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The opening shot of Mister Lonely tells you everything you need to know. Okay, maybe not everything: You never in the remaining two hours find out exactly why the shot's subject, Y Tu Mam� Tambi�n's Diego Luna, is a Michael Jackson impersonator, or why he's riding a clown bike, or why attached to said clown bike is a monkey puppet on a string. But it lays the groundwork for what's to come.

A self-styled enfant terrible, Korine used to make films that begged you to hate them and him, from his sensationalistic script for Kids to the misery of Gummo and the DV sludge of Julien Donkey-Boy. Apparently he's thinner-shelled than imagined, as Mister Lonely--his first in nine years--is almost transcendently self-pitying, exhibiting a oneness with social outcasts and the deluded that screams veiled autobiography.

Luna is busting out heyday MJ moves at a geriatric center in Paris when he happens upon a fellow impersonator, a Marilyn Monroe facsimile played by Samantha Morton. After some arm-twisting, she drags him out to a commune of impersonators in Scotland populated by three Stooges, a Buckwheat, a hilariously profane Abe Lincoln ("I'm Abe fucking Lincoln!"), and managed by Denis Lavant's Chaplin, whose firebreathing behavior, in union with that 'stache, makes him closer to Hitler. In a parallel plot whose relation to the main one is never explained, Werner Herzog plays a priest lording over a fleet of literally flying nuns.

Basically a kinder, gentler, less shocking Gummo, Mister Lonely takes on the traits of its subjects: irksome, yes, but ultimately sweet and at times moving. Morton in particular makes sure we always see the bottomless despair beneath her bubbly mimicry. Parts of Mister Lonely are so lovely--notably the aerial shots of the nuns free-floating among the clouds--that it's a shame so much screentime is dedicated to go-nowhere improv. Korine's clearly working through some demons, and given Lonely's lack of kids shooting cats or electrical tape on nipples, his next film might be only a little annoying.

Reflective surfaces are everywhere in Paris, at least in Paris as seen by Tawianese director Hou Hsaio-Hsien, who often chooses to let entire scenes play out within windowpane reflections in this minor-key lovely little slice of life. The formal strategy makes a strange sort of sense, as Flight of the Red Balloon isn't really a sequel to Albert Lamorisse's classic 1956 short film The Red Balloon, nor is it technically a remake. Calling this curious project a reflection of the earlier picture seems most apt.

As in Lamorisse's beloved classroom perennial, there's a lonely little boy (here played by Simon Itneau) being followed by a magical red balloon with a surprisingly indomitable will of its own. But Hou uses the earlier film as merely a jumping-off point, allowing the balloon to drift in and out of the film as it pleases, while we follow the child home and observe his frenzied family life.

Mom (Juliette Binoche) is a trainwreck. She's a professional puppeteer, and one of those curious children's entertainers who doesn't seem much interested in children. Her husband is in Canada at the moment. (He says he's just working on a book, but everyone seems to already understand that he's not coming back.) There's also an insufferable tenant downstairs (Hippolyte Girardot) behind on his rent, and the newly hired nanny (Fang Song) is a film student from Beijing who's working on a digital video, special-effects-laden remake of guess which 1956 classic?

As usual, Hou prefers to lock the camera down in a series of exquisitely composed wide shots, and we watch the characters come and go from a respectful distance. Nothing is foregrounded for the audience's benefit. Rather, tiny slivers of story points emerge slowly and organically. The largely improvised dialogue (Hou doesn't speak English and penned the script as a silent film) often serves as background noise. The nanny, video camera at the ready, serves as a directorial stand-in, a stranger in an unfamiliar city.

At times Flight of the Red Balloon feels slight enough to blow away alongside its title character. But if you're patient enough, an affecting melancholy seeps through. Some scenes are maddeningly vague, but others wonderful and mysterious, capturing a child's plaintive wide-eyed perspective for a few gorgeous fleeting moments.

One early morning in 1976 Claude Lelouch strapped a camera to his Mercedes-Benz and sped from one side of Paris to the other in just under nine transcendently awesome minutes. The result was the short C'Etait un Rendezvous, and it's the coolest thing the French director has ever done.

Best known for 1966's hugely successful bit of cartoonishly fran�ais pap A Man and a Woman, Lelouch has never held much currency with cinephiles. But the last several years have seen him failing at even putting asses in seats, most ego-crushingly with the drubbing over his "La Genre Humain" trilogy, which is only two-thirds complete. But Rendezvous, receives an homage in Lelouch's latest, Roman de Gare--a good sign. Lelouch went so far as to premiere the film pseudonymously--partly to disassociate it from his stinky name, partly because it fits right in with the film's mad procession of false identities.

Indeed, Roman de Gare opens with novelist Fanny Ardant, seen talking about her latest tome--a rollicking thriller filled with twists and death. Before we have a chance to definitively realize she's essentially talking about the film we're watching, Lelouch drags our attention over to a mysterious loner (rubber-mouthed Jean-Pierre Jeunet regular Dominique Pinon) and a harried woman (Audrey Dana) whose irate fiance has just left her at a petrol station.

Dana is a big fan of Ardant's. Funny she should say that, says Pinon as he gives her a lift, since he's Ardant's longtime ghostwriter. Pinon tells Dana he was just kidding--but was he?

To reveal more would do a disservice, as most of the fun in Roman de Gare is the way it cheerfully jerks us hither and thither, with characters exchanging identities and motives at the drop of a chapeau. Speed, as it was in Rendezvous, is the key here, and as long as Lelouch races us through the story's countless hairpin turns, Roman de Gare remains an assured, bubbly delight. But all vehicles have to stop at some point, and when Roman de Gare slows down, its aims for intellectual pretension and reliance on faux-urbane bon mots become easier to spot. But for a good while there it seems like Lelouch has, after all these years, regained the cool.

Mega-film producer Scott Rudin must be pissed about the existence of Son of Rambow. No sooner does he fork over a hefty sum for the life rights to the three guys who, as kids in the '80s, remade Raiders of the Lost Ark shot-for-shot, does a low-budget British film about kids redoing First Blood pop up. Rudin can always pass his version off as the inevitable American remake of some modest import, though at least the fresh-faced tweens in Son of Rambow aren't trying for anything so herculean as a grunt-for-grunt carbon copy of Sly Stallone's pec-o-rama.