Two New Waves in the movies

Two new trends spotted in world cinema, which might make it worth watching movies again (the last really good movie I saw was Raging Bull, and that was in the 80s):
a) The New Quirkiness. American films like Happiness (Solondz), Lost in Translation (Coppola), and American Splendor. Does Sideways count?
b) The New French Extremity. Twentynine Palms (Dumont), Anatomy of Hell (Breillat), Irreversible (Noé). The critic James Quandt came up with the coinage of the New French Extremity in Artforum. "Bava as much as Bataille, Salo no less than Sade seem the determinants of a cinema suddenly determined to break every taboo, to wade in rivers of viscera and spumes of sperm, to fill each frame with flesh, nubile or gnarled, and subject it to all manner of penetration, mutilation, and defilement. Images and subjects once the provenance of splatter films, exploitation flicks, and porn--gang rapes, bashings and slashings and blindings, hard-ons and vulvas, cannibalism, sadomasochism and incest, fucking and fisting, sluices of cum and gore--proliferate in the high-art environs of a national cinema whose provocations have historically been formal, political, or philosophical (Godard, Clouzot, Debord) or, at their most immoderate (Franju, Bunuel, Walerian Borowczyk, Andrzej Zulawski), at least assimilable as emanations of an artistic movement (Surrealism mostly)."
I'd call Miike's Audition an extremity, too, and the NY Times says Sympathy for Mr Vengeance (Park) qualifies. I've seen Audition and Irréversible. They were pretty damn extreme but exciting -- small-scale chamberpiece spectacular shock psycho action adventures. Very worth renting, but steel yourself. In related news, porn actress Karen Lancaume, who was Karen Bach in the post-feminist extremity Baise-moi, killed herself. This movie started a world-wide debate about art, violence and porn that didn't reach the cut-off cultural lives we live in NYC.