There is no dominant front-runner for this year’s Best Picture Oscar, but you would never know that from the polls of the Florida Film Critics Circle and the Southeastern Film Critics Association (the two groups I belong to as a voting member).

Both tapped The Social Network, David Fincher’s account of the founding of Facebook, as the best film of 2010 and, as happens only occasionally, I am in agreement with the groups’ pick. Both organizations also named Fincher best director and singled out Aaron Sorkin for best adapted screenplay. SEFCA also recognized the movie’s cast as the year’s best ensemble, an award that the FFCC does not present.

Both groups also saw the leading acting categories the same, voting Colin Firth as the year’s best actor for his performance as speech-impaired King George VI in The King’s Speech and the best actress award went to Natalie Portman for the mentally unhinged ballerina in Black Swan. I concur on Firth, and expect him to also pick up the Oscar for the role, in part for being overlooked last year for his also impressive dramatic turn in A Single Man. I liked Portman’s performance, but my vote went to Annette Bening for The Kids Are All Right, and the two of them should be battling it out for the Oscar.

The critics’ panels diverged when it came to the supporting acting categories. The Florida group voted for Geoffrey Rush, the unconventional speech therapist in The King’s Speech, and Hailee Steinfeld, the spunky frontier teen in the remake of True Grit. The Southeastern association went with two performers from The Fighter, Christian Bale and Melissa Leo, as the brother and mother of brawling boxer Mickey Ward.

I side with the SEFCA picks and think they both are probable Oscar winners. Bale steals The Fighter with his loopy, brain-addled, drug-addicted performance and should edge out the fine work by Rush, who previous took home an Academy Award for Shine. Leo is a little-known veteran actress who is greatly admired in the industry. By contrast, Steinfeld is making her film debut. She’s quite good in the Coen Brothers’ highly stylized Western, but her central role is really the movie’s lead.

In a true no-brainer, both groups call Toy Story 3 the best animated feature of the year. I not only agree, but think the Oscars should just give a statuette to the film now and consider naming the category for the Pixar Studio.

The Florida Film Critics managed to scrape together four awards for Inception, the mind-bending action picture about invading the subconscious as a form of industrial espionage. FFCC recognized it for best original screenplay, best cinematography, best art direction/production design and best visual effects. SEFCA gave its original screenplay award to The King’s Speech and cinematography to True Grit, with Inception the runner-up in both categories.

I side with the Inception wins, but imagine the more traditional Motion Picture Academy will lean toward The King’s Speech come Oscar time.

The Florida circle calls The Tillman Story, about the friendly-fire death of pro football’s Pat Tillman in Iraq, the best documentary of 2010. The Southeastern group went with Inside Job, the well-made saga of the financial collapse. I voted for Waiting for Superman, the story of the failure of our public schools and how to fix them.

The year’s best foreign film, according to SEFCA, was the Korean thriller Mother. The Florida critics tapped I Am Love, a family tale of commerce and awakening passion, which got my vote.

The Florida Film Critics Circle is composed of 19 writers from publications across the state. The Southeastern Film Critics Association has 43 members working in print, radio and online media in nine states throughout the region.

Kobayashi Four (Facets)

Standard list price: $71.99

Release date: Nov. 23

Facets celebrates its new release of Masahiro Kobayashi’s 2001 film Man Walking on Snow by repackaging three of the director’s previously available releases into a box set titled Kobayashi Four.

Watching these four titles from the criminally neglected Japanese auteur reveals a bracing talent with a thematically cohesive oeuvre who should easily be as recognized in contemporary Asian art cinema as Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Hirokazu Kore-eda or Kim Ki-Duk, all of whom share similar sensibilities.

The obsession that lingers most in Kobayashi’s cinema is the specter of death and its uncertain aftermath. Death incites equal parts grief, jealousy, anger and connection throughout these four titles, arriving in even the most deceptively comic packages.

In the oldest title in this set, Kobayashi’s second feature Bootleg Film (1998), the suicide of a shared lover brings together two of her paramours, a cop and a yakuza, who road-trip together to attend her funeral. Kobayashi directs this sharp, black-and-white Cinemascope journey with hipster detachment and film-school quirk. A manic slapstick comedy on the surface, Bootleg Film is reverential and referential to icons of the past, mostly American pop-culture institutions favored by the yakuza character, an avowed cineaste.

The film channels Laurel and Hardy one minute and Reservoir Dogs the next, with Tarantino’s cult film particularly ingrained in Kobayashi’s script. In one hilarious digression, the yakuza pre-empts the killing of a girl – and fellow Tarantino fan -- to argue with her about the proper way to pronounce Steve Buscemi’s surname.

Bootleg Film only gets weirder, and more supernatural, as it progresses. Characters we assume are dead to this world walk through the epic landscapes once again: Death is elusive and impermanent, a theme that will recur in arguably the director’s most engaging movie, Man Walking on Snow (2001).

In that film, we follow the routine of Nobuo (Ken Ogata), a 70-year-old man whose wife died two years prior and who spends his days wandering the snowy terrain of a remote Northern Japanese village, eventually wending his way to a salmon-breeding pond, where he strikes up an unlikely bond with a woman who works there. It’s a film that very much lives up to its title.

Seemingly endless shots of Nobuo traipsing through the harsh climate are intercut with shots of his two sons’ daily lives, one of whom dotes on his father’s every need while the other, a failed musician, has been estranged and bitter ever since his mother’s passing. The occasion of second anniversary of her death – and of Nobuo’s wavering vow of chastity – attempts to bring the broken family to some semblance of togetherness.

Kobayashi films this discomforting story of familial conflict with subtle formal cues: The way his camera jitters restlessly during the brief close-up shots and only seems steady and comfortable when filming the characters in long shots suggests the distance required for the family to communicate. The film’s depictions of real-life problems are authentic and moving, and its tragic nature creeps up on you – at least until Kobayashi, as in Bootleg Film, seems to negate a key climactic death, punctuating the film with a confounding epilogue.

Kobayashi followed this a couple of films later with Bashing, the harsh story of Yuko (Fusako Urabe), a woman returning home from being held hostage in Iraq, where she had volunteered for the coalition forces. Whether it’s for being captured or simply for volunteering in the first place, Yuko receives nothing but ire and shame from the unforgiving townspeople, from her family and boyfriend to the soup kitchen that refuses to serve her. Bashing is 80 minutes of pure suffering, and this time, there’s no rebirth for the deceased.

If it’s the weakest title in this box set, it’s partly because the film doesn’t have much room to breathe beyond its Issue Movie limitations. But mostly, Bashing doesn’t work because it’s hard for us in the West to relate to the story. It’s not a universal problem. The unforgiving society Kobayashi presents is culturally polarized from how we perceive returning veterans, especially hostage victims, all of whom return as heroes even if no heroism was demonstrated.

The box set concludes, appropriately, with Kobayashi’s most sublime and ascetically rigorous film, 2007’s The Rebirth. We get all the story we’re going to get in the film’s first eight minutes, where we learn that a woman’s daughter stabbed and killed the daughter of a neighboring, widowed man in an act of high-school terrorism. Kobayashi then revisits to these two characters – the mother of the culprit and the father of the victim – one year later, where both have resigned from their previous jobs and generally from life itself.

Until the last five minutes of this 102-minute feature, there is no dialogue or narration. We simply follow the characters in silent observation of their daily rituals: Eat, sleep, commute, work, eat, sleep, commute, work. Morning becomes night, and night becomes morning again. Like ghosts, they never communicate with the world around them, preferring lives of contemplative solitude.

To watch these two principal players (the man is portrayed by Kobayashi himself) for more than an hour and half is to accept the film’s meditative lull with a Zen-like sense of ease and comfort, and it reminds us how much potency can be conveyed without the crutch of dialogue. The characters do eventually meet, partaking in a kind of magnetic ballet of attraction and repulsion throughout the movie’s second half. But the pleasures are more in the soothing routines of their lives than in their wordless, predestined encounters.

This study in repetitive, Warholian banality – the Jeanne Dielman of post-mortem grief – is seemingly as removed as possible from the madcap antics of Bootleg Film, but the two movies share an understanding of the different ways we grieve, a common thread running through all of Kobayashi’s cinema. One solution in the grieving process may be to take solace in the familiar, as the characters in The Rebirth do.

The next time I lose someone close to me, this is the film to which I would most want to return.

Hair High (Microcinema)

Release date: Nov. 30

SLP: $17.99

Cult animator Bill Plympton directed this icky ode to high school, which plays out like an ‘80s John Hughes flick dragged through a dirty, surrealist muck until all sense of logic, decorum and “decency” (whatever that is) have been removed. In other words, it’s customary Plympton, familiarly disgusting for his admirers and instantly repellent for those not attuned to his wavelength. The movie centers on Spud (Eric Gilliland), a nerdy outcast forced to serve slavishly under Cherri (Sarah Silverman), the head cheerleader inevitably paired with hunky boyfriend and quarterback Rod (Dermot Mulroney). When Cherri finally reciprocates Spud’s attractions, their romance sets Rod off, leading to an uncertain death and a skeletal resurrection, with the title of prom royalty at stake.

The self-contained universe of Hair High is not the world as we see it, but the world Plympton sees, and it’s one worth visiting for a respite from conventional Hollywood “realism.” Channeling the anarchy of animation’s early deviants, Plympton utilizes the style’s uninhibited elasticity the way few contemporary animators do, exploiting it in truly visionary ways. Though many of the film’s sophomoric cheap shots suggest the emotional maturity of a 15-year-old male, Plympton smartly uses the tricks of the animation trade to creatively amplify its characters’ intense emotions, from fear to anxiety, anger, love and joy. If most of us felt things the way the characters in Hair High feel them, we’d be living in a very strange world, but it would be a lot of fun for about 10 minutes.

Jaffa (Film Movement)

Release date: Dec. 7

SLP: $24.95

Shot in the titular historic city in Israel, Jaffa is the latest forbidden-love drama between a Jew and an Arab, a romantic conceit that’s become as narratively familiar as it is perpetually relevant. The major players are the strikingly eyebrowed, newly pregnant Mali (Dana Ivgy); her auto-mechanic father Reuven (well-known Israeli actor Moni Moshonov); Toufik (Mahmud Shalaby), the Arab laborer with whom she’s planning on eloping; and Meir (Ro’i Asaf), Reuven’s son and an anti-Arab bigot. You don’t have to be Socrates to predict where these boiling tensions are heading, but nevertheless, I won’t spoil any of the plot’s tragic developments.

Jaffa is best when it probes familial grief and the lasting impact of chance decisions; we’re refreshingly spared any moral lectures about the eternally irreconcilable differences between the ethnic groups in question. But compared with the thrilling, fly-on-the-wall action of last year’s similarly set Ajami, this film’s glacial pacing is not always involving, and an extended epilogue, set nine years into the future, adds little resonance to the drama.

The Zookeeper (Brink DVD)

Release date: Nov. 23

SLP: $17.99

This turgid war drama from music-video director Ralph Ziman won Best Film and Best Actor at the Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival in 2001, which says more about FLIFF’s diminished standards of quality than it does about the merits of this picture. Sam Neill stars as Ludovic, a jaded ex-Communist in an unspecified, supposedly contemporary Eastern Europe country that’s dressed inexplicably in period garb. Ravaged by war, most of the citizens have migrated elsewhere – only Ludovic and his veterinarian companion (Om Puri) have agreed to stay and keep the animals in the city’s zoo alive as bombs explode around them.

Ponderous direction sinks the film’s interesting subject matter, rendered insufficiently compelling by Ziman’s insistence on derailing the narrative away from the fascinating dealings with the animals and toward the trappings of kitchen-sink melodrama. Ziman frees his zookeeper protagonist from the heavy tedium of his position by granting him a seemingly orphaned 10-year-old boy and, later, the boy’s androgynously disguised mother, which conveniently serve as Ludovic’s redemptive parenting lesson and rote romance, respectively.

Worse yet, the film feels epically longer than its 100 minutes, and not in a good way.

At a time when film festivals are either shrinking or simply disappearing,‭ ‬the Palm Beach Jewish Film Festival is expanding as it turns‭ ‬21.‭

The annual celebration of Jewish culture on celluloid from around the world,‭ ‬a program of the Jewish Community Center of the Greater Palm Beaches,‭ ‬unspools beginning‭ ‬this‭ ‬evening,‭ ‬Dec.‭ ‬1,‭ ‬with‭ ‬34‭ ‬films from‭ ‬12‭ ‬different countries,‭ ‬in four sites around the county‭ ‬--‭ ‬mainstay locations Cobb Downtown in Palm Beach Gardens and Regal Delray Beach‭ ‬18,‭ ‬plus two new western outposts at Regal Royal Palm Beach and Movies of Delray.‭

Ask artistic director Karen Davis to explain the festival’s longevity and she will point to its audience.‭ “‬I think that they appreciate quality film programming.‭ ‬One reason for that‭ ‬--‭ ‬the primary reason for that‭ ‬--‭ ‬is that they rarely get it,‭” ‬she says.‭ “‬There are fewer and fewer art movies,‭ ‬fewer and fewer art and independent films and I think that we really make up a substantial gap in the taste of cultured film lovers.‭”

(Full disclosure:‭ ‬For the first time,‭ ‬the festival has a‭ “‬reviewer in residence,‭” ‬a title I will be holding.‭ ‬At several screenings,‭ ‬I will be offering my observations and opinions,‭ ‬fielding audience questions and leading post-showing discussions.‭)

The festival leads off with two screenings of‭ ‬Anita,‭ ‬an involving tale of a young Jewish woman with Down syndrome,‭ ‬separated from her family after a‭ ‬1994‭ ‬terrorist bombing in Buenos Aires.

‭“‬When I saw it,‭ ‬I fell in love with it,‭ ‬as did the screening committee,‭” ‬explains Davis.‭ “‬Choosing an opening night film is always a little problematic.‭ ‬You want a crowd-pleaser,‭ ‬but you don’t want fluff.‭ ‬You don’t want a really sad movie.‭ ‬While this move deals with a serious subject and treats it seriously,‭ ‬I think it paints a very,‭ ‬very upbeat,‭ ‬optimistic picture of society.‭ ‬And I thought the acting and the direction were phenomenal and my screening committee agreed.‭”

Many,‭ ‬if not most,‭ ‬of the films in the festival are unlikely to gain American distribution,‭ ‬so their exposure during the festival‭ ‬--‭ ‬Dec.‭ ‬1‭ ‬-‭ ‬12‭ ‬--‭ ‬will be the only opportunity to see them locally.‭ ‬Two exceptions feature Oscar winners Helen Mirren and Dustin Hoffman.

Mirren stars in‭ ‬The Debt‭ (‬Dec.‭ ‬10,‭ ‬Regal Delray‭ ‬18‭)‬,‭ ‬playing a Mossad agent assigned to capture Nazi war criminals decades earlier,‭ ‬now reliving the trauma of those times and the toll they took on her.‭

Scheduled for commercial release by Miramax Films early in‭ ‬2011,‭ ‬the thriller‭ “‬is a U.S.‭ ‬version of an Israeli film that was made with Gila Almagor about three years ago,‭” ‬notes Davis.‭ ‬Originally,‭ ‬the film was supposed to be released in December,‭ ‬but then it was rescheduled.‭ ‬But because of the original release date,‭ ‬that’s why they were eager to have the film festival launch it.‭”

Hoffman narrates a documentary with plenty of built-in appeal,‭ ‬Jews and Baseball:‭ ‬An American Love Story‭ ‬(Dec,‭ ‬7,‭ ‬Regal Delray‭ ‬18‭; ‬Dec.‭ ‬12,‭ ‬Cobb Downtown‭)‬.‭ “‬It’s a wonderful film,‭ ‬better than‭ ‬‘The Hank Greenberg Story‭’‬ because it has a broader historical scope and perspective.‭ ‬Did you know that the first Jewish baseball players began playing in the late‭ ‬19th century‭?‬,‭” ‬asks Davis.‭ “‬I’m not a sports fan,‭ ‬but there was just something so engaging about this film.‭”

The opening night of the Palm Beach Jewish Film Festival coincides with the beginning of Hanukkah.‭ ‬As Davis explains,‭ “‬We chose December for the festival,‭ ‬because back in its early days,‭ ‬there was very little here for Jews because the month was so dominated by Christmas.‭ ‬So the Jewish Arts Foundation,‭ ‬which began the festival,‭ ‬decided to offer it as sort of a Hanukkah gift to the Jewish community.‭ ‬And we do have people buy tickets as Hanukkah gifts.‭ ‬Most of all,‭ ‬they buy the passes to gift themselves.‭”

Davis and her screening committee are content to bring to the area the best films from around the globe on Jewish subjects.‭ ‬But invariably,‭ ‬by serendipity,‭ ‬common themes tend to emerge from their choices.‭

“There are several small themes.‭ ‬One is the idea of forbidden or thwarted love.‭ ‬Three films fall into that category‭ ‬– ‘Oh,‭ ‬What a Mess,‭’‬ ‘He’s My Girl,‭’‬ and‭ ‬‘Adam’s Wall.‭’‬ Then there’s a broader theme,‭ ‬which has to do with the conflict between assimilation and identity.‭ ‬Both‭ ‬‘Bridge Over Wadi‭’‬ and‭ ‬‘World Class Kids,‭’ ‬as well as‭ ‬‘Lone Samaritan‭’‬ and‭ ‬‘Sayed Kashua‭’‬ deal with issues of multi-culturalism in Israel,‭ ‬how to be an Israeli citizen and still maintain your character,‭ ‬your identity.

‭“‬There’s a sub-theme which I call‭ ‘‬gutsy women.‭’ ‬One of them is‭ ‬‘Berlin‭ ’‬36,‭’‬ which is about the women Olympic high jumper.‭ ‬The other is‭ ‬‘Sixty in the City,‭’‬ a documentary about the‭ ‬60-year-old filmmaker who documents her experiences with on-line dating.‭ ‬‘Ahead of Time,‭’‬ a terrific documentary about the life of Ruth Gruber.‭”

Asked to single out five films that are must-sees‭ ‬--‭ ‬a request that Davis hates‭ ‬--‭ ‬she nonetheless gives in and agrees to cooperate.‭ “‬I would say‭ ‬‘The Matchmaker,‭’‬ because it‭’‬s an outstanding Israeli film that covers a historical period of time‭ ‬--‭ ‬the early‭ ‬50s‭ ‬--‭ ‬that is not normally covered in Israel cinema.‭

“I would say‭ ‬‘The Round Up,‭’‬ a French film that deals with the French round-up of Jews.‭ ‬They were sent to this cycling ring,‭ ‬the Vel d’Hiv,‭ ‬in a sweltering summer.‭ ‬It was sort of like the situation after Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.‭ ‬And then the Jews were all put on trains and sent to work camps and death camps.

‭“‬I would say‭ ‬‘Saviors in the Night‭’‬ is another outstanding film.‭ ‬Of course‭ ‬‘Jews and Baseball,‭’‬ but that doesn’t need any publicity.‭ ‬People will just see the title and come.‭ ‬And we have a very sweet historical drama called‭ ‬‘Gei-Oni‭ (‬Valley of Fortitude‭)‬’,‭ ‬about the founding of an Israeli town called Rosh Pina in the‭ ‬19th century.‭ ‬That’s five,‭ ‬but there are so many more good films in this festival,‭ ‬it’s really unfair to ask me to choose.‭”

THE‭ ‬21ST ANNUAL PALM BEACH JEWISH FILM FESTIVAL,‭ ‬Dec.‭ ‬1-12.‭ ‬Tickets:‭ ‬$8-$10,‭ ‬www.pbjff.org.

***

Anita‭ ‬(Cobb Downtown,‭ ‬Dec.‭ ‬1,‭ ‬7:20‭ ‬p.m.‭; ‬Regal Delray‭ ‬18,‭ ‬Dec.‭ ‬2,‭ ‬7:20‭ ‬p.m.‭) ‬--‭ ‬In a simple apartment in Buenos Aires,‭ ‬Dora‭ (‬played by Oscar-nominated Norma Aleandro of‭ ‬Gaby:‭ ‬A True Story‭) ‬lives with her daughter Anita‭ (‬the remarkable Alejandra Manzo‭)‬,‭ ‬who has Down syndrome.‭ ‬Anita’s life revolves around her endlessly patient mother,‭ ‬as well as her brother Ariel,‭ ‬who arrives with his wife for his ritual Sunday visit,‭ ‬but is too preoccupied with the World Cup soccer match to take Anita on a promised trip to the zoo.

That casual neglect comes back to haunt Ariel,‭ ‬for when Dora leaves Anita alone in the family stationery store to visit a Jewish charity to collect some subsidy money,‭ ‬a terrorist bomb explodes,‭ ‬leaving an uncomprehending,‭ ‬but trusting Anita to wander the streets in search of food and shelter.‭ ‬The city becomes one of the characters,‭ ‬as she receives help from unexpected sources,‭ ‬like a grizzled rummy and an Asian immigrant family that are each disarmed by this pudgy-faced child-woman.

The film’s success hinges on the role of Anita and Manzo gives an extraordinary,‭ ‬natural performance calculated to melt hearts.‭ ‬Director-writer Marcos Carnevale guides the film with assurance,‭ ‬capturing the chaos following the urban bombing,‭ ‬but never straying far from a close-up of Manzo.

‭ * * *

The Matchmaker‭ (‬Cobb Downtown,‭ ‬Dec.‭ ‬4,‭ ‬7:20‭ ‬p.m.‭) ‬--‭ ‬Move over,‭ ‬Dolly Gallagher Levi.‭ ‬Make way for Yankele Bride,‭ ‬the title character in director Avi Nesher’s sweet memory tale of a youth named Arik Burstein who comes of age in Haifa,‭ ‬circa‭ ‬1968,‭ ‬under the tutelage of the pragmatic,‭ ‬professional romantic who dedicates himself to matching up clients with‭ “‬what they need,‭ ‬not what they want.‭”

The world that opens itself to Arik‭ (‬Tuval Shafir‭) ‬is populated with highly colorful characters.‭ ‬Foremost is Yankele,‭ ‬whose scarred face suggests a mysterious,‭ ‬dark past,‭ ‬yet as played by Israeli stand-up comic Adir Mller,‭ ‬he is gentle and brimming with wry wisdom.‭ ‬There’s alluring blonde Clara‭ (‬Maya Dagan‭)‬,‭ ‬who assists Yankele in preparing his clients for romance that they tend to fall madly in love with her instead of the intended match.‭ ‬One such eager bride is the sassy dwarf Sylvia‭ (‬delicately featured,‭ ‬diminutive Bat-el Papura‭)‬,‭ ‬the proprietress of a movie theater within Haifa’s red light district.

While these lovelorn adults sort out their stunted emotions,‭ ‬Arik is coming under the spell of a teenager vixen named Tamara‭ (‬Neta Porat‭)‬,‭ ‬who knows how to string the defenseless lad along.‭ ‬Deftly set against the turmoil of the outside world,‭ ‬this fable-like saga walks a tricky tightrope between sentiment and sentimentality.‭

Everyone Else (Cinema Guild)

Release date: Oct. 26

SLP: $20.49

If “mainstream cinema” is shorthand for grounded, explicable, coherent story arcs told with logic and closure, then art cinema – the yin to Hollywood’s yang – is the terrain of the unknown, the inexplicable, the frustratingly open-ended. Its filmmakers are fully aware that, as in life, they don’t have all the answers, and their stories do not conclude in tidy, message-filled packages. More likely, the package has been destroyed, the wrapping paper strewn about the floor, the message missing.

Most movies canonized as classics – most of the films that wind up on critics’ top 10 lists each year – fall squarely in the middle of these polarizing modi operandi. But I usually have the most respect for movies that compromise nothing to mainstream conventions, that question rather than explain, that observe rather than preach. Everyone Else, the second feature from German director Maren Ade, is one such film.

Movies about relationships have rarely contained this much raw intimacy and uncomfortable insight into human conditions, because most of them seek to manipulate us one way or the other, fitting their characters into prescribed roles: We sympathize with the battered wife or the henpecked husband, and morality usually wins out in the end. Everyone Else, which has its roots in both the authentic, ragged psychodramas of Cassavetes and Bergman, and the lost-in-a-strange-land meanderings of Antonioni, is far more complex in its evocation of a seemingly blissful coupling that may or may not dissipate over a vacation in the Mediterranean.

The central players are Chris (Lars Eidinger), a struggling architect, and Gitti (Birgit Minichmayr), a music publicist. For Chris, the couple’s vacation in Sardinia serves a dual purpose, one that involves the potential reconstruction of a villa. Small battle lines are drawn early in the film: Gitti resents that Chris won’t compromise any of his architectural ideals even if it means never bringing any of his projects to fruition, while it’s quite obvious that Chris sometimes finds Gitti’s behavior offensive and embarrassing. When he and Gitti meet one of Chris’ colleagues, Hans, and his pregnant wife Sana, for dinner, their relationship begins to fully unravel, one painful tether at a time. A directionless mountain climbing adventure at the film’s midpoint only serves to reinforce the idea that Chris and Gitti are strangers in a foreign land, stranded in physical and emotional oblivion.

But the more you stick with this patient, perceptive movie, the more Chris’s casual coldness and hurtful solo excursions begin to look like justifiably erected walls against Gitti’s increasingly fractious, mentally unstable behavior. It’s a subtle transformation that happens almost without the viewer realizing it. We don’t know what to make of an ambiguous scene early on the film, when Gitti teaches hateful admonitions to Chris’s niece before pantomiming her demise in a pool. By the end, this behavior looks like a warning sign shot from the bow of a disturbed mind.

It’s important to understand that Ade’s film is, by its uncertain end, a potent dissection of mental illness -- not, per se, a fundamental depiction of male-female gender roles in contemporary courtship. First of all, gender roles are an antiquated notion to Ade, who confuses them early on by having Chris agree to be made up like a woman. Which is why it’s an offensive notion to read one particular web critic’s diagnosis of the film as a Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus study in gender differentiation.

If that were true, Ade would be saying that all women are irrational, combustible nutcases and that all men are mean, calculating jerks. Gitti and Chris are neither of these; in fact, they’re both so relatable in their peculiarities that you’ll hope for their happiness as you would a friend in a similar situation – even if said happiness can only be achieved by splitting up.

The Elia Kazan Collection (20^th Century Fox)

Release date: Nov. 9

SLP: $137.99

The holiday gift set to end them all, The Elia Kazan Collection compiles 18 movies from the classic Hollywood mainstay, many of which make their American DVD debuts. These include 1953’s Man on a Tightrope, with Frederic March as a member of a Czech circus troupe; 1960’s Wild River, a Jim Crow racial potboiler with Montgomery Clift; and 1963’s Academy Award-nominated America, America, a drama about a persecuted man in Constantinople that was inspired by the story of Kazan’s uncle.

Some other long out-of-print titles, such as the 1945 melodrama A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and 1952’s Viva Zapata, with Marlon Brando as a Mexican revolutionary, are included here as well, along with a couple of punchy noirs (Boomerang! and Panic in the Streets) as well as the director’s most prestigious titles (East of Eden, On the Waterfront, Splendor in the Grass). My favorite Kazan title, the Glenn Beck-anticipating media satire Face in the Crowd, is here too. Martin Scorsese’s name is almost as big as Kazan’s on the packaging; Marty selected the films and produced the first disc in this collection, the new documentary A Letter to Elia. This is mouth-wateringly good.

The Hungry Ghosts (Virgil Films)

Release date: Nov. 2

SLP: $20.49

The idea of lost, troubled souls converging amid the bustle of urban America is to independent film what ostentatious explosions and buff men walking in slow motion are to Jerry Bruckheimer productions. We need more of both like we need more cancer, laugh-tracked sitcoms and vampire novels. The Hungry Ghosts, the writing and directing debut of actor Michael Imperioli, falls wholeheartedly and unceremoniously in the former genre, an inexplicable favorite of film festivals if nowhere else. The specific characters may be different – a hard-living late-night talk show host (Steve Schirripa) and an alcoholic charmer (Nick Sandow) attempting to rekindle a relationship with a pretty but aggressive and newly homeless meditation companion (Aujanue Ellis) – but their loneliness, connected through vice, pain and Eastern religion, is all too familiar. This pointless pity parade collects perverts, drunks, drug addicts, degenerates, deadbeats and other timeless miscreants of the big, nasty city, while claiming on its official box-art description to channel “the zeitgeist of our times.” Hardly. The film’s summation, as voiced by Schirripa’s blowhard, is that “the world is a cesspool.” A perennial diagnosis, perhaps, but by no means original or zeitgeisty.

Tropic of Cancer (Olive Films)

Release date: Oct. 26

SLP: $18.99

Joseph Strick’s adaptation of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer is another reminder that, as with Ulysses and The Bell Jar, great literature does not always make great cinema. Rip Torn plays Miller in a story that transplants the drifting writer/horndog from the book’s ‘30s milieu to modern-day Paris, hoodwinking everyone he meets to satisfy his desires for food, sex and lodging. Technically faithful to the book, the barely coherent nonstory shambles along, jump cut by jump cut, audiovisual mismatch by audiovisual mismatch, until it settles into a languorous groove anchored by frank discussions of sexual organs that earned this once-shocking art-house drivel an NC-17. It’s boring both despite and because of its artsy quirks, and the acting is wooden and at times laughable. Curious Miller aficionados will likely encompass the movie’s microscopic demographic, and it’s no surprise that the most engaging part of Betty Botley’s screenplay are the passages lifted directly from the source material.

With the exception of the occasional adventuresome booking at West Palm Beach’s long-since defunct Carefree Theatre, this county used to be a wasteland when it came to international, independent or alternative films.

But six years ago, a digitally projected national network, Emerging Cinema, moved into Lake Worth. Now, beginning this weekend, comes Living Room Theaters, a more upscale series of intimate screening rooms on the Florida Atlantic University campus in Boca Raton.

This marks only the second location for Living Room Theaters, following its initial start-up in Portland, Ore. So why Boca next?

“Well, to be perfectly honest, it was the university, FAU, that came to us,” says Diego Rimoch, the younger half of a father-son team that owns Living Room Theaters, Inc. “That was over four years ago. They made this proposal to us, saying, ‘Would you be interested in doing this on campus?’ It was such a great opportunity, we just couldn’t let it go by.”

No, he explains, it was not the soft economy that caused the project to take four years. “There were a number of factors. This is the first time we or the university had heard of such a partnership between the public and the private sector, so there were a lot of things that had to be worked out,” Rimoch says. “We had to lay the groundwork for how the agreement would work out, a lot of minutiae.”

Having the screening rooms on campus has benefits for both sides. By day, these four 50-seat theaters will be used as classrooms for FAU’s film study program. At night and on weekends, they become commercial movie houses with an adjoining European-style café serving gourmet food items, specialty coffees, beer and wine.

Traditionally in bad economic times, the film industry has done well, because going to the movies is considered one of the least expensive entertainment options. Rimoch also notes that this year‘s box office totals have been inflated by the proliferation of 3D movies and their surcharges.

But, he quickly adds, “As far as we’re considered, that’s not the type of market we are after. We’re more of the art market. But I still think that if you offer a great product at a good price, people will still come. In hard times, people need something to entertain them and take their minds away.

Typical of the fare you can expect at LRT are these opening weekend features -- The Last Train Home, Only When I Dance, Soul Kitchen and the original 1960 Psycho.

We can expect to see more foreign films that might not otherwise make it down to South Florida. “Yes, although we try to have at least half of the films playing at any one time in English,” adds Rimoch. “We understand that a large segment of the population feels funny about subtitles and having to read a movie. But yes, there’s obviously a large foreign component to the movies we play.

“We won’t go after commercial films. We’ll stick to independent films, and I think people appreciate that.”

Living Room Theaters sounds like a natural competitor of Emerging Cinemas, which has outlets in Lake Worth and Lake Park, but Rimoch feels strongly that this market can support two alternative film chains.

“It’s similar, but we have a lot if features that they don’t have,” he says. “But the main differentiation is that they try to be content providers, so their business model is based on getting distribution of the movies, whereas we are an IT technology vendor.”

Rather than focusing on expanding his network of Living Room locations, Rimoch expects to place his in-house digital proprietary projection software in existing theaters around the country. “It’s a good product and it’s priced well, so over time we think a lot of independent theaters will find it attractive.”

The regular ticket price will be $9.50, but there are a variety of discounts beyond that. Matinees before 5 p.m. will be $7.50, students, educators, the military and seniors 65 and older will get in for $6.50. And all tickets on the traditionally slow business days of Monday and Tuesday will be a mere $5.50.

Adding to the income will be upscale food concessions, as different from the multiplex menu as the films are. “We have a full-fledged kitchen, so we’ll be doing gourmet pizzas and salads and paninis,” notes Rimoch.

“One of the things we say is since these are theaters by filmmakers and for filmmakers, we went about changing everything we didn’t like about movie theaters. From the environment, the look and feel of the theaters to the concessions,” he says. “But the main thing I would say that is different is the movie collection. We care about what we show. I won’t say that occasionally something won’t get through that’s mot up to par. It happens. And not everybody will like everything. But we care a lot about what we show and we’re very careful about what we show.

“One of the things we try to do is bill the theater as a destination. More than people saying, ‘Oh, I want to watch this movie,’ I want people to think, ‘I’m going to go to Living Room Theaters and see what’s playing there, because I know I will find something I will want to see.’ ”

LIVING ROOM THEATERS, Florida Atlantic University, 777 Glades Road, Boca Raton. Opening Friday. Tickets: $5.50-$9.50. Call: (561) 948-2560.