Fast Scans

Narrative films don't get more enigmatic than this love-it-or-hate-it puzzler from Alain Resnais (Hiroshima Mon Amour). A man and a woman meet at a lavish resort. He keeps exhorting her to remember their meeting a year ago, which she denies. Time is fractured and memory questioned in this tour de force that expanded movie grammar to tell its provocatively open-ended story. Extras include an audio interview with the still-active 87-year-old director played over clips, in lieu of a commentary track. Essential.

Fleeing her vengeful pimp after an encounter with a nasty john turns deadly, a hardened hooker and the preteen runaway she reluctantly recruited forge a strong bond in their fight for survival. Writer-director Paul Andrew Williams makes his impressive feature-film debut with this hard-bitten British drama that only gradually reveals how the initial trick with a pedophile went bad. A cast of unknowns bring an unusual level of believability to their difficult roles. For viewers who can handle tough material that avoids cheap thrills.

Having made a big splash with Knife in the Water, Roman Polanski brought artistic cachet to this low-budget psychological thriller featuring Catherine Deneuve as a paranoid schizophrenic who gradually descends into complete madness. Rarely has the subjective point of view been more effectively realized than through Polanski's painstaking use of sound and visual effects to show his protagonist's hallucinatory state of mind. Commentaries by the director and star, plus making-of docs, only make Repulsion more attractive.

In her sophomore outing, outré director David Lynch's daughter Jennifer (Boxing Helena) once again proves the apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Plausibility takes a backseat to the bizarre in this strange but gripping tale about a serial-murder investigation with rogue cops giving statements that conflict with a key witness whose recollections play out in flashback. Like her father, Lynch has a real flair for the visual elements and sound mix, putting the family spin on an offbeat thriller. For diehard Lynch devotees.

This day-in-the-life of an illegal immigrant delivering Chinese food to Big Apple customers serves up a helping of social realism that sticks to the ribs. Employing the modern techniques of ultra-low-budget guerrilla filmmaking (e.g., handheld digital-video camera, stolen exterior shots, no-name actors, etc.), codirectors Sean Baker and Shih-Ching Tsou follow a desperate young man out to earn enough from tips to pay off hammer-wielding loan sharks. The not-overly sentimentalized ending packs a wallop. For true cinema fans.