An epic depiction of France's near-revolution of May 1968 and its aftermath, Regular Lovers sets up a dialogue with several other films about the events. Its period ambiance is perfect, but instead of feeling like a documentary, it suggests an apocryphal French New Wave opus, while jousting overtly with Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers. Francois (Louis Garrel) is an aspiring poet who dodges military police to fight on the barricades of May '68. He becomes involved with Lilie (Clotilde Hesme), a sculptor who works in a foundry casting objects for more successful artists, and hangs out with Antoine (Julien Lucas), a wealthy opium addict.

The pacing of Regular Lovers is leisurely, but Garrel assumes that we need some time to adjust to the rhythms of another period. His characters aren't motivated by ideology as much as the chance to make a difference in everyday life: they view travel or poetry as political acts. While this doesn't always turn out so well, Regular Lovers never suggests that the attempt was misguided or doomed from the start. A thousand sub-MTV montages set to bad pop songs have destroyed the idea of music as an expression of ecstatic spirit; in a dance sequence set to the Kinks' "This Time Tomorrow," Garrel manages to dredge that notion back from nostalgia's dustbin. He brings the past — even its unfashionable bits — back to life with an immediacy that bypasses retro cool. For that reason alone, Regular Lovers is a must-see. — Steve Erickson

Andrei Kravchuk's The Italian, which tracks a Russian boy's escape from his orphanage in an attempt to find his mother, is shot through with a despair immediately reminscent of 19th century literature — the word "Dickensian" comes to mind. As a result, it's also the kind of film that will prompt more jaded viewers (or, ahem, critics) to put up their guards: here comes another wallow through the underbelly of humanity, seen through the eyes of an adorable tyke. If you don't cry, you'll curse the screen. Actually, you'll probably just do both.

But it turns out The Italian is a much weirder film than its potentially cloying subject matter would lead us to expect. For starters, the jury is out on whether Vanya, our diminutive, tow-headed hero (Kolya Spiridonov, in an excelllent performance) is ever really making the right decisions. What prompts his escape is the promise that a loving Italian couple is about to adopt him, coupled with the fear that his biological mother might be out there, somewhere, and that she may come for him one day. As a result, we never quite know what to make of Vanya's escape and of his unlikely journey to find his vanished parent. Is this a fool's errand, or the heroic journey of a plucky, Oliver Twist-like protagonist? That it never really answers this question is one of The Italian's great conceptual strengths. And the film's bizarrely atonal, spare, drifting electronic soundtrack helps create an off-kilter world of perpetual unease. Kravchuk avoids easy identification, giving us a world of characters whose intentions are often complicated and not at all clear-cut.

All these elements are to be admired on some level — there is clearly an attempt to do things differently here on the part of the filmmaker – but the end result is curiously lacking in warmth or even narrative tension, like a stylistic experiment in reinventing a twice-told tale. Perhaps that's also why the film seems to desperately shed its neorealist trappings and, in its final act, takes on the golden-hued and slightly unreal aura of a fairy tale. It seems strange to say this concerning a movie about a Russian moppet searching for his mom, but The Italian is ultimately cold and curiously uninvolving — a promising stylistic gambit, perhaps, but ultimately not very affecting, or effective. — Bilge Ebiri

In 1999, pint-size San Fernando Valley drug dealer Jesse James Hollywood kidnapped and murdered fifteen year-old straight-A student Nicholas Markowitz, after Markowitz's half-brother defaulted on a loan. Anyone who read the ensuing LA Times cover story could guess that it was headed for the big screen, for better or worse. Director Nick Cassavetes (related to his brilliant dad in body, not in spirit) scored the rights and was granted access to the case file by prosecutors, in hopes that the film would help bring Jesse James Hollywood out of hiding. He was caught last year in South America, and attempted to block the film's release.

The names have been tastefully changed and an A-list cast assembled, but let nobody pretend that Alpha Dog is a cautionary tale or a statement on societal ills — this is an exploitation flick through and through. If you know the outcome beforehand, it plays like torture porn, a good kid making one bad decision after another on the road to a dark, dark place. Cassavetes has called the project a case study in bad parenting, but Alpha Dog never lingers on this idea, instead reveling in the violence and misogyny of his wealthy, insanely attractive, Scarface-and-video-game-fueled youngsters. Jesse James Hollywood's only crime, it seems, was to take a stupid idea a bit too far.

Possibly the most egregious thing about Alpha Dog is how effectively gut-churning a drama it often is, coupled with the fact that Emile Hirsch (as Hollywood-proxy Johnny Truelove), Anton Yelchin, and Justin Timberlake inhabit their lead roles with palpable vulnerability. Combining high production values with the most depraved elements of E! True Hollywood Story and Larry Clark films, Alpha Dog is bound for prurient misappropriation and cult-classic status. — Akiva Gottlieb

Timing is, indeed, everything. When the outlandish Thai film Tears of the Black Tiger premiered at Cannes in 2001, its zonked-out kaleidoscope of genre homage must have felt like some kind of visionary triumph. Maybe that's why Miramax snatched it up with great fanfare at the time, but it doesn't quite explain why, like so many other Asian films, it wound up gathering dust on the studio's shelf for years, until the plucky Magnolia Films decided to buy it recently and give it a proper theatrical release. Wisit Sasanatieng's film is still a wondrously inventive and entertaining romp, but it's hard not to feel that the last few years of endless experimentation coming from Asia has dulled a bit of its edge.

The story (which actually has strange overtones of The Princess Bride) focuses on the doomed love between a rich girl and a peasant boy, whose relationship is kindled anew after years spent apart, during which time he has become the titular bandit. She, however, has been promised to a slimy police captain. Much candy-colored carnage ensues, in a film that, while officially billed as an homage to '50s Thai Westerns, also references everyone from Sergio Leone to Douglas Sirk to Sam Raimi along the way.

Watching Black Tiger, I imagine this is what rolling down a hill trapped inside a giant paint can must feel like. That might in fact be the best way to enjoy this garish, hallucinatory oddity. Screw the story, and screw even the hip referentiality: on an aesthetic level, with its swirling pastel colors, its mad soundtrack, its dizzying close-ups, Tears of the Black Tiger is pure cinema, for better and for worse. — Bilge Ebiri

Genres exist to be destroyed, or at least reinvigorated, and last year's Half Nelson did both for the "inspiring and unconventional inner-city teacher" drama. Along with exceptional performances and a semi-documentary realism, the film worked because it incorporated the teacher's curriculum into the filmmaking, just as the teacher worked his personal shortcomings into his teaching. Freedom Writers is another beast entirely: a pedestrian, cut-and-paste MTV Films release dumped onto screens in the first week of January. But Richard LaGravenese's film somehow transcends its considerable limitations through the force of its ideas.

Hilary Swank assumes the Michelle Pfeiffer mantle as a well-meaning college grad who, in the wake of the L.A. riots, opts to teach a class of at-risk students at Long Beach's Roosevelt High School as an exercise in social action. Armed with a Starbucks latte and a chichi pearl necklace, she fruitlessly attempts to charm a freshman class separated by gang colors and racial disparity. But after a visit to the Museum of Tolerance and a reading of Anne Frank's diary, the students begin to put their own histories on paper and warm up to the idea of an education.

Freedom Writers is overlong and schematic, and the students' transition from gangbangers to peacemakers lacks fluidity, but the film offers an inspiring view of history as teaching tool. It's like a calculated riposte to the teacher in The History Boys who's so overwhelmed by the Holocaust that he would rather keep it out of the lesson plan. Freedom Writers doesn't deny that equating World War II with inner-city gang violence is a risible gesture, but it convinces that an inability to learn from history is the most damaging form of Holocaust denial. -- Akiva Gottlieb