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One tends to be a bit of a moron at 13 or so when you're going on about your own personal canon, but "The T.A.M.I. Show" is now out on DVD, the Beach Boys are back in place, and I think I probably undersold the whole thing, actually. The film was directed by Steve Binder, who was later responsible for that 1978 Star Wars holiday cartoon special, the delight of many a YouTube-trawling stoner. "The T.A.M.I. Show" is a mess in its way, too, but in the manner of a rugby scrum or a goal line battle — the energy is intoxicating. And it looks like it was shot inside out — that is, the front of the stage might as well be backstage for all the attendant chaos, with bands setting up as other bands perform, and people racing in all directions for their marks.

Such scenes were familiar on the gala package tours that were the rock 'n' roll norm until the Beatles and Stones took over and a shift began away from singles and toward albums. All of a sudden, people had more stage-worthy material. "The T.A.M.I. Show" was a package show — the entirety of the two-hour film comes from one five-hour period of shooting — with the added wrinkle of an evolved social conscience. The Civil Rights Act had just passed, and so we get Chuck Berry and his Deep South locomotive rhythms in an opening battle-of-the-bands segment with Gerry and the Pacemakers, as white an act as any until the days of Bread.

Chuck Berry wasn't exactly the best guy, and the notes make an oblique reference to how he nearly jeopardized the entire undertaking just before the cameras started to roll, demanding more cash, and ready cash at that. But he could outclass just about anyone on the stage while still maintaining his standard ready-for-raunch persona. As he minces his way into the frame, he nudges his hips — very probingly — into the back of his guitar, as if it say, Ah, and now we're in. That's nice. I'm not sure what to compare it to. I wouldn't compare it to Gerry and the Pacemakers, who "inherit" — on the far side of the stage — Berry's "Maybelline" just as the master reaches the halfway point. The Pacemakers were the Beatles' big Liverpudlian rivals, and if you've not seen them perform before, you might find yourself at a loss to explain how this was possible. And I like the Pacemakers. But in the pop world, if you're not aging well, you're aging terribly, and it's like someone let the Pacemakers loose from a child's long-buried memory box.

Nostalgia sells, but the big, ever-timely dual theme of "The T.A.M.I. Show" is range and competition. You get Lesley Gore, who doesn't come off as twee as the Pacemakers, but who gets a proper stomping by the Supremes. "The T.A.M.I. Show" was an odd, one-off venture that you'd think no one took that seriously, but man — some real courage was involved for some of these acts to get up there and do what they do in the presence of acts they must have known did it so much better. Some, like the Barbarians — "all the way from the caves in old Cape Cod," according to MCs Jan and Dean — were probably so bemused that they were invited that they were mercifully unfazed. Their drummer, Moulty, had a hook for a hand, which led to a novelty single that has since become a classic for garage rock fans. Unlike most garage bands, who aped the Yardbirds and Them, the Barbarians basically just did their own brand of bashing, which borrowed heavily from Chuck Berry's school of riffing. I assume that they would have looted the Yardbirds and Them for everything they were worth, but those groups had yet to come along. The Barbarians are a mess, and they're fun. They also have no business being followed by James Brown and his crack band, with his crack dancing moves, and his Art Blakey-like drummer.

Brown didn't rehearse his segment — either he couldn't be bothered or he thought there was no need. He's pretty shameless — you'll see him stumble to the ground several times from exhaustion, having given his soul, strength, heart, etc., to the onlooking crowd of (mostly) white screaming teenyboppers. He actually has a "cape man," a guy who helps him up off the ground, wraps him in a cape, and encourages him to exit stage right, for a deserved rest. Brown wants no part of it, and ups the emotionalism, which, by the time of "Night Train," has passed from amusing to intense to "Oh my, he might expire up there." You can even see that his pants are starting to wear through at the knees. It's something.

The Rolling Stones wanted no part of following Mr. Brown, and told Binder and the execs. Brown thought he deserved the closing spot, not some bluesmen wannabes from England. No one listened, no one cared, save the musical parties. Brown then vowed to make the Stones wish they had never seen the States. Looking as calm and bored as if they were sitting down for tea, the Stones merely proceeded to play the greatest filmed set of their career. It's one kick-ass draw. Brown even offered his congratulations. I'd say that must have shocked the Stones, were it not for a look of total self-satisfaction that sets in on Mick Jagger's face around mid-set. You can practically see the arrivistes start to fancy themselves as full-fledged lords.

Colin Fleming's work appears in Rolling Stone, the Atlantic Monthly and the New Yorker. He is completing a story collection and a novel and can be found on the Web at colinfleminglit.com.

The last couple of years have offered numerous examples of foreign filmmakers taking on the traditions of American crime cinema and making them their own — I hereby direct you to two outstanding German-language examples, in "Jerichow" and "Revanche." Both of those, and "The Square" too, work from the basic "Postman Always Rings Twice"/"Double Indemnity" model, wherein a decent or at least ordinary guy is led further and further into some dastardly and idiotic criminal scheme by ... well, you know exactly by what. By a well-turned ankle, by a skirt, by a hot tamale. By some damn faithless tomato or other, that's what.

If this noir formula doesn't exactly offer an uplifting interpretation of the female nature, it also depicts men as witless suckers, low-rent Macbeths too stupid to understand that the promise of a new life with some young honey is an existential con game. In "The Square," said sucker is Ray (David Roberts) a corrupt building-site foreman in a shark-plagued New South Wales beach town who all too literally covets his neighbor's wife. That would be the pretty but faintly used-up Carla (Claire van der Boom), who's married to lunkhead mechanic Smithy (Anthony Hayes) but dreams of bigger things. Those bigger things would be embodied in the mysterious duffel bag full of cash that Smithy's got hidden in the attic — a classic example of the "dirty money" that so often plagues noir protagonists (further e.g., Josh Brolin's $500,000 suitcase in "No Country for Old Men").

By the time you're half an hour into "The Square," Ray and Carla have already cooked up their moronic version of the perfect crime: Steal the money and then hire a loopy professional arsonist (Joel Edgerton, the director's brother and co-writer) to burn down Smithy and Carla's house when nobody's home. Hey, Smithy, sorry man — your dough got all burned up. Poof, gone! You'll be shocked to learn that all this doesn't go quite according to plan, and Ray and Carla have to spend the rest of the movie receiving extortion-note Christmas cards from unknown correspondents, burying weaselly guys on Ray's construction sites and arranging late-night conferences at hot-sheet motels and overly bright Chinese restaurants. And yes, the not-yet-poured concrete central square in the "honeymoon holiday village" that Ray's company is building becomes a key location.

There's always a central problem with what you might call narrative orientation in this kind of movie. The characters need to remain somewhat sympathetic, or at least identifiable, even as they lapse into nuclear-grade stupidity and criminality. Or the audience simply won't care what happens to them. Still, the director can't offer them more than the occasional moment of what-have-I-done introspection, because as soon as one of them decides to behave like a vaguely rational human, get off the dumbass train, and save his own skin, the movie's pretty much over. You definitely can't call Ray and Carla entirely likable, and I'm not giving anything away in suggesting that a (richly deserved) comeuppance awaits them at or near the end of the story, but "The Square" clicks briskly along through its twists and turns, and it has way too much grimy atmosphere and dark humor to become totally alienating.

Shot on deliciously dirty digital video (by cinematographer Brad Shield), "The Square" delivers its kicks by packaging its horrific series of violent misadventures amid a completely realistic and underplayed drama in a fascinating setting. Edgerton's Aussie resort town is a sunny, balmy landscape of battered working-class men and women with puny dreams and terrible hair; it mashes up elements of Chandler's Southern California, Elmore Leonard's Florida and a downtrodden English coastal village. Add the dingy surrealism of a Christmas-season setting, when yuletide means the hottest time of year (Santa Claus arrives on a motorboat), and it's a universe you won't soon forget, even if you'll be grateful you get to leave it and go home.

"The Square" is now playing at the Sunshine Cinema in New York and the Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow.

It would be easy to conclude that the Lizard King was massively wasted on booze or hash or acid or some other drug cocktail of choice on that occasion, and that moreover he was kind of a self-important idiot. Both things are very likely true, but the intellectual thread that connects Jim Morrison's cock to the White House is not as flimsy as it appears. However you feel about the Doors and their music -- and DiCillo's generous and substantial film leaves room for varying interpretations -- the band had an outsize cultural impact, embodying the Dionysian macho-rebel spirit of late-'60s white (male) American youth with psilocybin intensity.

At this point, documentaries about '60s rock bands constitute their own genre, and it's frequently a tiresome one: Clips of civil-rights protests and Vietnam firefights, a highlight tour of assassinations and campus uprisings. There's a little bit of all that in "When You're Strange," but the film stands out for several reasons. There's the total absence of talking-head interviews with grizzled scenesters (or any other present-day footage); the cool and measured narration by Johnny Depp (clearly the perfect choice); the direction by DiCillo, a hard-luck indie veteran making his first documentary. "When You're Strange" is also free of the "fair use" copyright restrictions that plague so many rock docs. All the surviving band members signed off on the project, and you'll hear all the major Doors hits (from "Break on Through" and "Light My Fire" to "L.A. Woman" and "Riders on the Storm") in this film, which has been timed to accompany a 13-song soundtrack release from Rhino Entertainment.

"When You're Strange" consists almost entirely of archival material: home movies and photos, concert and rehearsal footage, period TV broadcasts, even clips from a UCLA student film in which Morrison appeared before he became famous. Especially since we're talking about a band whose entire career spanned less than five years (from early 1967 to Morrison's death in the summer of '71), this strategy collapses the historical distance between us and the Doors, and spares us the morass of maudlin pseudo-Proustian reflection into which many such pop-nostalgia films tumble. Furthermore, this underscores the ways that Morrison, in all his confusion and self-contradiction -- reclusive poet, leather-clad sex god, reluctant celebrity, abusive drunk, pop star with limited musical gifts -- remains a vital cultural force, the conscious or unconscious model for many rock stars, actors or rappers who came later.

While it's entirely true that nobody's made a Doors documentary before, the band has already been the subject of a quasi-legendary film. Oliver Stone's 1991 "The Doors," featuring a mumbling, incoherent Val Kilmer as Morrison, is the ne plus ultra of fictional '60s films. It transcends the so-bad-it's-good genre in a lysergic, sweat-lodge cloudburst. It's not even quite accurate to say that "The Doors" is so bad it's a masterpiece, although that's close. It's more like a risible mass of clichés and a visionary masterwork of cinema at one and the same moment. Even though Doors guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore served as "technical advisors" to Stone's movie, they were irritated by its portrayal of Morrison as a drug-addled, death-obsessed shamanistic babbler. Keyboardist Ray Manzarek (who refused to help Stone) has long vowed to help produce an "anti-Oliver Stone" movie that would tell the band's real story. Almost 20 years later, "When You're Strange" is that movie.

Certainly the historical Morrison we see in DiCillo's film is a long way from Kilmer's debauched rock idol, and more a nuanced, confused human being. The son of a career Navy officer -- an admiral who commanded a fleet during the Vietnam War -- Morrison grew up infatuated by Arthur Rimbaud, William Blake and Elvis Presley, which is almost all you need to know about him in one sentence. The band's name came not from Aldous Huxley's drug memoir "The Doors of Perception" but from Huxley's original source, Blake's poem "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell."

Morrison reportedly disliked his own singing voice (he preferred Frank Sinatra's) and told a friend he was afraid he had nothing to say. As Marshall McLuhan and Andy Warhol could have told him, none of that mattered: Morrison's brooding, let's-fuck persona and unpredictable stage behavior sent their own message, for which the Doors' music, and even his own droning baritone and portentous lyrics, sometimes seemed like context or background.

That said, DiCillo does an outstanding job of explaining the Doors' musical oddness: They were a rock band with no bass player to keep the beat, whose members had little rock experience. Morrison had never sung before (outside the shower) and Manzarek was a classically trained pianist and organist. Densmore was a big-band and jazz drummer, and Krieger a flamenco guitarist. They weren't aping either Chicago blues or Merseyside pop, they didn't sound quite like anyone else and there genuinely was something elliptical -- something symbolic or even spiritual -- behind the sex-and-drugs double entendres of their songwriting.

"When You're Strange" offers a mesmerizing, behind-the-music glimpse at a crucial and bizarre moment in rock history, and maybe in American cultural history, period. Certainly all the legendary episodes are here: the Doors' sudden lurch from third billing at the Whisky a Go Go on the Sunset Strip to a three-record deal with Elektra; their acid-trip forays into Joshua Tree and marathon recording sessions with Paul Rothchild and Bruce Botnick; Morrison passing out on stage in Amsterdam, antagonizing cops in New Haven and (apocryphally) exposing himself in Miami. (The wacky witch-journalist girlfriend, played by Kathleen Quinlan in Stone's film, is reduced to an unnamed parenthetical here.)

Still, even though this authoritative and often mesmerizing film provides a crucial counterweight to Stone's "The Doors," it could use a little of the latter film's bogus Nietzsche-Blake-Huxley babblequest. To grasp what Jim Morrison and the Doors were all about, you need to watch both movies one after the other, consume a whole bunch of drugs and beer and sugar and then drive out into the American desert half-dead from hangover. And then maybe you'll understand it all for a split second, or understand that there was never anything to understand in the first place, or that you already understood it as well as you ever will. I'm sure Doors fanatics already know this, but DiCillo's movie blew my mind in revealing that "Mr. Mojo Risin'," the repetitive chant from the end of "L.A. Woman," is an anagram for "Jim Morrison." Whoa. Damn! This shit is powerful, dude.

"When You're Strange" is now playing in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Madison, Wis., New York, Nashville, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Seattle, with more cities to follow.

Best known as the director of the 2004 Charlie Kaufman-scripted "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," one of the best-loved films of that decade, Gondry might be contemporary cinema's greatest nostalgic. For a guy who broke into the business making pop-music videos for the likes of Björk, Massive Attack and the Chemical Brothers -- and whose low-tech, handmade special effects have influenced an entire generation of visual artists and filmmakers -- Gondry appears utterly unconcerned with fashion or currency. (In its own way, that's the secret of his success.)

Here are the projects he's worked on since "Eternal Sunshine" turned him into a big-name director: episodes of Dave Chapelle's "Block Party" and "The Flight of the Conchords," music videos for the Willowz, a segment for the arty anthology film "Tokyo!" and the features "The Science of Sleep" and "Be Kind Rewind," a pair of winsome, personal visions that underperformed at the box office.

Only now, six years on from his lone commercial success, is Gondry taking on a major studio film, and that too is an exercise in nostalgia: "The Green Hornet," a superhero flick that's been kicking around Hollywood for almost two decades, based on a crime-fighting character who debuted on radio in 1936. I think we can assume that Gondry's version, with Seth Rogen in the title role and co-writing the script, won't be overloaded with CGI effects -- if it has any at all -- and won't be in 3-D. (Gondry took over the project from Hong Kong action-comedy star Stephen Chow, who wanted to make a superhero spoof with Jack Black in the lead role. I, for one, am grateful.)

But we're not there yet. "The Green Hornet" will be out in time for Christmas, maybe. (Gondry says he's still editing.) So on the way to that so-called big superhero movie he made a documentary about his aunt, a woman in her mid-80s who doesn't hear or see too well. "The Thorn in the Heart" is almost certainly the least commercial work of Gondry's career, and in fact it may be difficult for American viewers to grasp the point at all. (More on that below.)

Suzette Gondry is a ramrod-upright retired schoolteacher in the Maritime Alps of southern France, with a family reputation as a tyrant and a bitter, unreconciled relationship with her adult gay son, Michel's cousin Jean-Yves. (The title, "L'epine dans le coeur" in French, stems from a remark Suzette makes about Jean-Yves.) During our conversation, Gondry told me that Suzette plays a villain in "The Green Hornet," and I honestly have no idea whether he was kidding.

Many families have faced far worse problems, of course, but perhaps the unremarkable nature of Suzette and Jean-Yves' conflict is partly the point. In patiently observing these people and spinning out their stories in elliptical, Gondrian fashion -- there are model-railroad sequences, a few little animations and a whimsical reenactment of a minor family crisis -- Gondry eventually makes Suzette and Jean-Yves come alive both as individuals and as symbols of the rapidly changing history of modern France, and even of the irreducible loneliness of the human condition.

"The Thorn in the Heart" is a quiet, unglamorous film that sneaks up on you slowly. I found it had a lovely, peculiar emotional resonance by the time it was over, but it's likely to appeal more to documentary buffs and obsessive Gondry fans than ordinary moviegoers. It offers an intimate look inside the family history that shaped an idiosyncratic filmmaker whose influence is only beginning to be felt. I reached Michel Gondry on the phone a few days ago at his production office in Los Angeles, to talk about educational policy, our older relatives and the fate of Algerian refugees in France.

Michel, this is a lovely film. But what gave you the idea of making a movie about your aunt?

It's not that anything gave me the idea. I felt that I had to do it. Because she's an amazing character and she lived a life that mirrored the story of France in the second half of the 20th century. She witnessed important parts of that history from a very removed place, in the mountains. Her first pupils included refugees from Cambodia, and then she taught the Harkis, who were refugees in the Algerian war.

Then she basically occupied a lot of dying villages. France, like most countries in the 20th century, became completely industrial. It started as largely agricultural and then became industrial, so all the small villages were abandoned, one after another. That's why she kept changing schools, because they were all closing all the time. To me, it's enough to justify doing a movie. But more than that, I felt it would be unfair not to do a movie about her.

Was she an important person in your own life, as a child?

Yes, I think so. She always encouraged me, as my parents did. But I sort of appreciated her sternness and strength. It was a good balance with my parents, who were very easygoing. It was an aspect of her that maybe I was the only one to really appreciate. A lot of people in the family were afraid of her and found her too strict. I didn't see it that way. I always appreciated her stories and what she could teach me, and the fact that she was a strong woman.

It certainly seems from the film like her former students were scared of her. Yet as adults, they remember her fondly.

You know, in my son's education, his favorite teachers were not necessarily the coolest, at all. They were, a lot of times, the most severe. It's hard to explain but, you know, you don't judge kindness by looseness. Kindness really comes underneath, it's deeper than just being cool. You can be strict and have a real kindness, and bring more to children.

It's not that I advocate strict education. I'm just pointing out that I'm a father, and as far as my son is concerned, we both appreciate strong teachers. I think this offers some insight into what it is to deal with life. A lot of people talk to me and say they have family members who are teachers, and this film speaks to them a lot. This film speaks, as well, to older people. Most of the time, the way we live in cities, we try to put the elderly in places where we don't have to deal with them, so that we miss what they can bring us. For them to see this lady who is very active in her mid-80s, and to see that as a filmmaker and a nephew, I listen to her and appreciate her -- it shows that there is a way to bring back harmony between the generations, to bring back a sense of usefulness to older people. This is very important.

You know, I eventually picked up on the historical significance of Suzette's life, but it took a while. If you don't know much about French history, which is going to be most American viewers, it might not be obvious at all.

Yeah, and for this reason on the DVD that we're putting out I'm going to do a short subject on the Harkis to explain what that's about. The Harkis were people from Algeria who fought alongside the French [during the 1954-62 Algerian war], who were the colonialists at the time. So when the French lost or gave up or went away, they had to take with them those Algerians who had fought with them. They would have been massacred if they had stayed in their own country. They didn't get a lot of help in France; they were put into camps, and one of them was very near a village where my auntie was living and teaching. Some of them had a great experience, like the guy you see in the film, but we also went to see his cousin, who hated France and had a very bitter experience. In the documentary on the DVD, we'll see both sides of this question.

There are just a few touches of the things your fans will expect in this movie. There's the model railroad you use to show the way Suzette moved around. There are a couple of brief animated sequences. And then there's the scene where you make some schoolchildren invisible. Tell me about that one.

Well, it's a little breathing room. You know, things are not always meant for the purpose they end up seeming to be for. Initially, the train was there because Jean-Yves used to have the same train when we were kids, and I wanted him to rebuild it. I wanted to give him a purpose, because I saw how bad he was with life, how depressed he was. I thought that would give him a great activity. So I financed him rebuilding the train -- it took him two years to build it back, and we worked together on it.

With the kids, I thought just to go there and shoot them with the camera -- it was a regular working day for them, and I wanted their memory of it to be something more special. So I decided to have them wear blue outfits that I would make disappear in post-production. Well, before the documentary was finished, I sent them a DVD of that scene we did together. I thought they would be thrilled by that. So the scene was created for them. But then, when I was done, I thought that this moment was like a recess at school, when you go outside for a little air, to run a bit before you come back for more teaching. It was the same for the movie.

And the little animations I did, it was all part of being there, because we did all the animation for "Science of Sleep" at Suzette's house. She was very excited about it, and very welcoming, to see us doing work in a place that has been dormant for decades. I did it really for that reason.

Tell me a little bit about your relationship with Jean-Yves, Suzette's son. I get the impression that one reason you made the film was to help Jean-Yves, to do something for him.

Yeah, that's totally correct. It was devastating to see him, and see how his mom was hard on him. I wanted to be able to like Suzette without any restraint, any bad thinking. I wanted to clarify every scene to make sure she was the person I liked. I knew that she was very hard on her son, but then, Jean-Yves is not easy to deal with, so I understood why she was so aggressive with him.

I think this film helped me to reach Jean-Yves, just like building his train. And maybe it helped people understand that it's OK to be homosexual. It's not like that in the countryside. It feels like an old story when you live in the city, like it's been dealt with 10 or 20 years ago. But in the countryside it's a very difficult problem. He presented his boyfriend to his mom and things have gotten much better between them. He's very grateful.

Beyond the question of the Algerian refugees whom Suzette taught, is there other stuff in the film you can explore further on the DVD?

Yeah, I think there are some things that need to be explained about why she wound up in a lot of different schools. There are also some very funny movies that she made when she rented a Super-8 camera in the '70s and she used it as a still camera, because she didn't know she had to keep pressing the button. We added some techno music to it, and it's like the most outrageous techno video. I mean, it's great!

It must be great to have a family with such a vast archive of Super-8 films to draw on. I barely have any photographs of my childhood, and you've got, like, a video library.

Yeah, we were a very visual family, if I may say so. It's always useful if you want to talk about the past. You can see it in the movie, when she talks to one of her former students and they talk about the Super-8 film they made of their school play of "Snow White." And the lady says, "Oh, I want to see that." And then we get to see it right away! It's pretty amazing.

Another wonderful scene that involves film is when you go back to a village where Suzette once taught, and all the older people in town come out into the woods to watch the same Jean Gabin film ("Remorques," or "Stormy Waters," from 1941) that she showed them years ago, projected on a giant outdoor screen. That's really very moving.

You have no idea how excited and happy they were. You would think those people don't care about movies, or watching movies in their village. But they were so excited, saying they have to do it every year. They were shedding tears. It was a great experience.

This film really demands patience, which isn't something film directors ask from their audience very much these days.

Well, if you are used to watching the super-movies all the time, then of course it's hard. If you like to hear your parents speak and tell their stories, then it's captivating.

It definitely made me think about the older people in my own family, my mother, my mother-in-law, my aunts and uncles, and how I should listen to them more than I do.

Yeah, exactly. If there is any message, that's the main one.

"The Thorn in the Heart" is now playing at the Village East Cinema in New York, with more cities and DVD release to follow. 

This film also became the centerpiece of an altercation last year between famously prickly Chinese film authorities and the Western movie marketplace. After "The Sun Behind the Clouds" was booked at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, the Chinese government -- demonstrating both intolerance and a tin ear for P.R. -- pulled two much-anticipated films from the festival. For mysterious reasons, one of those Chinese movies, "City of Life and Death," a fictional story about the notorious Rape of Nanking in 1937, was then yanked from its American theatrical premiere at New York's Film Forum -- whose programmers replaced it with the film that had caused the ruckus in the first place.

Of course, the Chinese have long been completely unwilling to discuss the Tibet question -- which, when you think about it, reduces the question of what strategy the Tibetan movement should adopt to an arid philosophical point. There are reasons why the Beijing regime is so thin-skinned, as we see in "The Sun Behind the Clouds." The explosive Tibetan uprising of early 2008 put the lie to Chinese claims that their campaign of economic development and cultural assimilation had quelled both nationalism and discontent, and it left government spokespeople, in the weeks before the Beijing Olympics, uttering the worst kinds of warmed-over Mao Zedong talking points about the "Dalai clique" and its tradition of "theocratic serfdom."

As Sarin and Tenzing also make clear, there's a germ of truth behind the Chinese propaganda. The Dalai Lama himself has often decried Tibet's backward, feudal tradition -- but then, he's both a product and a symbol of that tradition. As in the Palestinian case, younger Tibetans who've lived their whole lives in exile are increasingly radicalized, while the Chinese continue to torture and imprison dissidents inside Tibet and the Dalai Lama's reasonable, enlightened middle-ground position is supported by international political leaders but almost no real people. Nobody thinks this issue is going away, and the Dalai Lama has already prepared Tibetans for the likelihood that his reincarnate successor will be born outside Tibet. The Chinese seem prepared to outwait this Dalai Lama, the next one and the one after that.

"The Sun Behind the Clouds: Tibet's Struggle for Freedom" is now playing at Film Forum in New York, with wider release to follow.

Given the gruesome, erotic and sadomasochistic elements of the tale, "Bluebeard" seems like natural material for Catherine Breillat, the much-loved and much-hated French provocatrix who made her reputation a decade ago with films like the borderline pornographic "Romance" and the shocking teen-sex thriller "Fat Girl." But anybody who thinks Breillat is just another Euro-purveyor of arty blue movies hasn't been paying attention. She has always described herself as a puritan; watching "Romance," or the similarly porn-influenced "Anatomy of Hell," might lead you to swear off sex forever.

Breillat's concise, almost ritualized new version of "Bluebeard," which hews closely to the fairy tale in both plot and manner, might qualify for a PG rating. It has no sex, no nudity and one brief scene of imaginary violence. Like "Fat Girl" (whose original French title means "To My Sister"), "Bluebeard" is less a story of sexual predation or male misogyny than a story about intimate emotional violence between sisters. As played by Dominique Thomas, Monsieur Barbe Bleue himself is a lumbering, doleful giant, fascinated by his child bride as a gorilla might be by a hatchling robin. Only after she enters the locked chamber where his previous wives are stored, he concludes --regretfully, with a sense of being trapped by unpleasant codes of honor -- that she must join them there.

It's Bluebeard's latest (and last) wife, Marie-Catherine, played by the teenage actress Lola Créton, who really captures Breillat's attention. A bright-eyed, high-spirited girl with a prodigious imagination, she responds to her father's recent death, and the family's resulting poverty, with wit and daring while her gorgeous, redhead older sister, Anne (Daphné Baïwir), sulks resentfully. When Bluebeard's representative comes calling, offering to shower them with riches in exchange for a no-questions-asked marriage, it's Marie-Catherine who jumps at the chance. If anything, she becomes fond of the lumpy old ogre with the strangely-hued beard at first glance. What became of his previous wives? Nothing good. But maybe they just weren't quite as sharp as Marie-Catherine.

Visually, Breillat and cinematographer Vilko Filac model their iconic Renaissance Faire imagery on Gustave Doré's classic illustrations to the fairy tale, and her script contains the same odd skitters and skips as Perrault's story (which suggest that he was adapting and abridging older material). That's because there's a confusing meta-narrative level to Breillat's film: She skips back and forth between the tale of Bluebeard and another tale of two sisters -- younger girls, in 20th-century dresses, playing in the attic -- as they scare and tease each other with the grisly yarn. In this story it is also the younger sister, Catherine, who is the brave and brazen one, and the elder, Marie-Anne, who is timorous and whiny. Bluebeard's tale has a violent denouement, and so too does this nested story of sororicidal rivalry.

Yeah, I know -- two pairs of sisters, with almost but not quite the same names, and the youngest of all has the same name as the filmmaker. (According to Breillat, as a child she indeed tormented her older sister with readings of "Bluebeard.") It's too convoluted by half, and turns what ought to be an idiosyncratic, delightful folktale-film into a baffling personal psychodrama with a nasty sting in its tale. Still, Breillat wouldn't be Breillat if she made movies that were easy to like, or to get your head around. Perhaps only she could tell the Bluebeard story in a way that leaves you feeling sorry for the old galoot.

"Bluebeard" is now playing at the IFC Center in New York, with more cities and DVD release to follow.