With the city washed by heavy rains this week, the natural instinct to go outside and enjoy the newly-cleaned landscape should not be ignored. However, do try to balance that with some of the excellent indie features popping up this weekend. You'll find a delightful British dramedy about adapting and aging and a French thriller with enormous amounts of frantic action.

This Weekend at the Drafthouse

A veritable who's who of venerable British actors, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel arrives this weekend with a breezy dose of fish-out-of-water comedy tempered with some poignant character driving reflections on getting old. Judi Dench, Bill Nighy, Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkinson, Penelope Wilton, Ronald Pickup and Celia Imrie are a group of retirees drawn to a lavish hotel in India via an impressive brochure. When they arrive, they find a dilapidated version of their expectations, a run-down shell of what was pictured in the advertisements run by a kid named Sonny (Dev Patel, Slumdog Millionaire).

Despite their horror at the situation, the group slowly learns to make the best of their time there with results that are comedic and dramatic in turn. (The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel also opens Friday at Regal Arbor Cinema and Violet Crown Cinema.)

Action fans are having a good year and while the summer blockbuster season has just begun, it's not Hollywood delivering these movies. First The Raid from Indonesia wowed audiences with 15-stories of epic, non-stop excitement and now we have the French film Sleepless Night.

Vincent is a police lieutenant and sometimes-drug runner who, as the movie opens, manages to seize a large amount of cocaine that unfortunately comes with a stab wound in the gut. He makes it home in time to see his son Thomas off to school but is taken by surprise when he later receives a call from crime lord and rightful cocaine owner Jose Marciano from his son's cell phone. This leads Thomas to Marciano's enormous nightclub the Tarmac where he will spend the rest of the evening fighting to get his son back and come out of a quickly unraveling situation with his reputation somehow intact. Sleepless Night executes action set pieces with such frequency and intensity it borders on exhausting.

Beyond the Weekend

The Alamo Drafthouse latest series, Bangarang!, is a celebration of everything there is to love about the '90s. The kick of screening of Reservoir Dogs with Michael Madsen live was a raging success and the next event on the books is the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pizza party. Enjoy turtle ninja and sensei rat action with all-you-can-eat-pizza and keep an eye on the Alamo Drafthouse calendar for future Bangarang! events.