• Courtesy Of Claire Folger/Orion Releasing Llc
• Jeffrey Wright gives a superlative performance as a frustrated author who tries a daring hoax in American Fiction.

We've reached the season when prestige films come at us thick and fast, so this week I wanted to cover two that represent opposite ends of a spectrum. Fallen Leaves, the latest from renowned Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, is a minimalist love story. American Fiction, the first film directed by Cord Jefferson (a writer on "The Good Place" and other shows), is a big, bold satire. For all their differences, however, both movies raise provocative questions about how fiction tells the stories of the downtrodden, making them palatable to audiences that are wary of sadness in their entertainment.

Those questions are front and center in American Fiction (starting Friday at Merrill's Roxy Cinemas in Burlington), based on Percival Everett's novel Erasure. Its protagonist is novelist Thelonious Ellison (Jeffrey Wright), Monk for short, who produces what's called "quiet" fiction — respected but not lucrative. Editors wish he would write something "more Black," by which they mean more like the output of the wildly popular Sintara Golden (a hilarious Issa Rae). Her bestseller is called We's Lives in da Ghetto.

This pigeonholing infuriates Monk, who comes from an upper-middle-class background and sees Sintara and her ilk as pandering to white people's stereotypes about Black people. But when a constellation of personal crises — his beloved sister's death, his mom's Alzheimer's diagnosis — puts him in dire need of funds, inspiration strikes. In a darkly funny scene, Monk sits down at his computer and channels the voice of a tragically fatherless inner-city drug dealer. He calls his manuscript My Pafology and bylines it "Stagg R. Leigh."

Naturally, publishers want the book, to the tune of six figures. They're even more excited when they learn the supposed author is a wanted fugitive. Horrified by his own creation, a satire that no one recognizes as such, Monk tries to back out. But his mom needs the best care available — a powerful incentive to strike a devil's bargain.

Although Erasure was published back in 2001, the satire of American Fiction couldn't be more timely, given the debates about "representation" that are currently consuming publishing. The film skewers white tastemakers who push their own preferred versions of minority narratives, from "poverty porn" novels to horror flicks that exploit the shock value of slavery. (Adam Brody plays a producer making a movie called Plantation Annihilation.)

While it's consistently smart and scathing, American Fiction gets a little muddled toward the end. After both Sintara and Monk's new girlfriend (Erika Alexander) push back on his disdain for his own cynically written novel, the movie closes on a meta note, foregrounding its own reluctance to make a decisive statement.

But American Fiction delivers plenty of satisfaction as a family drama. The prickly Monk is a beautifully fleshed-out character, as are his mom (Leslie Uggams), his sister (Tracee Ellis Ross), his brother (Sterling K. Brown) and even their longtime housekeeper (Myra Lucretia Taylor). The movie embodies an answer to the question Monk poses throughout: Where are the prestige books and films about Black characters who aren't defined by oppression? If American Fiction reminds you of an old-school ensemble comedy-drama such as Terms of Endearment, that's the whole point.

While American Fiction dissects the lurid excesses of popular narratives about the underprivileged, Fallen Leaves reminds us that such stories can also be told with restraint and grace. A Golden Globe nominee and likely Oscar candidate, currently playing at the Roxy, it has been described as a companion to Kaurismäki's trilogy of films about the working class: Shadows in Paradise, Ariel and The Match Factory Girl.

Ansa (Alma Pöysti) is a supermarket stocker who comes home each night to eat a solitary meal and listen to the radio drone about Russia's invasion of Ukraine (an ominous thread running through the film). Holappa (Jussi Vatanen) works on a construction site, smoking and swigging from a flask to stave off despair. He rarely speaks beyond some playfully hostile banter with an older coworker (Janne Hyytiäinen), who tries to bring him out of his shell by dragging him to karaoke at a local bar.

There Holappa spots Ansa, but it will take a few more chance encounters before they exchange a word. A date? Maybe, but these two lonely people have histories of bad luck.

The film's every shot is carefully composed, its script bare-bones, and its romantic gestures few. When they happen, though, they count, and Kaurismäki draws on movie history for iconography that is simple and powerful in equal measures. Fallen Leaves can be witty, too, as when Ansa and Holappa see Jim Jarmusch's The Dead Don't Die at the local theater. While a pair of cinephiles rhapsodize about Jean-Luc Godard references, Ansa makes a more down-to-earth observation that small-town sheriffs are no match for zombies.

Watching the Helsinki-set movie often feels like falling into an alternate dimension where sunlight is muted, modern technological distractions barely exist and everyone matter-of-factly acknowledges the futility of existence. Kaurismäki doesn't condescend to his characters, exaggerate their woes or strain to make them sympathetic. We know they'd shrug off our pity and turn our solicitude back on us — who are we to claim to have life figured out?

In this setting, gestures as simple as adopting a hungry mutt or extending generosity to a fellow human feel like enormous affirmations of light and love against darkness. As they should. In every walk of life, both these films suggest, prurient interest is cheap. But genuine empathy is a pearl of great price.