres here, where it would definitely be the most fun to see, but it’ll probably be a pretty sweet rental as well.

Amos Gitai’s new film isn’t quite, uh, as fun as Chocolate, but what elegiac and artful movie about memory, the French occupation and the Holocaust would be? Plus Tard Tu Comprendras stars Hippolyte Girardot and Jeanne Moreau in an elegant, if a bit austere, story of a Jewish family haunted by its memories of World War II, especially, as the film begins in the late ’80s, as the trial of Klaus Barbie brings memories of the period back to the surface. With Gitai’s trademark long takes, this is a slow and meditative film, pretty much the exact opposite of Chocolate and worth seeing if you’re in a very different mood.