“Head-On” is about a series of collisions in Hamburg and Istanbul. Hopped up on smack and booze, Turkish immigrant Cahit (Birol Unel) drives his car into a brick wall and lands in the hospital. There he meets a gorgeous young woman named Sibel (Sibel Kekilli) who, with a dangerous glint in her eye and utter apparent sincerity, asks him to marry her.

Having failed to successfully slit her wrists, Sibel thinks marriage is the only alternate way to win freedom from her conservative, domineering family. Several boozy nights and suicide attempts later, Cahit grudgingly agrees to the sham marriage. He soon collides into her family’s lack of enthusiasm; into a wedding; into a conflicting set of ideas about interior design. (He prefers punk posters and overflowing ashtrays; she detonates a “chick bomb” of curtains, candles, and scented soaps.)

Free of her family’s gaze, Sibel sleeps her way through the nightclubs of Hamburg. Cahit, for his part, takes up with an old, exceptionally feisty lover. Their respective miseries, as you might have guessed, begin to love the company, and these two misfits find themselves growing closer than they expected.

There are more collisions, many more, of increasing violence and desperation. L’amour faux turns l’amour fou; lives are wrecked, reconstituted, then wrecked again. The story darkens further in Istanbul, where Sibel’s self-destructive impulse flares up one final, harrowing time.

“Head-On” struck a nerve in Germany, winning top prize at the Berlin Film Festival, then cleaning up at the Lolas, the country’s equivalent of the Oscars. It’s not hard to see why: While the movie is, at heart, fairly conventional, the milieu is fresh and the telling pungent. It opens up a view on an angry, frustrated fringe of the Turkish immigrant experience in Europe – think “Sid and Nancy” meets “Green Card” – and gives us a pair of complicated, unusual people to care about.

A cross between Daniel Auteuil and a strung-out Mick Jagger, Mr. Unel gives a vigorous, volcanic performance as a man staggering through life in an existential hangover. Ms. Kekilli is possessed of exquisitely beauty and an exquisitely rare skill: She knows exactly how to control her beauty on camera; how to dazzle in one moment, blazing confidence and eroticism, and how to go cold, pinched, or venerable in another.

Director Faith Akin is as confident with his setting as he is with his stars. “Head-On” is soaked in interest and atmosphere, particularly in its vision of after-hours Hamburg – so much so that the two-hour runtime feels somewhat oversaturated. As problems go, that’s as forgivable as they come.

***

I suppose the title of Siegrid Alnoy debut feature, “She’s One of Us,” means to implicate the viewer, but I’m not entirely convinced that “we” could ever be this pretentious, over determined, fraudulently stylized, risibly mannered, obnoxiously alienated, or blatantly color-coded.

Nevertheless, I concede that we are all culpable in the capitalist dehumanization that inspired this ludicrous movie, and for that let me personally offer my sincerest apologies.

Christine (Sasha Andres) dresses in red, all the time: Behold (in every scene) the symbol of her psychic agony and/or murderous rage! She is a traumatized temp wasting away in the hateful beige depths of the provincial Rhone Alps. At the supermarket, she is overwhelmed by the terrors of consumerism; at driving school, she is followed by an insidious ambient hum. After initiating a friendship with her banal, vaguely supercilious boss at the temp agency – shades of the “psychotic lesbian stalker” here – Christine reaches her breaking point. Cue “shocking” violence and vapid compositional affectations.

Enter a pair of idiotic cross-talking cops, who suspect there’s something amiss with the recently promoted Christine – and exit this movie reviewer from describing the worst French film of this year or next.