From its title to the age-defying friendship at its core, the French import My Afternoons With Margueritte has the Chicken Soup odor of Tuesdays With Morrie.

Directed by movie-of-the-week sentimentalist Jean Becker (Conversations With My Gardener), it follows a similar emotional journey as Mitch Albom’s breakthrough, charting the developing relationship between a lonely, barely literate fruit vendor (Gerard Depardieu) and the lonely and very literate nonagenarian of the title (Gisele Casadesus), whom he encounters by – where else? -- a park bench, that perennial rendezvous for inspiration-seeking lost souls.

They bond over pigeons, and she reads him Camus. The next time he hangs out with his friends, Depardieu’s Germain Chazes surprises everyone by referencing the French existentialist’s The Plague in colloquial conversation, the first step in his intellectual turnaround. Germain and Margueritte gradually change each other’s lives, though forces beyond their control come to threaten their kinship.

To his credit, Becker curbs the story’s potentially excessive sap, relying more on his own screenplay (co-written with Jean-Loup Dabadie) than the manipulative crutches of a cloying score or mawkish acting. Depardieu is fine, if unchallenged, in the part, which consists mostly of listening to Margueritte read, fuming under his breath and waddling under his girth. Casadesus is charming, her elegance tempered with a resignation of the inevitability of aging and the problems it will soon cause.

The film is as its strongest with it flashes back to Germain’s childhood – a painful upbringing defined by hectoring teachers, a mentally abusive mother, a physically abusive stepfather and his own awkward coming-of-age. All of these triggers paint a lucid picture of the childhood traumas that impacted Germain, and they help to define his lack of self-confidence and his anxieties about fatherhood (he has a patient, unlikely girlfriend played by Sophie Guillemin).

My Afternoons with Margueritte is a pleasant provincial movie for mass audiences of a certain age. Directed and shot with simple anonymity, it’s not high art by any stretch of the imagination, and it’s best enjoyed as a matinee over tea and cookies. It’s not out to hurt anybody, and there’s nothing really wrong with it, if you like this sort of thing.

But it’s a completely contained movie, packaged for easy export and tidily composed with a ribbon on top. It leaves you with very little to think about when you exit the theater; the process of forgetting this disposable movie begins as soon as the end credits start scroll across the screen.

I’ve grumbled, and will continue to grumble, that these are the kind of foreign-language movies that arrive in semi-wide releases in South Florida, not the provocative works by art-house masters. If Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme is an urbane, five-star French restaurant an hour’s drive away, My Afternoons With Margueritte is a Paul food stand in your local mall: You get what you pay for.

MY AFTERNOONS WITH MARGUERITTE (LA TETE EN FRICHE). Cast: Gerard Depardieu, Gisele Casadesus, Maurane, Jean-François Stévenin, François-Xavier Demaison, Claire Maurier, Sophie Guillemin; Director: Jean Becker; Distributor: Cohen Media Group; Rating: Not rated; in French with English subtitles; Opens: Friday at Movies of Delray and the Tower Theatre in Miami

It is perhaps becoming a cliché to say that the latest performance by Ryan Gosling is a revelation, because he’s already had at least two revelatory performances – in Half Nelson and Blue Valentine – in his relatively short tenure as a leading man. How many times can somebody, uh, revelate over such a brief career?

But it seems like the more we’re exposed to Gosling, the more range he shows us while remaining one of the most consistently interior actors of this or any generation. In his best roles, he plays strange, bottled-up ciphers we can never quite understand – proverbial camels waiting for that last piece of straw to burden their backs. They are the kind of people Jack Nicholson would have played 40 years ago, so it’s no surprise Gosling’s best work conjures the auteur-driven American cinema of the 1970s.

His latest character, in the brutal neo-noir Drive, is just as emotionally impenetrable and just as facially expressive as his other great roles to date – All Good Things comes to mind, too – but with an added jolt of vintage Eastwoodian laconicism. He says few words, but when he does, we listen – while shaking in our boots and clinging to our seats. This is Gosling as the 21^st century anti-hero – a psychotic Dirty Harry who is only nominally nobler than the film’s cold-blooded villains – and it’s a scary embodiment.

He plays a man known simply as Driver; he lives only on the screen in front of us, we know nothing of his background or personal life, and it’s only fitting that his name is withheld, too. Driving is his life, whether crashing cars as a Hollywood stuntman by day as acting as a freelance wheelman for criminal operations at night. He’s an impersonal loner who drifts through a dangerous and sordid life; over the course of the film, he is compared overtly to a zombie and subtextually to a shark.

His routine is shaken up after he meets his neighbor Irene (the always excellent Carey Mulligan), the fetching wife of a soon-to-be-released convict and a mother of one. Avoiding any semblance of meet-cute contrivances, the two exchange some words outside their apartment, then she stops by Driver’s garage to have some auto repairs, then he sort of eventually gets around to sort of asking her on something resembling a date. Their just-the-facts conversations are filled with pregnant pauses, a welcome reprieve from the endless blather of so many Hollywood romances.

Eventually, though, Irene’s husband Standard (Oscar Isaac) is released from prison and is soon assaulted by some thugs to whom he owes protection money. When Driver involves himself in Standard’s latest heist, the plot splits open like a worm-infested cantaloupe, splintering into a barrage of surprises, double-crossings, and a level of violence that pushes the film’s R rating to its breaking point.

The star of Drive is as much as the film’s cult director, Denmark’s Nicolas Winding Refn, as it is Gosling. The man responsible for Bronson, Valhalla Rising and the Pusher series, Refn has always been a visionary stylist operating in seedy, niche genres. But this time, working from a critically acclaimed short novel by James Sallis, Refn has A-list material to flex his considerable talents.

Refn shows a deep commitment to every facet of the filmmaking process, from lighting, camera movement and mise-en-scene to the soundtrack (composer Cliff Martinez’s electronic score sets the perfect ambiance) and the direction of actors (Albert Brooks, shrewdly cast as the gangster at the top of the film’s underworld hierarchy, shows a side of himself we’ve never seen). He directs like an orchestra conductor, filming a studio thriller like the work of art every movie has the capacity to be. Both his bloody set-pieces and his benign, deliberate scenes of Driver navigating across the sprawl of Los Angeles are presented with the operatic grandeur we associate with Coppola and Scorsese’s most acclaimed work.

There are moments in this film that are as visually enrapturing as anything in Terence Malick’s canon – they pulsate with life and radiate with an uncommon glow. Drive is, quite simply, a procession of beautiful, unforgettable moments in time that add up to one of this year’s few American masterpieces.

DRIVE. Director: Nicolas Winding Refn; Cast: Ryan Gosling, Carey Mulligan, Bryan Cranston, Albert Brooks, Oscar Isaac, Ron Perlman, Christina Hendricks; Distributor: Film District; Rating: R; Opens: Friday; Venue: Most commercial houses

For those who have been stressing lately over deadly earthquakes and hurricanes, worry instead about tiny viruses that travel with unexpected speed around the globe transported by a cough or a handshake.

Oh, to have the surgical mask concession at movie theaters showing Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion, a star-packed exercise in medical paranoia told with a muted style instead of melodrama, preferring science to sensationalism. That documentary-like tonal choice is likely to lose the film some box office, but it results in a cumulative sense of dread, as the epidemic spreads around the world and society breaks down into rioting mobs, that is more dramatically effective.

Soderbergh again demonstrates a remarkable ability to lure A-list actors to his projects. Gwyneth Paltrow plays an international marketing executive who travels to Hong Kong for work, becoming infected there and bringing the virus home with her. Matt Damon is her unnerved husband who has a fluke immunity to the disease. Laurence Fishburne and Kate Winslet play operatives of Atlanta’s Centers for Disease Control, juggling science and politics.

Marion Cotillard joins the sleuthing effort, trying to track down the virus’ source and vaccine for the World Health Organization. If there is a human villain, it is Jude Law, a weasely blogger whose goal seem to be profiting from the panic.

Contagion brings to mind an earlier film on a similar subject, 1995’s Outbreak, but Soderbergh is more interested in getting the factual details right, even at the expense of cinematic jolts. This may lead to less of a conventional thriller than most disaster movies, but it imagines how such an epidemic would really play out, which ultimately is more unnerving. Grab some hand sanitizer and see Contagion.

CONTAGION. Director: Steven Soderbergh; Cast: Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Marion Cotillard; Rating: PG-13.

* * *

Taking a page from last year’s boxing film, The Fighter, Gavin O’Connor’s Warrior hooks us in with its characters and their conflicts with each other, which trumps the sports drama and its inevitable clichés.

The sport is this case is mixed martial arts, an anything goes combination of boxing, wrestling and animalistic mayhem, which happens fittingly inside a chain link cage. Brutal in the extreme, it attracts a crowd of blood-thirsty spectators, which presumably will be replicated by a movie audience drawn to the catnip of violence.

But Warrior also has a compelling story line, about two brothers -- one a recent Iraq War veteran, the other a high school physics teacher -- both estranged from their alcoholic father (Nick Nolte) and with seething resentments to each other. For varying reasons, both brothers are strapped for cash and drawn to a $5 million jackpot MMA tournament called Sparta.

Although it is said to attract fighters from around the world, these two blue-collar Pittsburgh brothers improbably make the cut into the field of 16 and, yes, you guessed it, they eventually are matched up in the cage against each other in Atlantic City.

Grizzly Nolte does not stray far from his usual rumpled performance, but he is well-cast as the father seeking sobriety and reconciliation. Brit hulk Tom Hardy (Inception) makes a strong impression as soldier Tommy, bull-headed and brimming with brute strength, as does Aussie Joel Edgerton (Animal Kingdom) as family man and academic Brendan. Both their acting skills and physical prowess are well showcased, and future film careers of prominence seem likely for each of them.

Warrior undeniably packs a punch -- and a kick and a gouge -- in its mixed martial arts scenes, as well as its family warfare.

WARRIOR. Director: Gavin O’Connor; Cast: Tom Hardy, Nick Nolte, Joel Edgerton, Jennifer Morrison; Rated: PG-13.

I understand that Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs has been remade, with the Rod Lurie-directed film set to bloody cinema screens everywhere Sept. 16.

It was only inevitable that a film whose shocking, graphic depictions of violence and sexuality, which were well ahead of their time in mainstream cinemas in 1971, would be mined and possibly exploited by a generation of moviemakers and moviegoers for whom graphic violence and sexuality are very much of their time. If I Spit On Your Grave, the most notorious shock-cinema classic of the ‘70s, could be remade by Hollywood, as it was in 2010, then anything can.

Lurie, who gave us The Contender and Resurrecting the Champ, is a good director, but I’m afraid to see what Straw Dogs will resemble as a 21^st-century studio movie, particularly if the worthless, torture-porn revision of I Spit On Your Grave was any indication. Straw Dogs was arguably the premier ultraviolent home-invasion movie, filmed decades before the trope became commonplace in horror cinema. I fear the remake will look too glossy, too overdramatic, too enamored with its own expensive hemorrhaging. Worse yet, I’m afraid it will abandon the moral ambiguity of the original, converting its sense of a completely depraved and decaying hamlet into a story of familiar good-versus-evil archetypes.

Thankfully, the remake has at least prompted the Blu-ray release of the original film (Fox, $16.99), which looks better than ever (no extras, though). The story is simple: Dustin Hoffman’s workaholic mathematician David and his beautiful young wife Amy (Susan George) arrive in Southern England for a yearlong sojourn in Amy’s hometown. Their relationship is a stressful, pins-and-needles affair of verbal spats and frustrated expressions even before the terrors of the outside world encroach on their home in the form of the local handymen hired to work on their property. The mens’ opening salvos – a dead cat here, a dangerous roadway trick there – lead to a sexual assault and finally a crazed home invasion fit for pitchforks and torches.

This story, the stuff of many a forgettable exploitation film, becomes the lurid canvas for one of Peckinpah’s most artful explorations of the darkness of the human soul. Straw Dogs was his first non-Western, but the lawless brutality and the absence of sheer goodness that characterized his groundbreaking Westerns carries over nicely, and more profoundly, in the “civilized” modern world. Where other films might treat Amy as a tragic innocent defiled by evil men, Peckinpah captures her duality as tease and victim, suggesting her lecherous attackers to come hither and subjecting the awful consequences when they do.

Peckinpah introduces her breast-first as she saunters across the street, a seemingly sexist shot with a brilliant ulterior motive: Followed by images of the townsmen staring at her figure, this opening immediately and bluntly identifies her as an object of desire, establishing a tone of unease and menace that persists through the film’s first 40-odd minutes, a boiler room of pre-violence tension (As with Psycho, it can be argued that the best parts of Straw Dogs happen long before any of the controversial stuff).

David, the movie’s ostensible protagonist, is hardly a paragon of virtue either. Behind Hoffman’s foppish hair and thick spectacles (he vanishes into this unbecoming part) lie the roots of a psychopath, present long before his full-blown transformation into a gun-brandishing, tribe-protecting savage. There is simply no better scene in Straw Dogs than the one of David’s abuse of Amy’s cat, pelting the offscreen feline with a barrage of fruit, just for the hell of it. When he finds the cat strung up in his bedroom closet a few scenes later, he plops down in a chair in a state of wordless shock and perverse acceptance, perhaps realizing that he could have just as easily been the one to have done it.

For these and many reasons, Straw Dogs transcends its reputation as a B-movie gorefest; it’s a film that should have a regular residence in the halls of film-studies academia. Peckinpah’s intercutting offers an extraordinary absorption of Sergei Eisenstein’s theories of associative montage, which manifests itself most effectively in the rape scene and its aftermath, as visions of the assault cloud Amy’s psyche like war flashbacks in even the most benign settings (though Peckinpah movies don’t have very many of those). Those who want to find interpretations of the male gaze (in the film’s self-conscious treatment of Amy) and the Other (As an American, David is a poked and prodded minority amid a gnarled U.K. contingency) will notice these as well.

When the new Straw Dogs opens soon, it will prompt the same question we exasperated critics ponder every time a masterpiece is remade: Why tinker with perfection? The answer is always money, of course, or laziness, or some combination of the two. If The Manchurian Candidate, Solaris, The Wicker Man and Psycho are blueprints, this will be another bet that doesn’t pay off.

DVD Watch: Sept. 13: The most notable disc of this week, and the whole month of September, is undoubtedly the Blu-ray premiere of Citizen Kane (Warner Bros., $39.99). Warner went all out on the 70^th anniversary of Orson Welles’ modernist masterpiece. The bonus features total more than four hours of entertainment and information, including two full-length films: the PBS documentary The Battle Over Citizen Kane and the HBO docudrama RKO 281.

There are two commentaries, storyboards, a press book, deleted scenes, interviews with cast and crew and even an audio recording of Welles’ seminal War of the Worlds radio broadcast for the Mercury Theatre. For an additional $10, order this box set from Amazon, and you’ll get Welles’ rarely screened The Magnificent Ambersons as an additional bonus disc. With the holidays around the corner, think of gifting it to someone special.

Also on tap for this date are two of the best movies, so far, of 2011: Meek’s Cutoff (Oscilloscope, $23.99 Blu-ray and $18.99 DVD), Kelly Reichardt’s Antonioni-meets-Malick existential study of lost settlers adrift on the Oregon Trail; and Le Quattro Volte (Kino, $31.49 Blu-ray and $26.99 DVD), a singular experience of life, death and rebirth from Italy. Peter Jackson’s underrated horror-comedy The Frighteners (MCA, $26.91) also makes its Blu-ray debut.

Sept. 20: On this date, Criterion will release a pair of titles by a great director whom the distributor has never explored previously: Claude Chabrol. Considered the founding father of the French New Wave, Chabrol died around this time last year after completing 50 features over a prolific half-century. Criterion takes us all the way back to his very first two features, Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins ($27.99 Blu-ray and 21.99 DVD each). The former is about a theology student who reunites with an unhappy childhood friend; the latter takes the two actors from the former and reverses their characters in a complementary study of the duality of man. I can’t wait for these titles. Supplements include newly shot documentaries and audio commentaries and vintage clips from French television.

Also this week, silent film lovers are already salivating over Flicker Alley’s Landmarks of Early Soviet Film box set ($62.99), which compiles such rare classics as Sergei Eisenstein’s last silent Old and New, Dziga Vertov’s Stride, Soviet, Victor Turin’s Turksib, Lev Kuleshov’s The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, Mikhail Kalatozov’s Salt for Svanetia and more. Enjoy the work of an octet of still more great directors, in a more truncated form, in the omnibus film Visions of Eight (Olive Films, $22.49), which features short contributions from Kon Ichikawa, Milos Forman, Arthur Penn, John Schleshinger and others. And I’m particularly excited this week about The Strange Case of Angelica (Cinema Guild, $34.95 Blu-ray and $29.95 DVD), 102-year-old auteur Manoel de Oliveira’s latest magical realist, voyeuristic mystery.

Sept. 27: This week, Image Entertainment’s The Blood Trilogy ($12.99) reissues three gorefests from B-movie maven (and Broward County resident!) Herschell Gordon Lewis on Blu-ray at a budget price. Criterion unveils its edition of Carlos ($34.99 Blu-ray and $33.99 DVD), one of 2010’s most critically acclaimed films. Olivier Assasyas’ exhaustive account of international terrorist Carlos the Jackal runs 330 minutes and includes new video interviews and a making-of documentary. This is a great rainy-day disc. Also, check out the Blu-ray premiere of the director’s cut of Guillermo del Toro’s Mimic (Lionsgate, $9.99).

TCM Watch: September starts slow for rare and unusual fare on TCM, but it picks up on Sept. 16. Michael Curtiz’s Bright Leaf (10:30 a.m.) is an unusual historical drama about a tobacco grower who shocks his community by planning to mass-produce cigarettes. Gary Cooper stars, and I’ve been wanting to catch this film ever since it became a central text in documentary filmmaker Ross McElwee’s Bright Leaves. The night ends on a culty note, with the unreleased-on-home-video 1967 B-horror film Corruption at 2 a.m. and the 1973 psycho-horror-comedy Wicked, Wicked at 3:45 a.m., which uses split-screen technology to tell the entire story.

On midnight Sept. 18, check out the newly restored, two-and-a-half-hour cut of Fritz Lang’s pioneering Metropolis, followed by Metropolis Refound, the sausage-making documentary about its reconstruction. On Sept. 20, a Kirk Douglas tribute night includes screenings of the unreleased The Devil’s Disciple (1:45 a.m.), a 1959 Revolutionary War drama costarring Burt Lancaster, and 1961’s acrid Town Without Pity (3:15 a.m.), one of darkest and most cynical films to emerge from the classic Hollywood studio system.

Finally, on Sept. 30, TCM will screen two features by the famed, controversial, surrealist Yugoslavian auteur Dusan Makavajev: Love Affair, or the Case of the Missing Switchboard Operator (2 a.m.) and A Man is Not a Bird (3:15 a.m.). These are both available on a wonderful Criterion Eclipse box set, but I’m mentioning them here to bruit the sheer fact that Dusan Makavajev movies are being broadcast on American cable television. Frankly, I never thought I’d see the day.

A “political whore” with a noble cause and a shy Jewish scientist who worries too much about the avian flu meet, and last, in the French comedy The Names of Love (Le Nom des Gens), which is playing through Thursday at the Lake Worth Playhouse, Mos’Art Theatre and other area art houses.

The buzz about these two eccentric characters, Baya Benmahmoud and Arthur Martin (played by Sara Forestier, 24, and Jacques Gamblin, 53), had been such I went to catch their story at a cinema in Coral Gables (never mind that it was a weeknight).

The film, winner of César Awards for Best Actress and Best Screenplay, was very refreshing and did not disappoint. It contained plenty of funny and shocking scenes that brought down the house as well as serious, touching moments. (A note: the subtitles here come in white bold letters, so there’s no stress.)

Forestier’s Baya is curvy and revealing, jumpy and incapable of multitasking. Gamblin’s Arthur is lean and tall, studied and guarded. The lovely pair carries a convincing chemistry and the camera does a great job emphasizing it (watch for the warm, tinted scenes).

I do not remember who said “the ultimate test of a relationship is to disagree but to hold hands” (nor am I going to Google it now) but I wanted to see if and how Baya and Arthur would pass that test. Their names, families and personalities could not be more different. They also do not do small talk.

Instead they get into racism, Arabs, Jews, blacks, sex and other heavy topics in the very first conversations. They free crabs from the eternal fire and make love before falling in love with each other. But these two have more than one thing in common, including regrets.

Arthur is son to a fragile Jewish mother, who was deeply damaged by the deportation of her parents during the Holocaust, and a nuclear scientist. Baya is the daughter of a French rich girl who turned hippie and rebellious and married an Algerian refugee. His parents are quiet and love technology. Her mother is terribly outspoken and her father has always liked painting.

While Arthur lacks a sense of identity and chooses to do nothing about it (not even ask questions), Baya chooses to confront the issues, even if they are painful ones. She forces her father to pursue his passion – painting -- while Arthur protects his mother from further suffering and pressure.

They are both rescuers: she saves right-wing “fascists” through what we can only presume to be magnificent sex and transforms them into left-wing heroes (some even go on to raise sheep). Arthur rescues dead birds --a goose, a swan, a duck. You can never be too careful with the flu. It is better to be “always vigilant.”

For Baya, it is never too late or impossible to convert the “fascists,” as she can do “great things with her ass.” Being too late is a constant threat for Arthur, as the bird-flu virus does not live long once the animal is dead. He wished he had a less common name and more experience with girls. She wished her piano teacher had given her piano lessons.

By the end of the film, Arthur abandons his philosophy of precaution and Baya cuts back on the sexual experiences with all but one man. You get the feeling this is not a pair that will be claiming irreconcilable differences anytime in the future.

I trust they will be just fine, as long as they do not pronounce the word “nuclear” in front of her mother or the word “camp” in front of his.

LES NOMS DE GENS (The Names of Love). Starring: Sara Forestier, Jacques Gamblin. Directed by Michel Leclerc. Rated: R. In French with English subtitles. Now playing at: Lake Worth Playhouse, Mos’Art Theatre, FAU Living Room Theaters, Movies of Delray, PGA Gardens Cinemax and Cobb Jupiter 18 in Palm Beach County.