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The Holy Girl

It's astonishing to see such a coolly knowing dramatization of the thrumming sexuality of teenage girls drawn in equal parts to religious fervor and erotic mischief. Amalia, a moody, moony, and only semi-holy girl, is a droopy parochial-school student who comes alive when a stranger rubs up against her in a crowd. The culprit happens to be a prestigious doctor. It's his ironic bad luck that he is staying in the hotel run by Amalia's divorcee mother while attending a medical convention.

Inflamed by a kind of warped love and the sheer adventure of it, the pious-perverse girl begins to stalk her molester with a clammy ardor. Is she trying to save him or seduce him? The promise of Martel's brilliant debut, La Cienaga (NYFF 2001), is more than fulfilled with this provocative second feature. 106 min. Argentina, 2004. An HBO Films Release.

Rolling Family

Four generations of an Argentinian family hit the road in Pablo Trapero's enchanting and buoyantly funny new movie. An aging matriarch, her frazzled middle-aged daughters, exasperated sons-in-law, hormonal grandchildren, and newborn great-grandson pile into a temperamental camper to travel to a clan wedding far from Buenos Aires. Along the way, old passions and enmities are re-ignited, emotional and mechanical mishaps abound, and the landscapes and folkways of Argentina are endowed with a wonderfully fleeting beauty thanks to Trapero's keen camera eye and gentle, patient rhythms. Just as he did in his debut, Crane World (NDNF 2000), Trapero works with non-actors, and carefully builds his narrative around everyday events, giving us a road movie with a difference, in which reality acquires a magical aura.

103 min. Argentina, 2004.

The World

The latest triumph from Jia Zhangke (Platform, Unknown Pleasures) is about people who aren't sure where they belong in the new, globalized world order. The story focuses on a young dancer and her security-guard boyfriend who work at a Beijing theme park, a weird cross between Las Vegas and the Epcot Center that offers scaled-down versions of famous landmarks - the Pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, even the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Rather than dwell on the kitsch, Jia casts a compassionate eye on the daily loves, friendships, and desperate dreams of the provincial workers at World Park. They've come to the capital to get ahead in the big glamorous world but end up offering tourists surreal simulacra of the real thing. Sly, poetic, and pulsing with life, this funny, touching work confirms, yet again, that Jia is one of the new millennium's most inventive cinematic talents. 143 min. China, 2004.

Moolaade

It takes a master to transform a well-meaning story about "social issues" into a buoyant work of art. The great Senegalese filmmaker and novelist Ousmane Sembene does just that with one of his finest works. Now 81, Sembene deals with the most daunting topic imaginable - female genital mutilation. Yet in telling the story of one woman's resistance to this traditional practice, he offers a novelistically rich portrait of a modern African village torn between three religions: spirit worship, Islam, and free-market globalization. This movie has everything - scheming imams and heroic feminists, benevolent mercenaries and Paris-educated tribal chiefs, bloody murder and explosions of song and dance. Too wise to mistake the earnest for the serious, Sembene's powerful assault on a cruel religious ritual leaves you feeling surprisingly elated. 124 min. Senegal, 2004. A New Yorker Films Release.

Keane

Lodge Kerrigan stays close, very close, to William Keane, the eponymous hero of his new film. As this troubled young man, dynamically incarnated by British actor Damian Lewis (Band of Brothers), stalks his way through Port Authority and the strange industrial landscapes outside the Lincoln Tunnel, endlessly searching for the daughter snatched away from him months before, Kerrigan puts us squarely in Keane's profoundly unsettled universe. We see reality as he sees it - every sight and sound is potential evidence, and every moment might be the wrinkle in time from which his lost child will magically re-appear. When Keane is entrusted with the care of another little girl at his hotel, the film moves to a whole new level of grief-stricken poignancy - not to mention hair-raising tension. Kerrigan, whose Clean, Shaven was a highlight of New Directors/New Films 1994, has made a stunningly vivid film about the spiritual desperation brought on by loss. 90 min. USA, 2004.