Among the festival offerings is "The Day I Saw Your Heart" -- fluffy, quirky and very French.

The Atlanta Jewish Film Festival, which starts Wednesday, February 8, and will last for three weeks in its longest incarnation yet, has become an annual must-see event in the metro area, regardless of your religious affiliation or lack thereof. You just have to love good movies you might otherwise miss.

“I really value the opportunity to see films we’re not likely to see in Atlanta, or at least not for a very long time,” says Matthew Bernstein, who is serving as co-chairman of the festival for his second time. “A number of films that have shown at the festival in the past may come many months or a year later and play at Tara or Midtown. But it’s not a high percentage.”

Founded in 2000 and growing steadily ever since, AJFF has become the city’s biggest film festival. There’s good reason why the staff of Creative Loafing, in their yearly “Best of Atlanta” roundup, named it the city’s top film festival in 2011.

“The high production standards that [Executive Director] Kenny Blank and his team have maintained mean it’s a very well-run festival,” Bernstein says. “That’s one reason I think it’s the biggest in the city.” Film lovers will recognize Bernstein’s name: as professor and chairman of Emory University’s department of film and media studies, he’s been enriching the city’s movie scene since 1989 and is the author or editor of notable film books, most recently “Screening a Lynching: The Leo Frank Case on Film and TV.”

Almost every year, without any design, a theme or two emerges among the dozens of titles screened at AJFF. “One of the overwhelming, surprising themes that emerged this year,” Bernstein says, “that we haven’t seen to quite this extent before, is the notion of what is called ‘righteous persons’ ” — non-Jews who made it a point to intervene for or aid Jews in times of trouble. Among some half-dozen films with that theme are the narrative features “Free Men” and “Wunderkinder” and the documentary “Nicky’s Family.”

But that theme is a minor thread among the 50-plus films being screened this year. “There’s always an incredible diversity in the programming,” notes Bernstein. The Jewish connection can be front and center or almost intangible in a list of works that includes documentaries about opera, sign language, autism and oil tycoons, and narratives that range from WWII-era comedy-thrillers (opening-night title “My Best Enemy”) to Parisian romcom (“The Day I Saw Your Heart”) to, well, an anniversary screening of “Dirty Dancing.” Actress Jane Brucker, who played Baby’s older sister in the movie, will be on hand for that screening.

As always, one special component of the festival is the roster of speakers and special guests it assembles for its screenings: actors, directors, film experts and the actual subjects of the films (for example, two of the “girls” who were saved from Nazi-seized Poland as seen in “Nicky’s Family”).

Below are quick appreciations of some of the movies I was able to preview. For full information on the lineup, ticket availability, venues and speakers, go to the AJFF main site.

“The Apple Pushers.” Like most cities, New York suffers from “food deserts” in neighborhoods that lack any greengrocers but are chock-full of fast-food joints that exacerbate the nation’s obesity epidemic. “Pushers”

"The Apple Pushers" -- we all need fruits and vegetables.

documents a program that gets independent vendors wheeling carts through these streets, selling fresh fruits and vegetables. Focusing on five vendors relatively new to the country (one a first-generation son of Russian Jews), this pleasant doc balances personal stories with a celebration of the country’s debt to the immigrant experience. (One caveat: the nasal drone of narrator Edward Norton, a well-meaning actor and activist whose involvement with some projects makes them the equivalent of, ahem, eating your vegetables.)

“David.” Maybe my least favorite of the dramas I saw. But because it’s perfectly charming in its way, that speaks volumes about the overall quality of this year’s offerings. The son of a strict Brooklyn imam, young Daud (Muatasem Mishal) gets mistaken for a Yeshiva student, says his name is David and finds himself becoming pals with Jewish kids his age. Sweet but a little far-fetched at times, the movie plays like an “Afterschul Special” — but hey, there are worse things, right?

“Free Men.” In this interesting drama, Tahir Ramen (“A Prophet”) plays an Algerian immigrant in German-occupied Paris. His me-first life of selling black-market goods changes when he’s forced by the Gestapo to spy on his local mosque. There, through friendship with an incognito Jewish singer, he slowly becomes a Resistance fighter. Based only loosely on fact, the movie’s Muslim-aids-Jew scenario can feel a little like wishful thinking, since the reverse was also true during the years when anti-Semitism leapt like a brushfire across many borders. But whether or not you buy the premise, the movie is well made. Too bad it’s weakened by its lead. Ramen has movie-star looks, but he reacts to every onscreen incident (a freedom fighter’s execution, a surprise Nazi raid) with the same baffled expression.

“The Last Flight of Petr Ginz.”A lovely documentary that celebrates the brief, creatively rich life of a Prague boy, killed in Auschwitz at age 16 with several novels already written and scores of notebooks filled with

A brief life: "The Last Flight of Petr Ginz"

fanciful artwork. Subtly animating these works, the movie rejoices in his youthful exuberance while mourning the mature artist he never got to become. A small drawback: in its last act, “Flight” dwells a little long and darkly on its concentration-camp passages. The gray, bleak animation here seems to contradict the central message that Ginz’s life-affirming art and writings defied the Third Reich’s soul-crushing intentions until the very end. Still, this is moving and uplifting stuff; how could it not be?

“The Day I Saw Your Heart.” Maybe not as light as a soufflé, but tasty enough. Mélanie Laurent (“Inglourious Basterds”) plays a Parisian X-ray technician with daddy issues. And for good reason: Dad is played by French film legend Michel Blanc as a blunt-talking fellow who simply can’t filter his strong opinions. This has its negative effects on Laurent’s dating life, especially when she meets a hunky shoe salesman-cum-amateur boxer. It’s all very quirky, very French. And it’s a lovely little palate cleanser among AJFF’s weighter fare, good for some romance, some laughs and maybe a tear or two.

“My Best Enemy.” Moritz Bleibtreu (“Run Lola Run”) plays Victor, scion of a wealthy Viennese gallery owner who comes into the possession of a Michelangelo sketch of Moses. Unfortunately, the art-plundering Italian and German Fascists want it for themselves. Complicating matters is Victor’s boyhood friend Rudi (Georg Friedrich), who grew up with him as the housekeeper’s son. To say that Rudi has gone through some changes while away in Germany would be to give away some of the film’s pleasurable twists and turns. It’s convoluted enough to feel like a true story (it isn’t). Switching from comedy to drama, the movie doesn’t always keep a firm hold of its moods, and a few twists are implausibly convenient to serve the plot. (After several years in a camp, for example, one stocky character doesn’t lose an ounce of his pre-internment weight.) But it’s an engaging film nonetheless. (“Enemy,” the opening-night selection, will be screened only once.)

“Nicky’s Family.” Call it “Nicky’s List.” While many people emerged from World War II with dubious, unprovable tales of valor in the mouth of danger, British stockbroker Nicholas Winton never mentioned his considerable heroism for 50 years, until his wife found out by accident. Visiting a friend in Prague in 1938, seeing the many ways the Third Reich was persecuting Jewish families, Winton stiffened his upper lip and decided, by gum, to do something about it. By the time the war officially started, he had organized the safe passage of 669 Polish children, largely Jewish, to foster homes in Britain. The children lived; their families perished. Filled with dramatic re-creations, testimony from the now old children and typically modest interviews with Winton himself (he’ll turn 103 in May), the movie is a deeply moving tribute to the innate goodness of mankind in the face of its worst instincts.

“Rabies.” Israel’s first slasher flick. But that’s not the most interesting part. What’s interesting is how sly, twisted and gleefully existential this gorefest is. In an isolated forest, a psycho traps an adult brother and sister,

"Rabies" -- Israel’s first slasher flick.

with homicidal plans for both. That is, if he isn’t interrupted by a quartet of young tennis players bickering over romantic entanglements, a park ranger and his noble dog, or a couple of cops with considerable personal and psychological problems. Laced with dry absurdist humor and unexpected timing, the movie’s biggest joke is in sidelining the psycho killer while these upstanding citizens — as if in a Shakespearean comedy-turned-splatter-flick — paint the forest red.

“This Is Sodom.” Monty Python meets the Borscht Belt in this irredeemably/irresistibly funny retelling of the tale of Sodom, the good man Lot, and the reasons why his wife deserved to be turned into a pillar of salt. You may hate yourself afterward for laughing, but worry about that later.

André Wilms (left) and the notably inexpressive Blondin Miguel in "Le Havre."

A weird thing happens at film festivals. Deprived of sleep but jazzed by the buzz of the event, viewers — journalists, producers, film buyers — sometimes fall prey to a communal mind-set about a movie that really, really isn’t worth all the hype. Buyer’s remorse follows. (That was literally true for film companies that paid big bucks for such Sundance acquisitions and underperforming duds as “Happy, Texas” and “The Spitfire Grill.”)

Last spring at the Cannes Film Festival, a lot of warm chatter surrounded “Le Havre,” written and directed by terminal hipster Aki Kaurismäki. Let me state some history here: in the years that I’ve been writing about movies, I’ve had a real love-hate relationship with this Finnish director. I hate, hate, hated his “Leningrad Cowboys Go America” from 1989. I admired, with reservation, “The Match Factory Girl” and sorta really dug “La Vie de Boheme.”

That said, “Le Havre” stinks. It’s a con. André Wilms plays Marcel, a shoeshine boy (albeit 60-something) on the streets of the French port town of Le Havre. His wife Arletty (Kati Outinen) is terminally ill, but she withholds that information from her husband so that when she goes into the hospital, he can focus on caring for a teenaged African illegal immigrant named Idrissa (Blondin Miguel), who washed up in a cargo container in the port.

Miguel is such a deeply inexpressive non-actor that he seems chosen by Kaurismäki to telegraph the movie’s intrinsic insincerity. In a riff on the old it-takes-a-village meme, Marcel’s working-class neighbors (grocers, a bar owner) enlist in shielding the boy from not-very-urgent pursuit by police, led by Inspector Monet (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), who wears an old-fashioned fedora to remind us that this is a movie with only a tenuous connection to the real world. Nothing in it feels real.

Writer-director Kaurismäki traffics in a kind of deadpan style that requires his actors to perform with a mild, self-conscious awkwardness. This seems to be a self-protective tic, preserving Kaurismäki from criticism: how can you really rag someone who’s just having a laugh? His kind of “stylization” is baby steps away from amateurism and incompetence, not to mention a deep disrespect for the viewer.

When a filmmaker refuses to commit sincerely to his material, there’s no reason to buy a ticket. Instead, if this movie’s subject seems interesting, check out one on a similar subject that’s as unfashionably sincere (and smart) as “Le Havre” is not. That’s “The Visitor,” written and directed by Tom McCarthy (“The Station Agent”). It stars Richard Jenkins (Oscar-nominated, rightly) as a burnt-out college professor whose worldview gets jump-started when he meets a couple of illegal immigrants subletting his Manhattan apartment.

Yes, it sounds painfully sincere. It is. It’s also honest, shrewdly observed and exquisitely acted. And you won’t feel as if you need to take a bath with some anti-hipster soap after you see it.

“Le Havre.” With André Wilms, Kati Outinen, Blondin Miguel. Written and directed by Aki Kaurismäki. In French with subtitles. 93 minutes. Unrated. At Landmark Midtown Art Cinema.

Glenn Close and Mia Wasikowska in "Albert Nobbs." (Photo by Patrick Redmond)

Producer, star and freshly named Oscar nominee for her lead performance, Glenn Close has wanted to bring “Albert Nobbs” to the screen ever since she played the cross-dressing role on the New York stage three decades ago. It’s a shame she couldn’t pull the project together earlier. The film might make more emotional sense if it starred a much younger lead.

Here’s the setup. In the stratified world of a Dublin, Ireland, hotel in the 1890s, Albert is a longtime waiter and factotum in good standing. He squirrels away his salary under the floorboards of his spartan bedroom. He treats his fellow servants with quiet dignity. He is, however, actually a she — so traumatized by abuse as a orphan that, since age 14, she has masqueraded as a fella for economic survival. (Please remember that detail: since age 14.)

Into Albert’s rigidly ordered world comes a gust of easygoing manliness: a house painter named Hubert Page. Things get complicated when Albert is required to share her bed with Hubert for a night — complicated not because Hubert is a man, but because “he” is played by Janet McTeer. On meeting her first fellow drag king (married, no less, to a seamstress who’s a biological female), Albert has to take stock of her place in the world.

Unfortunately, that involves a subplot that has Albert fantasizing about opening a tobacco shop and marrying sweet young housemaid Helen (Mia Wasikowska). Inconveniently, Helen happens to be sleeping with studly young servant Joe (Aaron Johnson), a two-dimensional villain with boo-hiss writ across his brow.

Even less conveniently, the movie (scripted by four people, including Close) appears to have no idea what Albert’s motives are. Albert doesn’t seem to be sexually attracted to Helen, or to other women, or to men either. But questions of sexuality or gender identity come a distant second to what seems to be the character’s much greater inability, mentally, to “get” how the world works.

Here’s where I’d like for you to recall that age of 14. If we assume that Albert is the same ballpark age as Close herself (64), she’s been masquerading as a male for 50 years! Working for multiple decades in the sociological theater of a hotel seems to be an ideal way to witness, up close, the fundamentals of personal and romantic interaction. If Albert was much younger and new to her play-acting, maybe her cluelessness would make more sense. But here she comes off as a Forrest Gump or a Rain Man of the Victorian era, less holy fool than nincompoop.

Albert’s innocence raises a boatload of questions — sexual, sociopolitical and emotional — that the movie sidesteps entirely for a climax that’s one of the most anti-dramatic cop-outs I’ve seen in years. On one hand, you could praise it for avoiding cheap melodrama. On the other, you can’t really admire a movie that squanders all the dramatic tension it has generated.

Oh, well, it’s a labor of love; that’s sometimes how these things turn out. Close is very fine in a scene where she recalls a trauma from her youth, but she spends much of the movie looking like a frightened rabbit. The makeup and prosthetics (also Oscar-nominated) seem to have restricted her means of expression. Also, her Irish (is it?) accent sounds nothing like those of the genuine Irish actors around her, and her “male” voice is more like that of an old woman battling a chest cold.

The movie isn’t terrible, just a disappointment that underutilizes some fine talents. The director, Rodrigo Garcia, has built an interesting career on movies that focus on women’s experiences (“Nine Lives,” “Mother and Child”). And the gifted supporting cast includes Brendan Gleeson as the hotel doctor and Pauline Collins as its cheerfully opportunistic proprietress.

The movie’s third Oscar nominee is McTeer for supporting actress. There’s a hint of 1999’s “Girl, Interrupted” about this. You may recall that life-in-a-nuthouse movie, which actress-turned-producer Winona Ryder nurtured as a star vehicle for herself … only to see supporting actress Angelina Jolie waltz off with the Academy Award. McTeer may not pull a Jolie on Oscar night, but “Albert Nobbs” really comes to life, emotionally, only when her big, warm, manly Mr. Page lights up the screen, a breathing reproof to the title character’s chronic timidity.

“Albert Nobbs.” Starring Glenn Close, Janet McTeer, Mia Wasikowska. Rated R. 113 minutes. At Tara, Lefont Sandy Springs, AMC Barrett Commons and AMC Mansell Crossing.

Bernardo Bertolucci’s "The Conformist," from 1970, will be shown in the Emory University film series.

Reduced to their essence, this is what movies are: a dance of darkness and illumination, splashed across a screen. The Emory University film series “Painting With Light” celebrates the medium’s power at its most basic and most glorious with a range of titles that take us from the silent era to the end of the 20th century.

The curator, Emory professor Karla Oeler, says the series was partly inspired by Patrick Keating’s book “Hollywood Lighting From the Silent Era to Film Noir.” “When we were thinking of a series, it seemed that one of the most powerful things about watching films is the experience of light and color washing over you, especially in a large-screen format,” Oeler says.

But that big-screen experience is slowly diminishing. That’s due in part to changing viewing habits, with fewer people bothering to seek out films on the large screen, opting instead for DVDs or digital streaming on TV or computer screens. And another thing is chiseling at the big-screen tradition. Hollywood, notoriously negligent of its own heritage (prime example: destroying whole libraries of early films by dumping them into Santa Monica Bay), doesn’t seem to have wised up in 100 years.

“The eye-opener for me is how difficult it is to get prints of films now,” Oeler says. “Studios aren’t transferring their old 35mm prints to high-quality digital, or making new prints.”

For instance, she originally wanted to book “Queen Christina,” from 1933, to show how cinematographer William H. Daniels lit Greta Garbo as compared with Lee Garmes’ approach to Marlene Dietrich in “Shanghai Express.” “I wanted to show the way they created glamour,” Oeler explains. But a print of “Christina” simply couldn’t be found. (Instead, the intended slot is being filled by the terrific documentary “Visions of Light.”)

The Emory series is smartly eclectic in its blend of black-and-white and color works and in its sweep of genres — from hard-boiled, low-budget noir (“T-Men”) to lush color melodrama (“Black Narcissus” and “Leave Her to Heaven”) to underappreciated contemporary classic (“Out of Sight”).

Personally, Oeler is looking forward to the showings of “The Crowd,” the King Vidor silent drama, and “The Conformist,” Bernardo Bertolucci’s unsettling 1970 masterpiece. “[That's] the one I’m probably most excited about, because I haven’t seen it in 20 years,” she says. “I saw it at a very impressionable age and I never forgot it.”

She hopes film lovers will take the time to see the offerings in their intended format. “Size really does matter in film. And I’m really happy with everything we’re showing.”

All the Emory Cinematheque screenings will be free and will be on Wednesdays starting at 7:30 p.m. in 205 White Hall on the Emory University campus.

The schedule:

January 25: “The Crowd” (1928). In King Vidor’s silent classic, James Murray and Eleanor Boardman (Vidor’s real-life wife) play a couple coping with the realities of adulthood and marriage. Veteran silent-film scorer Donald Sosin will play live piano accompaniment for this screening.

Marlene Dietrich in "Shanghai Express" (1932).

February 1: “Shanghai Express” (1932). Marlene Dietrich shimmers as the notorious Shanghai Lil, passenger on the titular train in this film from Josef von Sternberg (whose “Blue Angel” launched Dietrich to stardom).

February 8: “Visions of Light” (1992). A lovely documentary that helps explain, with radiant examples, the magic that cinematographers do — the focus of this series.

February 15: “Sweet Smell of Success” (1957). This bitter cocktail of a noir-flavored showbiz tale stars Tony Curtis as an ambitious press agent and Burt Lancaster as a powerful new York columnist with an unhealthy fixation on his own sister.

February 22: “T-Men” (1947). Director Anthony Mann’s low-budget noir about Treasury agents who infiltrate a counterfeiting ring.

February 29: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1935). Mickey Rooney makes a memorable Puck in Max Reinhardt’s lustrous version of Shakespeare’s rural romp. (Emory Distinguished Writer-in-Residence Sir Salman Rushdie is scheduled to introduce this film.)

March 7: “Baby Doll” (1956). Tennessee Williams’ twisted joke of a flick stars the creamy, dreamy Carroll Baker as the crib-sleeping child bride of sexually stoppered Karl Malden. Eli Wallach plays the business rival who schemes to seduce lil’ miss sexpot.

March 21: “Raging Bull” (1980). Martin Scorsese’s knockout version of boxer Jake LaMotta’s life story, starring Robert De Niro. That “Ordinary People” bested it at the Oscars is all you need to know about the Oscar voting system.

March 28: “Black Narcissus” (1947). Mother Superior Deborah Kerr and her nuns face the sensual temptations of the Himalayas — and so do viewers of Michael Powell’s lush color film, shot, of all places, entirely in England.

Gene Tierney in "Leave Her to Heaven" (1945).

April 4: “Leave Her to Heaven” (1945). A Technicolor scream, starring Gene Tierney as a socialite whose love for husband Cornel Wilde takes her to murderous extremes.

April 11: “The Conformist” (1970). Bernardo Bertolucci’s fever dream of fascism and sexual repression stars Jean-Louis Trintignant, Dominique Sanda and a wintry forest that serves as one of filmdom’s most memorable settings for murder.

April 18: “Personal Velocity: Three Portraits” (2002). Rebecca Miller (daughter of playwright Arthur and wife of Daniel Day-Lewis) directs Kyra Sedgwick, Parker Posey and Fairuza Balk in this triptych about women facing difficult relationships with men.

April 25: “Out of Sight” (1998). A perfect marriage of potboiler plot and high-art filmmaking, this adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel stars George Clooney as a bank robber on the lam and Jennifer Lopez (in her single really solid screen performance) as the federal marshal who falls for him while trying to drag him back to prison. (Footnote: the son of the film’s cinematographer, Elliot Davis, is an Emory student.)

 Zoé Héran (left) stars as the “Tomboy.”

Jeanne has the best big brother a six-year-old could hope for. The only problem is that Michael (Zoé Héran) is actually Laure: a sporty, short-haired 10-year-old girl who uses the excuse of summer in a new town among new kids to unleash — and name — her inner tomboy.

A lovely and unforced French film, “Tomboy” introduces us to Laure as she moves into a new apartment with kid sister Jeanne (Malonn Lévana), their very pregnant mother (Sophie Cattani) and sweet, shaggy-haired father (Mathieu Demy, French film royalty, being the son of directors Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda).

When she meets her neighbor, Lisa (Jeanne Disson), Laure impulsively gives her name as Michael. And the deed is done. With her shorn hair, scrawny chest and flailing limbs, she resembles a boy just as much as the gang that soon adopts her as one of its own. In short, Michael becomes the new cool kid of the neighborhood. And in the headiness of such popularity, he/she forgets that the summer days are quickly aiming toward September and the first day of school in a fourth-grade classroom, where there is no “Michael” listed on the roster, but there is a Laure.

Wisely, “Tomboy” doesn’t try to “explain” Laure’s need to be Michael, and there really is no explanation in any sort of easy psychological terms. Her gender identity just happens to have a y-chromosome attached. Sexuality doesn’t come into it at age 10, and the movie doesn’t pretend to know whether this Summer of Michael is just a phase or the signal turning point of Laure’s ongoing development.

The movie recognizes that kids can be more savage than their parents, who try to idealize them as angels and little princes. So, yes, all the way through you may feel the building unease of the unsparing punishment that might befall Laure/Michael for upsetting the status quo. (A scene in which she goes swimming with the gang, wearing a skintight bathing suit and a strategically placed bit of Play-Doh, creates the kind of low-boil suspense Hitchcock might have admired.)

But “Tomboy” isn’t interested in easy pyrotechnics or lectures. It feels almost documentary in its approach to the rules and rituals of pre-adolescence. (Warning: its gentle, minimal-dialogue approach may seem too slow and too undidactic for some viewers.) Writer-director Céline Sciamma gets joyous, naturalistic performances from the children, as if she took the time to become a sort of embed in their culture.

A solemn presence with a striking face, no matter what gender she’s embodying, young Héran carries the movie with gangly grace. And she develops a great rapport with the even younger Lévana, who captures the perfect logic of a child dealing with an older sibling: I won’t give your secret away, so long as I get to come along for the fun.

“Tomboy.” With Zoé Héran, Jeanne Disson, Malonn Lévana. Written and directed by Céline Sciamma. In French with subtitles. 82 minutes. Unrated. At Landmark Midtown Art.

Oh, and in his off time, Hoover may have been sleeping with his handsome second-in-command, Clyde Tolson, and dolling himself up in women’s clothing. Clint Eastwood’s film “J. Edgar” refuses to totally validate, even fictionally, those suspicions. Well, sorta, maybe, a little. Its odd dance of approach and retreat, of confirmation and denial, is what makes the movie a fascinating frustration. Well, I guess any movie trying to nail down an enigmatic slice of jelly like Hoover never stood a chance of being a definitive portrait. That’s the nature of that beast.

Here’s what you want to know: under layers of makeup, Leonardo DiCaprio is reliably good as Hoover. I just wish that, after “Revolutionary Road,” “Blood Diamond,” “Body of Lies,” “Inception” and now this, he would take on movies that were as satisfying to watch as they are prestigious on paper. DiCaprio’s next gambit is playing Jay Gatsby for director Baz Luhrmann (oy!), who’s probably working hard to make that great F. Scott Fitzgerald novel as unwatchable as “Moulin Rouge.”

Like I say, DiCaprio is reliably good. Not great. Not indelible. Not oh my God! That’s partly the fault of the script, by Dustin Lance Black (Oscar winner for “Milk”), partly Eastwood’s (also reliably) craftsmanlike direction. Sorry, but Eastwood isn’t a natural match for material that strays into bohemian, non-heterosexual territory. Exhibit A: his awkward adaptation of “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.” “J. Edgar” is a better movie than that one. That’s partly because Hoover’s life intersected with so many interesting passages of American history, whether he’s investigating the Lindbergh kidnapping (the film’s central plot thread as it hopscotches across decades) or secretly keeping track of Eleanor Roosevelt’s sapphic shenanigans.

Partners: Armie Hammer and Leonardo DiCaprio.

The first lady’s proclivities provide a shadowy, mirrored metaphor for Hoover’s own bunkered private life. The movie aims us, in its last moments, toward a bittersweet appreciation of the man’s inner conflicts. But J. Edgar Hoover and “bittersweet” are a mismatch in subject and tone, I think. Here’s this great, whirligig American icon — love him or hate him, he was a real original, a bully, a fabulist, but someone responsible for genuine advances in our criminal justice system. The movie never decides to celebrate or condemn him, for either his excesses or his inhibitions. Watching, it’s hard not to think of the wonderful liberties Tony Kushner took with Roy Cohn in “Angels in America,” turning him into a shining demon who shared some of Hoover’s drives. “J. Edgar” wimps out while pretending not to.

The nature of Hoover’s sexual urges hides in plain sight throughout the movie, but it is weirdly squeamish about going there. When Hoover and Tolson have a spat that winds up with bloodshed and a kiss, viewers at the screening I attended coughed out nervous chuckles. I think that’s because, like the two characters themselves, the movie seems unable to really follow through on its impulses. But come on: if you’re going to make a movie speculating about the private life of J. Edgar Hoover, then speculate already. Instead of “Brokeback Mountain,” we get “Halfbroke Capitol Hill”

In the supporting cast, Judi Dench, as Edgar’s smothering mother (paging Dr. Freud!), is tony wallpaper, except for one Lady Macbeth-lite scene when she fans the ember of self-hatred her son might feel for being turned on by other men. (She refers to gay men as “daffodils,” which, excuse me, is just fabulous.) Underutilized but expert as always, Naomi Watts plays Hoover’s private secretary and keeper of his (and others’) secrets. With a nod or grimace, she’s able to convey decades of world-weary knowledge.

As Clyde Tolson, Armie Hammer (who played the Winklevoss twins in “The Social Network”) has the right himbo glamour for the role, at least as a young man. He’s the sort of walking trophy you imagine Hoover would want at his side, a reproach to the Creator who made him, himself, so bulldog-ugly. Playing the older Tolson, though, Hammer suffers from unconvincing old-age makeup, and he gives a high school-level performance of Playing Old. He nearly wrecks the movie in scenes that call for wistful delicacy.

“J. Edgar” is an interesting movie that seems to feel its way toward what it could have been, if only its makers had agreed on what they were trying to achieve. By the end, we appreciate that Hoover was a damaged soul. But the film can’t quite persuade us to care. After watching “J. Edgar,” you feel hungry for a Ken Burns documentary about the man. Not a good thing.

“J. Edgar.” With Leonardo DiCaprio, Armie Hammer, Naomi Watts, Judi Dench. Directed by Clint Eastwood. 136 minutes. Rated R. At metro theaters.

That may seem like a digressive way to start a movie review. But I remembered that moment often while watching “The Mill and the Cross” — really less a standard movie than an immersive experience. It’s both a meditation on fate and an art-appreciation lesson. And it’s mutedly thrilling, hypnotically strange.

Polish co-writer and director Lech Majewski takes us, quite literally, into 16th-century artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting “The Road to Calvary” (below). Like his “Landscape With the Fall of Icarus,” this teeming canvas is a masterpiece of visual misdirection. In a (very Flemish) landscape, at the base of a windmill, Jesus is stumbling along, dragging his cross. You’d be excused if you don’t see him right away (any more than the splashing legs of Icarus, vanishing into the bay in that other painting). He’s way in the background, behind the capering fools, the peasants bickering, and his mother, Mary, grieving his death in advance. All those soldiers in red coats are Spanish militia, persecuting “heretics” — in this case, Jesus himself. So, yes, the man from Nazareth, in Bruegel’s painting, finds himself being crucified all over again by disciples 1,500 years after his first execution.

Putting it that way might be lending “The Mill and the Cross” more of a message than it intends. That’s the thing about Majewski’s movie, though. It’s a broad canvas (so to speak) on which to paint your own thoughts as you watch it unfold. The closest approximation to a plot is appearances of Bruegel (played by Rutger Hauer), planning his painting and discussing it with his wealthy patron (Michael York).

Most of the movie is wordless, observing the daily routines of the people who will compose the crowd: farmers, monks, children and the aged Mary herself (Charlotte Rampling, a long way from “The Night Porter”), who questions, in internal monologue, the destiny of her son. (They’re filmed in a dimly lustrous light that comes closer to Vermeer than to Bruegel.) And, of course, there’s the miller and his wife, overseeing it all from their bizarre, rocky promontory. The film is always visually fascinating, blending real locations (in Poland) and digital versions of Bruegel’s painting.

The movie carries that painting forward in time, dramatizing the torture and death of Jesus, though thankfully not to the obsessive, pornographic extremes of Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ.” (That doesn’t make this a religious film, but more an exploration of the vagaries of fate as seen through that Bible story.) What does it mean? It means that art can be a blessed distillation, an attempt both to evoke the eternal and to celebrate the mortal. Messy and divine. That holy, unholy welter of impulses that we call mankind.

“The Mill and the Cross.” With Rutger Hauer, Michael York, Charlotte Rampling. Directed by Lech Majewski. 92 minutes. Unrated. At Landmark Midtown Art Cinema.

Working with Almodóvar for the first time since 1990’s “Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!,” Antonio Banderas plays Robert Ledgard. A cutting-edge plastic surgeon, Robert lives in a splendid, isolated villa — equal parts aged, crumbling stucco and gleaming, antiseptic modernity. It even has its own operating theater, which comes in handy.

Robert’s housekeeper Marilia (Marisa Paredes, the theatrical diva of Almodóvar’s “All About My Mother,” with too little to do here) tolerantly oversees Robert’s mysterious housemate. That’s Vera (Elena Anaya), a stunning young woman sequestered in a minimalist chamber and swathed in a Band-Aid-colored body suit. She’s also, we discover, wrapped in a layer of skin genetically engineered by Robert to withstand the direct heat of a blowtorch.

Who is Vera? Why is she imprisoned? What has all this got to do with the doctor’s late wife, who suffered major burns in a car accident some years ago? Oh, and wasn’t there a daughter in Robert’s past, too?

This all sounds more intriguing than it plays. “Skin” feels like an almost pro forma version of Almodóvar’s now familiar structure, full of narrative Gordian knots, flashbacks and surprise revelations. But the result comes off like the work of a sincere but less talented acolyte. It’s unconvincing. Maybe that’s because the director is working from a novel by Thierry Jonquet. It’s only the second time he’s adapted someone else’s material (the first was “Live Flesh,” also lower-shelf Almodóvar).

The movie includes a few things you’d expect. Its interiors are flawlessly art-directed. And a casually rude exchange in a secondhand shop, about clothes for fat women, has the non sequitur tang of the director’s old work. But the familiar echoes aren’t all good. The intrusion into the movie of an on-the-lam criminal-turned-rapist feels like an ugly reprise of a similar setup in his uneven “Kika.”

“The Skin I Live In” lacks the juice and passion of Almodóvar’s better work, though Banderas and Anaya are both fully committed to trying to flesh out, so to speak, difficult roles. But Alberto Iglesias’ engaging, skittery score for strings suggests a level of tension that rarely emerges on screen. That said, even inferior Almodóvar is always worth a look.

“The Skin I Live In.” With Antonio Banderas, Elena Anaya, Marisa Paredes. Written and directed by Pedro Almodóvar. In Spanish with subtitles. 117 minutes. Rated R. At Landmark Midtown Art Cinema and Lefont Sandy Springs.

A 24-hour, tick-tock spectacle of a firm trying to save its own collective ass from the Frankenstein monster it invented, the sharply written movie sometimes has the testosterone reek of a David Mamet play. That’s underscored by the presence of Mamet regular Kevin Spacey — though the smell of testosterone here is alloyed with the scent of the best cologne and finest gin money can buy in Manhattan.

Zachary Quinto as a junior analyst in "Margin Call."

Spacey plays Sam Rogers, the boss of trading, who has been at the firm for more than three decades, and it shows. His dog is dying, and he’d rather be at home with her. But he’s needed at the office to rally the troops on the morning after 80 percent of his staff get downsized and marched off the premises.

They include senior risk analyst Eric Dale (the invaluable Stanley Tucci), whose severance package includes the company’s “transition plan”: a magazine with a sailboat on the cover, under the words “Looking Ahead.” It’s one of the film’s excruciatingly on-target depictions of the corporate mind-set, which has established its nest in that cavity where our country’s conscience and soul once resided.

Here’s the bad news for the firm: Dale has been running some numbers and graphs and seen that the company’s long-term reliance on subprime assets is about to blow up. Like, now. This news gets passed along to junior analyst Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto), who finds himself in the unenviable position of telling all the suits above him that the party is over. Big time. There’s poetic justice in knowing that employees who smugly survived the morning’s reaping are about to suffer a much harsher 24 hours than their colleagues who got pink-slipped. And there’s fun to be had in watching the players — including Paul Bettany, Simon Baker and Demi Moore — put on their steeliest game faces as they try to save their jobs, or at least score a shiny golden parachute.

Arriving in theaters when economic frustration has spilled onto Wall Street’s sidewalks and around the world, “Margin Call” couldn’t be timelier. It’s also more nuanced than you might expect from a first-time filmmaker like Chandor. His most radical approach to this story is what distinguishes art from easy polemic: he individualizes these people and tries to grant them the dignity of their convictions — or at least their self-justifications.

It would be easy to demonize these characters as ruthless snake oil salesmen. But “Margin Call” shows that some are motivated by loyalty, or an entrenched work ethic (and the need to pay the vet’s bills), or the thrill of playing what is essentially a computer-screen video game, where winning means big bonuses and losing means catastrophe — but only for the suckers who don’t realize the game is rigged.

Perhaps the most representative character is the company’s youngest employee, Seth (Penn Badgley). Half playboy, half puppy, he spends the movie’s long night trying to guess how much money the executives take home per year. He starts to see the bigger picture only when he realizes he’s about to lose his own job. “Shit, this is really gonna affect people,” he says. “I mean, real real people.”

Kevin Spacey as the boss of trading in "Margin Call."

Because every tale of a great fall needs its Satan, “Margin Call” provides one in a CEO named John Tuld (as opposed to real-life Lehman CEO Richard Fuld). Jeremy Irons, in the role, arrives by helicopter and channels the sinister silkiness that earned him an Oscar for playing Claus von Bulow. “It’s just money, it’s made up,” he says near the end, in the dismissive tones that come only from those who have enough of the stuff to speak of it in theoretical terms. As if foreseeing the government bailout, Tuld views the global economic disaster simply as a new opportunity to make more money from different sources.

Written with both economy and verbal pungency, “Margin Call” has the knack of scoring its points and delivering valuable perspectives in dialogue that avoids the artificial sound of speechmaking. (It helps to have such a skilled bunch of actors delivering the lines.) At times, the movie has the hushed intrigue of stripped-down Shakespeare — the politely barbed give-and-take of negotiations unfolding in chambers behind the throne room. That probably oversells “Margin Call.” It’s no masterpiece, but it’s an impressive, limpidly dramatized account of recent events that have changed our bank accounts, and the way we all move forward into the future.

“Margin Call.” With Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Jeremy Irons, Zachary Quinto. Written and directed by J.C. Chandor. 107 minutes. Rated R. At AMC Phipps Plaza 14, Lefont Sandy Springs and Landmark Midtown Art Cinema. Also available as Video On Demand.

What French executive Christine (Kristin Scott Thomas) and her ambitious underling Isabelle (Ludivine Sagnier) both want is advancement — preferably to the stateside office of the high-octane company they work for. They also both want, and get, playboy colleague Philippe (Patrick Mille) in their (separate) beds. And what they have to watch out for — as they climb ruthlessly toward that glass ceiling, hammers in hand — is each other.

The movie starts with a semi-Sapphic shiver, as Christine gets a little too nuzzly with Isabelle as they work late on a project in Christine’s living room. But anyone hoping for some Gallic gal-on-gal shenanigans — or the casual nudity that helped propel Sagnier to stardom in the 2003 film “Swimming Pool” — should tame their expectations. These ladies spend most of their time buttoned up in business suits with lapels sharp enough to slash a vein.

Directed by Alain Corneau (who made 1991’s “Tous les Matins du Monde,” the best movie ever about viola da gamba players), “Love Crime” doesn’t have anything especially insightful to say about women in the working world or the state of sexism in the homeland of Dominique Strauss-Kahn. For the most part, all the bad behavior (and objectification of the opposite sex) is instigated by the women.

Kristin Scott Thomas

Once typecast as a chilly Anglo princess (despite her film debut as the leading lady opposite, of all people, itty-bitty rock star Prince), Scott Thomas has enjoyed a hot run onscreen in recent years. That’s thanks in part to being bilingual and living in France. She’s ranged from sharp supporting turns in fantastic films such as “Tell No One” to fantastic lead roles in so-so stuff like “I’ve Loved You So Long.” “Love Crime” lets her unleash her inner, absolute bitch. Her Christine is appalling in a can’t-take-your-eyes-off-her way.

If Scott Thomas always seems to be one beat ahead of everyone else in the room, Sagnier can feel a half-beat behind. Her acting choices lack the surprise and unpredictability of the older actress’. She’s not bad, exactly, and her unique mix of porcelain delicacy and fleshy amplitude is always easy on the eye. There’s just an imbalance between the two leads.

Ludivine Sagnier

Halfway through, “Love Crime” switches from one sort of movie to another genre entirely. It would be too big a spoiler to say much more than that. To put it vaguely, the movie’s tone shifts from emotionally volatile to something chillier — diagrammatic, yet enjoyable on its own terms. But, yes, it loses a little lifeblood in its final hour. Still, it’s a satisfying diversion. After all, the French know how to transform little more than dairy products, air and the right oven temperature into a soufflé … perhaps served with a postprandial glass of ambition steeped in bitters.

“Love Crime.” With Ludivine Sagnier, Kristin Scott Thomas. Directed by Alain Corneau. In French and English, with subtitles. 106 minutes. Unrated. At Landmark Midtown Art Cinema.