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.

In Puritan New England, no one knows why Hester Prynne (Sandi Scheier) wears the “A.”

Sketch comedy, pretty much by definition, is uneven. Even the classics — “Monty Python’s Flying Circus,” “In Living Color” — had their share of clunkers, and “Saturday Night Live” remains the longest-running textbook example of hitting .250 on a good night.

So a greatest-hits approach is the way to go with sketch, as proven by Sketchworks, the little Decatur-based non-profit comedy troupe. Its latest show, “Deadliest Sketch,” is a best-of culling of some of the group’s funniest work over the past couple of years, which runs through March 3 at a mere $15 a ticket.

The company barrels through 21 skits in two hours, some of them filmed bits that provide the actors with a little breathing room. Not every one is a winner, but most are pretty good to great. Highlights include:

• “The Scarlet Letter,” a Python-influenced piece of absurdity that has Hester Prynne (Sandi Scheier), wearing a large red “A,” surrounded by Puritan townsfolk who don’t know what her sin was. So they try to guess. Is she an accountant? Apathetic?

• “Black Perspective,” a mock TV interview show, which has a sublimely clueless, overeager white host (Ashlee Heath) bumbling her way through a cringe-worthy interview with a black author (Atkins Estimond) about his book on race. It really nails our awkwardness when we talk about race and is better than a lot of “SNL’s” similar attempts.

• “The Booksigning,” which features the same beleaguered author, now at a bookstore appearance, where he encounters the ultimate passive-aggressive fan. She’s played by the hilarious Jan Kelley, who also wrote the skit and directs “Deadliest Sketch,” and who manages to crack up some of her fellow actors with her deadpan delivery.

• “Brand Expanders,” a short film that has marketers pitching Barack Obama about money-making opportunities (“Barackawear”) and showcases local comic and Obama impersonator J.A. Anderson, who nails Obama’s voice perfectly. Only this Obama, speaking in that cultivated cadence, is prone to obscenities and ghetto slang.

There’s also “Grease” with zombies, “Sesame Street” with porn (the show is for mature audiences) and a “Bonanza” takeoff that should have Lorne Greene spinning in his grave.

You can see a bunch of Sketchworks’ videos on its YouTube channel.

Tom Key is powerful as Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko in "Red." (Photo by Josh Lamkin)

The new play “Red,” onstage at Theatrical Outfit through March 11, opens with painter Mark Rothko (Tom Key) asking his new assistant (Jimi Kocina), “What do you see?” Like the play itself, the seemingly simple question is fraught with the complexities and uncertainties that Rothko himself faced in the late stage of his career. Playwright John Logan depicts him at an uneasy, anxious time.

As the play opens, Rothko is working on his now infamous commission for a series of paintings for the new Four Seasons restaurant in Manhattan, a project that seemingly became a source of anxiety and depression for the real-life artist. Rothko’s motivations for refusing to hand over the paintings, and his suicide years later, are among the great mysteries of 20th-century art.

Veteran Atlanta actor Key dives into the role head first. Key’s Rothko takes himself and his work with deadly seriousness. At the same time, he can mock, even torture, himself for it: he builds the monument as he lightly defaces it. Key is especially good in moments that convey Rothko’s self-knowledge about his idiosyncrasies. “I don’t work well in nature; the light’s no good,” Key deadpans when asked whether he ever works en plein air. The way Key noisily inhales a cigarette or anxiously pours a glass of (what else?) Johnny Walker Red tells us as much about the character as any line of dialogue.

Kocina, as Ken, brings out the assistant’s puppy-dog innocence but also clearly conveys the character’s journey from hero-worshipping idolator to rebellious challenger. He’s eager to absorb Rothko’s knowledge, but once absorbed he wants to reject it.

The advent of Pop Art, which ended the reign of the Abstract Expressionists, is well known but is seldom played out as human drama. It’s clear that Key’s Rothko sees it as a sort of twilight of the gods, and we get a rare understanding that such movements can carry a human cost.

What comes across in Key’s performance is Rothko’s sudden powerlessness, his impotent rage and his unswerving dedication to his art, even if it leads him to a place of ruin. He thinks of the young guns as barbarians at the gates, and Key is so good that we believe him even while we can also see the foolishness of his constructs. His anger at art collectors, at the bourgeoisie, at intellectuals, at young artists all seem perfectly justified. But in Key’s telling, it’s clearly a doomed and poisonous path.

The play is powerful in its narrow focus on two characters, but perhaps a third character would have drawn the conflict out of cerebral headspace and into the dramatic sphere of ideas played out as theater. I felt that an actual visit from architect Philip Johnson, even if it strained credulity or historical accuracy, as a representative of the corporate forces Rothko despised would have brought the conflict alive. Instead, we get a brief phone call in which we hear only Rothko’s side of the conversation as he announces to Johnson that he won’t complete the commission. We get the briefest report of Johnson’s reaction.

The talk stays a bit too lofty, philosophical and arty throughout. At one point Ken complains, justifiably, that Rothko seems uninterested in Ken’s personal life. They’ve worked together for two years, and Ken complains that Rothko has never asked where he lives, whether he’s married and so on.

But that’s actually a two-way street: we never hear much about Rothko’s personal life either, and he never mentions his (very real) marriage and family in the play, which is odd, because the few personal revelations that there are produce some of the play’s strongest moments. Key makes a description of Rothko’s early life growing up in an atmosphere of fear and violence as a Jew in czarist Russia fascinating, but it’s all too brief. The tantrums and the art talk often veer too close to artist bio-drama cliche.

“Red” is a two-man play, but this production actually has a third star in Lee Maples’ stunning set. Detailed and thoughtful but never busy or overwrought, his design for the studio tells us as much about Rothko as the spoken words themselves, from the stored stacks of paintings and spilled paint to the windows covered to block out natural light and the cabinet-sized record console full of Mozart LPs. I especially loved the wooden cover of the phonograph itself, tellingly smudged with paint and fingerprints.

All in all, “Red” offers a thoughtful and fascinating portrait of a giant of 20th-century art facing a confusing, diminishing and uncertain time. Those who like cerebral theater will feel right at home, while those who prefer more blood-and-bone drama on the boards may find the play a bit wanting. In order for “Red” to work for you, you have to believe that finding the correct proportion of red to black when mixing paint can be a matter of urgency and drama. If you can’t go there, all is lost for you here. The show won’t suit every taste, but it’s the sort of splendidly acted cerebral drama that we get all too rarely in Atlanta.

ArtsCriticATL writers Rebecca Dimling Cochran and Catherine Fox will conduct a discussion after the February 25 evening performance.

Bryan Fenkart portrays manic 1950s Memphis disc jockey Huey Calhoun, the first to play a record by Elvis Presley. (Photos by Paul Kolnik)

The rich soil around Memphis yielded fertile fields of cotton for decades. And the city’s rich stew of Southern cultures — black rhythm and blues, hillbilly-country,  dollops of gospel and boogie-woogie — was the source of the first stirrings of rock ‘n’ roll. It was in Memphis that a crazy disc jockey named Dewey Phillips started playing “race records” on a white radio station in the early 1950s, and where Sam Phillips (no relation to Dewey) first recorded a white boy who sounded (kind of) black, Elvis Presley. Dewey was the first DJ in the country to play an Elvis recording, “That’s All Right,” and the walls came tumbling down.

“Memphis,” the Tony Award-winning 2009 musical playing at the Fox Theatre through February 5, is the fictionalized story of Dewey the DJ, an exuberant but uneven musical romp that intertwines the civil rights and musical strains of the ‘50s. (A spritz of “Hairspray,” anyone?)

Huey Calhoun (Bryan Fenkart), as Dewey is called here, is an unlikely leading man for a musical. An innocent rube in the beginning, he is slightly spastic in his movements, his voice is a nasal twang, and everything he does is over the top. But this hillbilly with  a heart knows what he loves, and he loves the music coming out of the black nightclubs on Beale Street. And pretty soon he loves Felicia (Felicia Boswell), a singer in one of those clubs. But Huey is white and Felicia is black and this is the South in the 1950s.

When the show opens, a somnolent radio DJ intones, “That was Whitey White and the Whitetones, singing ‘Whiter Than You.’ ” When Huey fast-talks his way into a record-spinning job on that sleepy station, the first song he plays is “Scratch My Itch” by a Little Richard-ish singer named Wailin’ Joe, and we see white teenagers all over Memphis listening to the station. The music stirs their hormones and makes them get up and dance. Soon Huey is the biggest radio jockey in town, then he has his own local TV show, then the national network comes calling.

Felicia Boswell belts out a song.

None of this success makes Huey and Felicia’s taboo relationship any more possible in a time when many states had laws against miscegenation. The show has some problems of tone in portraying the era’s embedded racism, handling it almost breezily for the first hour, then busting loose with some unexpected violence. But even though “Memphis” is mostly upbeat, it can’t be accused of ignoring the ugliness.

The show is structured to give several supporting players big solo moments, and they engage in a tear-off-the-roof competition, with the audience the winner. Gator (Rhett George) busts out “Say a Prayer,” Felicia’s brother Delray (Quentin Earlt Darrington) pulls off  “She’s My Sister,” and Julie Johnson as Huey’s Mama Gladys (that was Presley’s mother’s name) stops the show with “Change Don’t Come Easy.” But, while there’s some wonderful r&b and gospel in “Memphis,” there’s also too much generic Broadway filler. “Someday,” the song that is Felicia’s big single, is weak and forgettable in any era.

Even though there’s a lot going on, the heart and soul of “Memphis” is Huey. Fenkart gives a manic, gutsy performance, so jittery that he makes early Jerry Lee Lewis look like the Dalai Lama. According to Louis Cantor, who worked in Memphis radio in the ‘50s and wrote the Dewey Phillips biography “Dewey and Elvis,” Phillips was a heavy amphetamine user; the crazed speed freak wasn’t just an on-air persona. That historical detail isn’t part of “Memphis,” but it provides a little subtext, and an extra bite to the musical’s bittersweet ending.

Young Pascal (Thomas Shoup) explores Paris in "The Red Balloon." (Photo courtesy Théâtre du Rêve)

The classic 1956 Albert Lamorisse film “The Red Balloon” seems like a terrible candidate for transposition to the stage. There’s almost no dialogue, and the three main stars — a little boy, a red balloon and the city of Paris — are all notoriously bad at taking direction in the theater.

But Théâtre du Rêve’s production, at 7 Stages through February 12, is a remounting of a successful staging of “The Red Balloon” by the Atlanta-based company last year. The first run sold out, and this second is back by audience demand. It’s easy to see why. It’s a family-oriented production that puts an “impossible to tell” story on stage in ways that are utterly charming and inventive.

There’s actually not much to the “story.” A little boy named Pascal (played in the movie by Lamorisse’s son Pascal) finds a magical red balloon that follows him around, protects him, plays with him and then is popped. The evocative streets of Paris are the setting, and they’re filled with colorful helpers and antagonists, bit players and tormentors. In Théâtre du Rêve’s production, the simple story is told in English and some simple French, but the narrative and dialogue are so straightforward that it could be told in Aramaic or Mandarin and we’d never feel lost.

The little backroom theater at 7 Stages becomes a tiny corner of Paris, with views of hills beyond. The troupe does an especially good job of showing us vignettes of characters engaged in daily Parisian life. As in the film, the setting turns into more than just a setting, and the background characters become more than mere background — a street sweeper finds a rubber ball and bounces it into his pocket, a little girl with a hoop reads a book as she hulas. The actors double up to create this busy and crowded Paris of vendors, musicians, schoolchildren, street sweepers, businessmen, matrons, teachers, bus drivers and passers-by.

The show also adds some inventive sequences using puppetry and animation. When Pascal falls asleep during arithmetic class, we witness his surreal dream as fractions dance around him, and a trip to the flea market brings to life its piles of junk.

A bus plays a small but significant part in the movie, and the show’s designer and adaptor, Park Cofeld, brings it on in the cutest way: we see the bus approaching hill by hill in the background as a puppeteer uses a series of larger and larger cut-outs of two-dimensional buses. Finally, a bus driver enters stage left holding an enormous cutout, and the characters board it. It’s a bit of homespun magic, perfectly indicative of the overarching spirit of this show.

There is, however, something more contemplative and isolated at the heart of the film, which hard-core fans might miss in the stage production. Théâtre du Rêve’s Paris is a happier place than Lamorisse’s. In the movie, adults are unimaginative and unfriendly, the tormenting gang is truly terrifying, and the streets are old, gray, dreary, wet and depressingly empty or crowded with people to whom Pascal is often just a momentary nuisance, if that. Théâtre du Rêve’s Paris is fun and full of song, and it’s a happier story all around.

Film purists might bristle, but they’d be wise to remember the crucial lesson of both movie and play: keep your heart open. “The Red Balloon” is an inventive, lively, engaging and heartfelt production. One hopes this second staging won’t be the last.

Across the universe with Jon Ludwig's delightful "Space." (Photo courtesy Center for Puppetry Arts)

With a blend of puppetry, animation and projection, the Center for Puppetry Arts has created a fun, energetic show for children that explains the often abstract and unfamiliar objects in our universe. From red dwarf stars to the planet Neptune, from comets to black holes, the production uses shadow puppets, hand and rod puppets, computer animation and crystal-clear images from NASA to bring “Space,” at the center through March 11, alive.

The show is a musical — indeed it’s music almost all the way through — and the rousing rap and rock score and clever lyrics (try finding rhymes for “Jupiter,” “Europa” and “asteroid”) keep things lively and funny. Two rod and hand puppets, Ot and Eeema, are our alien guides, and they’re accompanied by a band of shadow puppets that sing songs about the planets as we travel first through our galaxy and then into the deeper reaches of space.

The use of so many different techniques — animation, projections, music, puppetry and often several at the same time — is surprisingly seamless and cohesive. The puppeteers are called on to do a great deal in the show, working a wide range and style of puppets while also singing, dancing and acting.

What’s especially nice is that everything has a slick, finished and professional look, but the viewer can still discern the hand of an artist in what’s on stage. The set, designed by F. Elaine Williams, is colorful, inventive and versatile. What opens as a hilly wooded landscape transforms into a flying saucer, an asteroid belt, the oceans of Europa, a black hole and more.

A scene on an asteroid belt is dazzling in its combination of puppetry, projections and music: the asteroids seem to be everywhere, and the puppet asteroids are cute and sing an especially good number. Illusions of floating in a zero-gravity environment — accomplished by puppeteers clad entirely in black manipulating puppets under black light — are especially effective.

The cut-out overhead projections of mythological and historical characters such as the god Mars and Isaac Newton are well done. But the three main aliens themselves — life-size projections of puppeteers wearing alien heads — were less effective. The heads didn’t connect to the bodies in a convincing way — the real head of the puppeteer was too visible beneath the constructed head — and the material of the headdress wasn’t stiff enough, causing it to bend and diminish the illusion.

In the end, the show conveys a surprising amount of information about space. Children and adults alike will be fascinated to learn just how inhospitable Venus is (sulfuric rain and volcanoes would make it a very unpleasant place for people or puppets) or that Mars once had oceans and still has polar ice caps. I especially liked a punk Saturn singing “I’ve got rings” a la Johnny Rotten. It was a cute joke to have Pluto enter, thinking he could do his own musical number like the other planets, only to have the other puppets point out that he’s not considered a planet any more.

It’s not surprising to learn that Jon Ludwig, the center’s artistic director, has written and directed 20 such shows for the Family Series. Fleetly paced, visually inventive and packed with interesting information memorably conveyed, “Space” effortlessly meshes information and entertainment. Kids’ reactions don’t lie, and the audience of schoolchildren at the opening morning performance I attended was obviously enthralled, clapping and singing along. With humor and music, “Space” will keep children (and grown-ups) informed, laughing and humming all across the universe.

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.)

Tess Malis Kincaid and Mark Kincaid in “A Body of Water.” (Photo by Chris Bartelski)

The two lead characters in Lee Blessing’s “A Body of Water,” on stage at Aurora Theatre through February 12, both wake up one morning with no recollection of who they are. Avis (Tess Malis Kincaid) and Moss (Mark Kincaid) find themselves together in a pleasant vacation house surrounded by woods and water, with no idea about their pasts, how they got there or what their relationship to each other might be.

Under the direction of Freddie Ashley, who occasionally takes breaks from his role as artistic director of Actor’s Express to direct shows at Aurora, this unusual play is as compelling and engrossing as a good murder mystery. The principal actors (the Kincaids are married in real life) are able to make the two mysterious characters seem sympathetic, familiar and understandable, even if their situation is extreme.

Indeed, the audience is in the exact same situation as they are, grasping at the same little slips of clues and befuddled by the same compounding enigmas. The two characters might not know who they are. But in their affability, their particularities, their desire to make sense of strange circumstances, the skillful actors turn their characters into people we might know. That’s a crucial lure to draw us into what otherwise might be a remote and contrived story. Their banter takes on the sparring tone of a long-married couple, and Moss and Avis begin to piece together that they are (possibly, probably) married to each other.

Blessing is a master at alternating between dramatically concealing and revealing information, and the mystery only deepens when a third character arrives. Cara Mantella nails the part of Wren, who may or may not be Avis’ and Moss’ daughter or lawyer or nurse.

In a role that could easily have become merely an expository background foil in less capable hands, Mantella makes Wren a third object of our curiosity. Is she a helper or an antagonist? We’re never sure, but Mantella limns Wren’s smaller motivations in a perfectly lucid way from moment to moment. Annoyance, concern and impatience are easy to read, even as the character’s larger purpose and actual identity remain somewhat inscrutable. It’s an intriguing balancing act.

Those who seek literal explanations, who like for loose ends to be tied up, may leave this show frustrated. It’s a drama that’s somewhat in the “Twin Peaks” or “Lost” mold: we’re presented with a fascinating tangle of mysteries that draw us in, but then we’re left with many that are never unraveled. Some viewers will be excited to go along for the ride; others may feel they’ve been treated unfairly. (It’s a weird quality of the human mind: we’re delighted and fascinated by unanswerable mysteries, but also a little miffed by them.)

We’re left with Avis and Moss’ situation as a sort of philosophical and perhaps symbolic conundrum. Their situation — two people who repeatedly lose their memory every day for no discernible reason and are assisted (or perhaps antagonized) by someone who may or may not be their daughter — is so particular that it’s hard to take it as somehow universal.

Still, like “Twin Peaks” and “Lost,” “Body of Water” is entertaining and compelling. Moreover, it explores some thought-provoking territory about the connection between memory and identity. In the end, what audiences make of it will depend a great deal on how comfortable they are with ambiguity. Suspenseful, strange and marvelously crafted, the expertly made and intricate parts of “Body of Water” are beautiful to see in motion, even if, in the end, we’re mystified as to what the machine’s purpose might be.