Like most criminal activity, everything in Margin Call happens in the dead of night – one specific night, in this case.

The movie’s well-dressed investment bankers, important fat cats in their self-contained worlds, are like single-celled mitochondria in the grand scheme of the financial collapse that will follow in their wake, as we watch them trudge, bleary-eyed, toward the desperate dawn of Sept. 15, 2008.

Or so we presume. Unlike recent history-based feature films that have directly addressed the beginning of the Great Recession – Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps and HBO’s Too Big to Fail – Margin Call is an almost abstract rumination on the downfall. While those two films prided themselves on exhaustive research and patinas of hyperrealism – to the point where they nearly lost themselves in insider jargon – Margin Call leaves us pretty much adrift in a financial miasma, never specifically orienting us in time and space.

There are repeated references to the generic “this firm,” and the phrase “Wall Street” is never used. This is a work of fiction, and surely, any similarity to actual people and institutions (cough Lehman Brothers cough) is purely coincidental.

What this means is that Margin Call may have a longer shelf life than its ripped-from-the-literal-headlines forbears. Predicated as they are on universal human greed and bubble-bursting overexpansion, the events of the movie could happen anywhere, in any country, at potentially any time. Set largely in one ominous, shadowy skyscraper over a 24-hour time span, this intimate chamber piece plays out like a talky Greek tragedy on the corruption of power, one that will be appreciated as a work of sophisticated drama long after its immediate relevance has waned.

It all begins with brilliant company trader Peter Sullivan (Zachary Quinto), who is passed a flash drive from his recently laid-off boss (Stanley Tucci, brilliant as always) along with a warning to “be careful.” On the drive is the skeletal information that will lead to the global financial crisis, research Peter completes with a panicked sense of urgency. He calls his friend and fellow broker (Penn Badgley) and his cynical new boss (Paul Bettany) to the office for a late-night assessment of his findings; minutes later, they’re on the phone to the next guy up the corporate totem pole (Kevin Spacey), who then reaches out to his supervisors, until this rapidly metastasizing problem reaches the desk of CEO John Tuld (Jeremy Irons), who arrives via helicopter at 3 in the morning.

In what is remarkably his film debut, writer-director J.C. Chandor exhibits a wicked, hilariously accurate understanding of the intellectual hierarchy of his milieu. Each suit we meet – Simon Baker and Demi Moore are in there, too, for damage control – is more important but lesser informed than the figure below him on the company’s payroll ladder, from Peter’s underpaid rocket scientist to John’s vapid, cutthroat president. Our sense of the world outside the cloistered meeting rooms is limited to the building’s janitorial staff of inevitable minorities, the silently tragic figures who will become the recession’s real victims.

In an inversion of the noxious, shark-like businessman he’s cultivated in so many roles, Kevin Spacey is the closest we get to this movie’s Henry Fonda – its righteous moral center and the most sympathetic cog in the firm’s machine. Dealing with the imminent demise of a beloved dog on the very night of the collapse, his problems are real human problems, and they’re heartbreaking. It’s easily one of Spacey’s best performances in years, his weary countenance etched with decades of quiet resignation.

It’s him the movie leaves us with, making a symbolic gesture that suggests the financial apocalypse that consumed his night is far from over.

MARGIN CALL. Director: J.C. Chandor; Cast: Kevin Spacey, Paul Bettany, Jeremy Irons, Zachary Quinto, Penn Badgley, Simon Baker, Mary McDonnell, Demi Moore, Stanley Tucci; Distributor: Lionsgate; Rating: R; Opens: Friday at Movies of Delray, Living Room Theaters at FAU, Gateway 4 in Fort Lauderdale, Sunrise 11, Intracoastal in North Miami, the Coral Gables Art Cinema and AMC Sunset Place 24 in South Miami.

Here are capsule reviews of some movies scheduled for the Fort Lauderdale Film Festival, which opens today:

ABOUT FIFTY (10/21, 7:30 p.m., Sunrise Civic Theatre; 10/24, 6:15 p.m., Sunrise Civic Theatre; 10/29, 7 p.m., Muvico Pompano) -- Most rites-of-passage films have been about the mysteries of puberty, but as filmmakers age they begin confronting the latter passage of midlife. So it is for Adam (Martin Grey) and Jon (Drew Pillsbury), two California pals who have recently passed the great divide of their 50th year with varying states of unease.

Adam is separated from his wife, Jon remains a perennial bachelor, and they head off for a getaway weekend to Palm Springs for some golf and, perhaps, a bit of female companionship. Note the dynamic of the party guy and his more reticent buddy, substitute wine tasting for golf and it would be easy to see marked similarities between About Fifty and Alexander Payne’s Sideways. Co-writers Grey and Pillsbury (along with director Thomas Johnston) may lose a few points for lack of originality, but the writing is incisive and any comparison to Sideways is high praise indeed.

The plot thickens when Jon comes on to Alix, an attractive sales clerk (Michaela McManus) half his age, and wangles a dinner invitation for Adam and himself with her and her roommate. But the roommate turns out to be Alix’s divorced mother (Wendie Malick), who is just as rusty and awkward at dating as Adam is. Fortunately, director Johnston keeps matters more subdued than sitcom as the two arrested-development guys grow a bit over the course of the weekend.

Grey and Pillsbury project a very credible friendship, complete with the accompanying antagonisms. The well-cast McManus brings to mind a younger Virginia Madsen (of Sideways) and Malick ably handles the more dramatic opportunities than she usually is dealt on television.

Apparently About Fifty was tailor-made for the Palm Springs Film Festival, where it premiered. But with careful marketing and word-of-mouth, it might be able to find a receptive commercial audience far beyond there. (A-)

* * *

THE PILL (10/25, 8:15 p.m., Cinema Paradiso; 11/3, 8:00 p.m., Sunrise Civic Theatre) -- Finding a new angle for a romantic comedy must rank high on the challenges of a screenwriter, but J.C. Khoury (who also wears the hats of director and producer) manages that winningly in The Pill, a contemporary urban comedy about a one-night stand of unprotected sex and the social protocol of the morning-after pill.

After a boozy evening in Mindy’s bed, Fred freaks out over not using a condom. For her part, she is not using oral contraceptives because she is Catholic. Still, he insists she take a morning-after pill, and then has to feign continued interested in Mindy to ensure that she takes the complete dose 12 hours later.

In case we start caring about these two, Khoury keeps escalating their unlikeability. Fred, we soon learn, has a live-in girlfriend and whiny Mindy tricks him into attending a family party at her overbearing parents’ apartment. With obstacles in place, we do not exactly root for Mindy and Fred, but we do remain involved with each improbable plot twist.

Besides the better-than-average script, The Pill works because of the cast. Noah Bean mines Fred’s duplicity for its multi-layered potential and Rachel Boston is well-matched with him as understandably suspicious Mindy. While there are plenty of reasons that their relationship should not work, the chemistry between the two actors is combustible. (B+)

* * *

TROUPERS (10/25, 4 p.m., Sunrise Civic Theatre; 10/29, 5:30 p.m., Sunrise Civic Theatre; 10/30, 11 a.m., Cinema Paradiso; 11/4, 1 p.m., Muvico Pompano) -- Whatever happened to ….? Nostalgia fans should eat up Troupers, a valentine to a dozen veterans of stage and screen, each of whom is over 80 (and a few of whom have died since filming their interviews.)

This documentary is probably a hard sell to teenagers, but mature moviegoers should appreciate checking in with such stars of the past as Kaye Ballard, Pat Carroll, Betty Garrett, Carl Ballantine and Harold Gould.

Co-directors Sara Ballantine (Carl’s daughter) and Dea Lawrence get no points for their unimaginative editing -- introducing a topic and then piecing together the responses in a dull linear fashion -- but the personalities that shine through and the anecdotes of the former days of show business retain their fascination.

Many of the subjects covered are misty-eyed recollections, but Troupers also delves into the devastation of the anti-Communist blacklisting -- which destroyed the career of Garrett’s husband, Larry Parks, and drove Allan Rich to give up acting and open an art gallery, which proved quite lucrative. Otherwise the film sticks to softball questions about how these folks got started in show business, their favorite roles, how they handle rejection and what advice they have for young performers trying to enter the business.

No one seems reluctant to talk and while few of the answers are startling they make a nice time capsule of the good old days of the biz. (B)

* * *

MAN ON THE TRAIN (10/25, 8:00 p.m., Sunrise Civic Theatre; 11/1, 7:00 p.m., Cinema Paradiso) -- Few if any foreign-language films remade in English have been as satisfying as the original movie, and that goes for the new version of Patrice Leconte’s 2002 gem Man on the Train. It is not that Irish director Mary McGuckian has messed up the story or gotten the tone wrong, merely that her film is too much like the earlier one, rendering hers superfluous except for those who avoid movies with subtitles.

She does get credit for casting Donald Sutherland and U2 drummer Larry Mullen Jr. as the chatterbox retired teacher and the taciturn robber who comes to town to knock over its one bank. Very similar in type and performance to Leconte favorite Jean Rochefort and singer-turned-actor Johnny Hallyday, as effective as the new leads are, they only reinforce the feeling of déjà vu.

Chance -- or is it fate? -- causes them to meet in the town pharmacy, and soon after, the lonely Sutherland invites the stranger to stay in his home for the week. At week’s end, each has a day of reckoning, heart surgery for the old man and the robbery for his houseguest. Before that, though, in the tradition of “odd couple” yarns, they begin to rub off on each other.

McGuckian lacks Leconte’s deft, puckish touch, but the character-driven tale still retains its punch in this less subtle, surprise-challenged version. (B-)

The Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival opens today and runs through Nov. 11. For more information, visit www.fliff.com.

The oldest consecutively running such event in Florida, the Fort Lauderdale Film Festival (FLIFF), returns this week for its 26th incarnation, with an ambitious lineup and a far-reaching program.

Opening Friday and running through Nov. 11, FLIFF features six world premieres, 15 U.S. premieres, 61 Florida premieres and more than 150 films from more than two dozen countries, including Bhutan, Fiji and the United Arab Emirates.

In a year when film festivals have been hard hit by the economic crisis – the Palm Beach International Film Festival has been scaled back and the Downtown Boca Film Festival is in flux -- the 2011 Fort Lauderdale Film Festival is spreading its roots throughout Broward County, up the coast to Boca Raton, Daytona Beach, St. Augustine and Amelia Island, and offshore for four days to Grand Bahama Island for a new event called FLIFF on Location.

“Yes, we are looking for world domination,” joked Gregory von Hausch, the festival’s director. “But seriously, it is a huge undertaking with potential benefits. We hope to broaden our base and generate revenue. Grants and monies from the corporate sector have scaled back, but we have not scaled back our programming.”

Von Hausch said FLIFF has received money this year from the state’s tourism office, Flagler College, the city of Daytona Beach and even the Bahamas Ministry of Tourism.

“We like to think we have our finger on the pulse of the public, and we are here to serve our members and the larger community. I know they appreciate it and we always appreciate their feedback,” he said.

The festival opens with the Florida premiere of The Artist, directed by Michel Hazanavicius. Snapped up for distribution by Harvey Weinstein at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the film, shot in black-and-white and set in 1927, pays homage to the age of silent film.

Starring Jean Dujardin, John Goodman, James Cromwell and Penelope Ann Miller, it relates the story of the interlinked destinies between a rising young starlet and a silent movie superstar whose career is on the decline at the advent of the talkies.

Penelope Ann Miller will be on-site to receive a Career Achievement Award. Other 2011 FLIFF honorees include: Former U.S. Sen. George McGovern; Dennis Haysbert, known for his roles in the Oscar-nominated film Far From Heaven, as a Cuban baseball player in the 1989 baseball flick Major League and in the TV series 24 and The Unit; and Dennis Farina, who returns to FLIFF for the screening of his new film, The Last Rites of Joe May, and will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award.

Also accepting a Lifetime Achievement Award is Piper Laurie, best-known known for her roles in The Hustler and Carrie. She won the Best Actress award at FLIFF in 1995 for The Grass Harp, a film based on the novel by Truman Capote that will screen again at this year’s festival.

Dan Hudak, chairman of the Florida Film Critics Circle and teacher of history and film appreciation at Palm Beach State College, has attended the past eight FLIFFs.

“The programming at FLIFF this year is outstanding, with one of the best collections of films South Florida has ever seen,” Hudak said.

Von Hausch personally recommends the following films:

Delhi in a Day, a Bollywood dark comedy directed by Prashant Nair, which provides a glimpse into upper-class Delhi society. Von Hausch describes the film as “a gem – comic and culturally enlightening.”

Marathon Boy, an HBO documentary film by director and British journalist Gemma Atwal about India’s youngest marathon runner. Von Hausch describes it as a compelling, heartbreaking story about politics, ambition, greed and resilience.

Abandon Ship, a Canadian documentary directed by Dianne Carruthers-Wood about the sinking of the SV Concordia. The film is a dramatic telling of the real-life journey of 48 Canadian students and 16 crew members on a tall ship that capsized off the coast of Brazil in February 2010. Stranded with no communication and four life rafts, the film uses handheld footage to tell the story of their darkest hours until their miraculous rescue.

About Fifty, an American indie comedy starring Martin Grey, Drew Pillsbury and Wendie Malick, directed by Thomas Johnston. A film that asks: “If 50 is the new 30, why do my knees hurt?” Von Hausch describes the film as “sweet, warm and funny, with an insight into the male psyche.”

My Week with Marilyn, a British drama directed by Simon Curtis and written by Adrian Hodges, starring Michelle Williams, Kenneth Branagh and Emma Watson. Based on a book by Colin Clark titled The Prince, the Showgirl and Me, it chronicles the making of the 1957 film The Prince and the Showgirl, starring Marilyn Monroe and Sir Laurence Olivier.

Clark worked on the film, which was shot in England, and escorted Monroe around the country. The film focuses on the week that Clark and Monroe spent together, a chapter that was left out of the original book and published separately as My Week with Marilyn.

The American indie romantic comedy, Like Crazy, will close the festival. Directed by Drake Doremus and starring Felicity Jones and Anton Yelchin, the film won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance film festival.

Jessica Taylor, the media relations director for the Broward Office of Film and Entertainment, said the country is “proud to be the home of the Fort Lauderdale Film Festival.”

“The caliber of films in the lineup and the honored celebrities being awarded for their bodies of work are truly gifted,” Taylor said. “The rich cultural offerings taking place this time of year enhance this celebration of new features, documentaries and shorts from around the globe.”

Films will be screened at: Cinema Paradiso; Muvico Pompano 18; Sunrise Civic Center; Bailey Hall on the Broward College campus in Davie; The Manor in Wilton Manors; and The Living Room Theaters in Boca Raton on the Florida Atlantic University campus. For schedules and times, please visit the website at: www.FLIFF.com or call: (954) 525-3456.

Ticket prices: Most films are $6 FLIFF members, $8 for seniors or students, $10 general admission. Special screenings: $10 FLIFF members, $15 general admission. FAST passes available: $395 members, $475 non-members.

Here’s the long and short of it: Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’ documentary The Shock Doctrine (Zeitgeist, $26.99) attempts to explain, in 80 minutes, what journalist Naomi Klein proposed in her 600-page best-seller of the same name: that the neoliberal, free-market capitalistic ideas of Milton Friedman are the root cause of our economic perils yesterday, today and tomorrow, whether it’s in South America, Wall Street or the Middle East.

Intellectual compression of this magnitude is a tall order ­– some might say an impossible order – and many areas of Klein’s book get short shrift. Whitecross and Winterbottom rush through important passages about the harmful corporatization of the post-Katrina and post-Indian Ocean tsunami recoveries, while spending too much time on the author’s unconvincing connections between radical sensory-deprivation experiments of the 1950s and the exported economic theories of the so-called Chicago School, spearheaded by Friedman.

But as a handy Cliff’s Notes adaptation of Klein’s polemic, this is a tantalizing film. The Shock Doctrine is a sobering survey across a half-century of economic terrorism; when accompanied by stark archival footage, it makes for a well-paced, comprehensive thriller with clear good guys (John Maynard Keynes, Salvador Allende, surprisingly Richard Nixon) and clear bad guys (Augusto Pinochet, Donald Rumsfeld and Margaret Thatcher, with Friedman positioned as the demonic wizard behind the curtain). Causality is explained ad nauseam, and conclusions are spelled out like summaries at the end of chapters, which I suppose is necessary in a feature of such brevity.

Winterbottom is more famous for his narrative features (The Claim, Code 46, etc.), but he is no stranger to docudrama. His 2006 film The Road to Guantanamo, about a trio of innocent Muslims spuriously shackled in the titular prison, is one of the best cinematic indictments of the Bush Administration’s extraordinary-rendition policies. The Muslims’ story is recounted, briefly, in The Shock Doctrine, along with a number of other bullet-point topics that have been explored more fully in other docs, from the horrible ramifications of the 1976 Argentinean coup to the private-contractor hell of Paul Bremer’s post-war Iraqi occupation.

The “newness” here isn’t in the isolated catastrophes themselves but in the connective tissue – the repeated use of the term “shock” in varied settings – that binds them across borders, language and culture. The Shock Doctrine falters most during its seemingly arbitrary cutaways to scenes from Klein’s book tour; as with feature filmmaking, the directors would have benefited from keeping the screenwriter out of the assembly process.

But its strongest asset remains its evenhanded presentation of its thesis. The Shock Doctrine isn’t nearly as researched or probing as The Corporation or Charles Ferguson’s documentaries (No End in Sight, Inside Job), but it borrows their understated grammar. There is never that sense of hyperventilated panic that made films like Countdown to Zero collapse under their own hysteria. The Shock Doctrine is offered more as an academic argument augmented by historical record. It seems to say: Consider this information, contest its merits if you wish and go forth. Viewers of opposing political and economic viewpoints will have much to debate when the credits roll.

DVD Watch

Oct. 11: From one Michael Winterbottom feature to another: This week saw the release of The Trip (IFC, $16.99), one of the best films of this past summer. Shortened from an apparent miniseries, the movie reunites British comic stalwarts and real-life buddies Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon – who shone brightly for Winterbottom in Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story – in a largely improvised road movie through bucolic U.K. countrysides. The Trip is recommended for the dueling celebrity impressions alone – wait till you hear both funnymen tackle Michael Caine, Hugh Grant, Woody Allen and others. But there’s pain beneath the puns; the film functions as a potent study of friendship while casting a critical eye on the semiautobiographical Coogan character.

Also on tap this week is the reigning champion of 2011, Terrence Malick’s staggering and stupefying The Tree of Life (Fox, $24.99 for Blu-ray/DVD combo pack). Sure to divide critics and audiences for decades, this is, so far, the most important film to see this year, whether you like it or not. This combo pack has just one special feature – a supplement called Exploring the Tree of Life – but I smell a fully loaded Criterion reissue in the not-too-distant future. I also recommend this year’s Sundance favorite Terri (Fox, $20.99 Blu-ray and $16.99), a brave dramedy about the relationship between an overweight high-school misfit and his strange vice principal (John C. Reilly) that, inexplicably, never even opened theatrically in South Florida.

On the retro front, check out the Blu-ray release of the omnibus film Boccaccio ’70 (Kino, $32.49), a quartet of lengthy shorts by Italian masters plumbing Boccaccio’s Decameron for inspiration. The films, directed by Mario Monicello, Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti and Vittorio De Sica, are some of the directors’ most sexually provocative works, and the final product clocks in at an imposing 204 minutes.

Oct. 18: The Fellini fun doesn’t stop there; this week. Raro Video issues the Blu-ray release of I Clowns ($20.99). Typical of late-period Fellini, the movie is a surrealist phantasmagoria, eschewing conventional narrative in favor of a strange, dreamy approach that gives way, stranger still, into a documentary-like aesthetic. Fellini called the final product a “docu-comedy.” And, as its title suggests, it’s all about clowns, a concept the should make some happy and many others frightened.

But my favorite pick up this week is the three-disc box set Aki Kaurismaki’s Leningrad Cowboys (Criterion, $40.49). In 1989, deadpan Finnish auteur Kaurismaki made the cult classic Leningrad Cowboys Go America, about a fictional, musically inept ragtag rock band’s tour of the United States, which included a hilarious cameo by Jim Jarmusch, a kindred spirit to Kaurismaki’s low-key style. For years, this has been one of my favorite movies not released on DVD, so I’m thrilled about this. The Criterion Eclipse release also includes the little-seen 1994 sequel Leningrad Cowboys Meet Moses and the concert movie Total Balalaika Show, from the same year, which documents the by-then real-life Leningrad Cowboys at an appearance in Helsinki.

Also of note this week are Baaria (Image, $18.99 Blu-ray and DVD), Guiseppe Tornatore’s epic, Amarcord-like journey through his (and Italy’s) complex past; the Blu-ray premiere of Martin Scorcese’s bloody reimagining of Cape Fear (Universal, $14.99), and Paul Mazurksy’s autobiographical movie satire Alex in Wonderland (Warner Archive, $26.99), which casts Donald Sutherland as a commercial filmmaker desperate to break into art-house cinema … a move that culminates in a meeting with Federico Fellini (yet another Fellini reference this month!).

Oct. 25: This week, Criterion unveils Identification of a Woman ($20.99 Blu-ray, $16.99 DVD), a late-period Michelangelo Antonioni movie that has long deserved its due. It’s not considered one of his most transcendent pictures, but this seemingly autobiographical take on a blocked filmmaker’s sexual adventures with two enigmatic women is certainly one of the most compelling art-house provocations of the vanilla ‘80s, highlighted by a masterful, fog-drenched set piece. The disc includes a 1982 television interview with Antonioni and a new essay by critic John Powers.

Also, don’t miss Lu Chuan’s historical Chinese epic City of Life and Death, in luminous black-and-white CinemaScope, which is sure to be included in many critics’ top 10 lists at the end of this year. This release includes a feature-length documentary on the making of the movie. Elsewhere, Richard Linklater’s Gen-X masterpiece Dazed and Confused gets the Blu-ray treatment (Criterion, $27.99), along with 1974’s The Conversation (Lionsgate, $17.99), for my money the best movie Francis Ford Coppola has ever made. Also look out for The Countess (MPI, $22.49), the third directorial feature from French actress Julie Delpy, about the spiritual bloodlust of a 17^th-century Hungarian countess, along with the Blu-ray debuts of two cult horror flicks from giallo director Lucio Fulci: Zombie and House by the Cemetery (Blue Underground, $22.49 and $15.99 respectively), just in time for Halloween.

TCM Watch: Every Tuesday this month, TCM has been paying tribute to the great director Nicholas Ray on what would be his 100th birthday. This has meant, so far, a trove of rarely screened Ray features, including Born to Be Bad, Johnny Guitar and The Lusty Men. The fun continues Oct. 18 with 1958’s Wind Across the Everglades (11:30 p.m.), an unforgettable and flat-out bizarre Florida-shot adventure; and Hot Blood (3:15 a.m.), a 1956 musical with Jane Russell and Cornel Wilde.

On Oct. 25, experience the rarest Ray product of all: We Can’t Go Home Again (11 p.m.). Shot just a few years before the director’s death, this is an experimental movie filmed with his students at SUNY Binghamton that even IMDB knows nothing about. The Ray retrospective concludes at 12:45 a.m. with Don’t Expect Too Much, a brand-new documentary on Ray’s life and career that includes contributions from Victor Erice and Jim Jarmusch.

On Nov. 1, kick off the month with a couple of unreleased favorites, collected under the theme of “Writer/director/star.” The night includes Jour de Fete (3 a.m.), the first feature from French comedy titan Jacques Tati, a movie unavailable on DVD in America; and Jerry Lewis’ Three On a Couch (4:30 a.m.), a comedy about psychiatry that, to my knowledge, has not been released on any format, anywhere.

I’ve never been to France, but when I visit, I’d prefer to avoid the parts of the country that seem to fascinate Jean-Claude Brisseau.

This underrated French director avoids the picturesque Paris of Woody Allen’s latest time-travel reverie, the tourist-chic France of living postcards, fashionable bistros and perpetually beautiful women. Nor is it the snooty enclave of the New Wavers’ on-location hipster paradise of pool halls, piano bars and art-house cinemas. Brisseau’s France, removed from the metropolises, is more like inner-city Detroit, a dangerous ground that only the brave, stupid or destitute dare tread.

I learned this while absorbing the three worthwhile films comprising Women on Margins: Cinema of Jean-Claude Brisseau, a newly compiled box set from Facets ($71.99). The earliest film in the series, the 1978 TV movie Life the Way It Is, offers the bleakest portrait of France’s underbelly. Violence and depravity are heightened and omnipresent.

A mentally ill person staggers through bus stations, warning passengers that he’s a “groper”; another head case wields a metal rod around a public space chanting, “You’re all corpses,” before his tirade is thwarted by a bullet from an unseen assassin. Deadly knife fights break out, over nothing, on the streets. Tenants of a dilapidated condominium plunge to their own deaths with regularity and are met by society with numbed indifference.

We see all of this happen, and most of it is simply background ambience, establishing a climate of cruelty for young protagonist Agnes Tessier (Maria Luisa Garcia) to overcome. She leaves her school and her home at the beginning of the film in order to finally generate some income, taking a secretarial position in a chemical factory that is, like every place else in the film’s cloistered universe, drab and oppressive.

Women are treated like the personal playthings of the company’s sexist male supervisors, and when Agnes speaks truth to power about the attempted rape of one of her colleagues, she is swiftly victimized by the so-called Golden Cupboard rule, which implies that if a company doesn’t have the rationale to fire an employee, it can simply break down her will to work until she quits.

If the movie really presents, as its title suggests, life the way it is (or was) in 1978 France, then it’s one of the most enraging films ever made, imbued with a hopeless, Fassbinder-like fatalism. Certainly, its documentary grit suggests more than a patina of authenticity -- among the ahead-of-its-time innovations are a couple of early examples of direct-to-camera interviews with some of Agnes’ fellow employees, a practice that is now de riguer in the pseudo-documentary genre.

Brisseau draws much of the film’s emotional traction from the relationship between Agnes and her best friend Florence, a kinship that borders on the romantic. An overt depiction of a lesbian relationship in would have been awfully taboo in ’78, but Brisseau suggests carnal undercurrents, and the love between two women (one ostensibly straight) also manifests itself in 1992’s Céline, also included in this collection (Brisseau’s depiction of female same-sex relations reached its natural conclusion – explicit eroticism – in the ’00s, in the form of Secret Things and The Exterminating Angels).

Céline is about Genevieve (Maria Luisa Garcia again, billed here as Lisa Hérédia), a country nurse who happens upon a young woman crying in the rain. This turns out to be the title character (Isabelle Pasco), the troubled daughter of a newly deceased entrepreneur who fled her inheritance. It’s not long after she’s discovered that Céline tries to gorge on prescription pills and drown herself, so at the behest of Céline’s stepmother, Genevieve acts at Céline’s live-in doctor.

Here’s where the heretofore realistic story goes supernaturally haywire, a stylistic clash that defines much of Brisseau’s work. Through spiritual endeavors such as yoga and meditation, Céline reveals herself to be a healer; she can touch wounds and make them vanish, embrace paraplegics and enable them to walk again. And she can levitate.

Augmented by the sense of growth and loss in the two women’s relationship, Céline is a study of Eastern mysticism served straight, a fantastic twist in an earthbound world, and it suggests, through the tactile physicality of the world around Céline, the possibility of miracles. It’s not Brisseau’s strongest film, but it conjures up Robert Rossellini’s films about faith – secular movies dressed up in spiritual clothing.

Workers for the Good Lord, which had the better title God’s Little Footlings in France, is the odd film out in this series because its protagonist is a man, but it shares with Celine a vibrant mystical quality. It also has the unexpected violence of Life the Way It Is: Immature, illiterate Fred (Stanislas Merhar, a dead ringer for American comedian Christian Finnegan) quits his mechanic job by head-butting his boss, then wields an ax around his apartment complex when he reads a goodbye letter from his girlfriend.

He spends the rest of the picture robbing banks and redistributing wealth while on a quixotic quest to track down his ex – a trek that forces him to confront France’s subterranean crime syndicates. He is aided by Sandrine (Raphaële Godin), a longtime friend, and Maguette (Emile Abossolo M’bo), a shaman who claims to be the heir of a deposed African king.

The story grows increasingly surreal and violent, with Brisseau’s stylized carnage recalling the dazzling set-pieces in Goodfellas and City of God. At the same time, the director’s evocation of nature is his most painterly and luminescent. Workers for the Good Lord doesn’t have the social impact of Brisseau’s early work, but it’s his most exciting stab at conventional genre filmmaking. It also benefits from having the best-looking transfer in this box set.

Be forewarned about the other two – the transfers are not DVD-quality. Nonetheless, this is a great introduction to a controversial and always surprising auteur.