Let’s be honest, if you’re watching a foreign film, at least part of the reason is to feel smart.

I remember when I was a kid, watching Siskel and Ebert and they would negatively review an awesome movie like The Money Pit or License to Drive and then they would praise some weird movie from Belgium with stars I’d never heard of. I thought it was dumb. La Mort Rouge isn’t even playing at the mall!

And yet, even back then, deep down, I knew that there must be something to those weird foreign movies. Those were the real movies, the sophisticated ones. One day, I would learn to like them.

I love regular old Hollywood movies: action, comedy, romance, and, lately, Marvel. It’s what I was raised on. The Karate Kid, Goonies, Back to the Future, those got to me at an early age and still hold a place in my heart.

But something does happen, eventually. You watch American movies and you start to notice patterns. You see that justice is almost always meted out appropriately at the end. The couple gets together. The lone soldier completes his mission. Things resolve nicely and neatly. It’s satisfying but even that starts to get old.

And so you find yourself looking for different movies, more challenging movies. Movies that play in the small arthouse downtown. You want to be able to make those same references to the French New Wave and Ingmar Bergman and all that crap (I haven’t seen a Godard, Truffaut, or Bergman movie in my life).

It’s this instinct that found my girlfriend and I watching two foreign films this weekend. This and the fact that I didn’t want to see The Grinch or Bohemian Rhapsody.

The first was Burning, a Korean movie based an a Haruki Murakami short story starring Steven Yeun. (Bonus points for it being adapted from a Murakami short story, an author name checked by many a hipster, even Thom Yorke at one point, I believe.) I’m not going to talk too much about the plot because one of the great things about seeing a foreign movie is it isn’t promoted to death here and you don’t know what it is before walking in. This movie is a slow burn – sorry, there’s no other way to say it – at times a little too slow but intriguing throughout. We probably wouldn’t have seen it without Steven Yeun but Ah-In Yoo as the main character was hypnotic.

We also saw Border, a Swedish movie that’s about – spoiler alert – trolls. We’re introduced to a homely woman who is gifted at her job in customs because she can smell fear and shame in people coming through. She meets a similarly homely man and learns all about where she really came from. This movie also has to be seen to be believed. It plays out basically like a romantic comedy directed by Aphex Twin.

The other cool thing about seeing foreign movies is when Oscar season comes around, you actually have an opinion about that category.

I’ve had enough culture for a little while, though. Arthouse movies don’t feel the need to give you a nice, happy ending. These two didn’t. During the last half hour of Border, I took an Alamo Drafthouse order slip and wrote a note to my girlfriend.

“From now on… Pixar.”