Arts+ Selects

Wondering what else is in theaters this weekend? Here are four films recommended by The New York Sun's critics that you can still catch around town.

BORDER POST
Unrated, 94 minutes

As "Border Post" opens, it's 1987 on the Yugoslavian-Albanian frontier. Civil War is still four years away and in the soon-to-be-former Social Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, it's Cold War business as usual. At a small mountainside garrison, a group of bored and horny Yugoslav troops serve out their mandatory military service by doing as little work as they can get away with without running afoul of their careerist superiors. By day the soldiers mark time in unenthusiastic drills and by surreptitiously smoking hashish "courtesy of our unaligned Afghan brothers." By night they empty any bottles and chase any skirts that they can find in a nearby town.

Adapted from a novel by the Croatian journalist Ante Tomic, the film nimbly walks the line between farce and drama. Director and co-writer Rajko Grlic smartly uses period background broadcasts to color his portrait of a nation sputtering toward civil war on ideological fumes.

Bruce Bennett (March 7)

ZODIAC
R, 160 minutes

The new film from "Fight Club" and "Se7en" director David Fincher dramatically reactivates — or at least re-enacts — the Zodiac Killer case that paralyzed San Francisco in the late 1960s and early '70s. Based on a pair of books by San Francisco Chronicle political cartoonist-turned-amateur sleuth Robert Greysmith, the film painstakingly portrays the murders, the fruitless police investigation, and the accompanying press frenzy. Mr. Fincher creates a gorgeously grimy and lived-in 1970s look, with livery skin tones and green-brown shadows that are a far cry from the department store window perfection of Oliver Stonegeneration period films.

During the course of its 160-minute running time, "Zodiac" succeeds at doing something much subtler and more difficult than merely breathing new digital life into yesteryear's atrocities. It is not a film about a murderer; it's a film about a community — one that briefly awakens in fear and then quietly slips back to sleep, forgetting both the monsters that threatened it and the guardians who sought to protect it.

B.B. (March 2)

THE CATS OF MIRIKITANI
Unrated, 74 minutes

What a deceptively innocent title for such a tragic, affecting affair. "The Cats of Mirikitani" is, quite simply, breathtaking — one of the most surprising and unshakable documentaries I can recall. Constructed around a story more farfetched and coincidental than anything a writer of fiction would dare conceive, and brimming with a sense of anger and hope against all odds, this is a film that stays with you.

Linda Hattendorf's film begins simply as a story about a frail, elderly homeless man, Jimmy Mirikitani, who sets up his cart and his cardboard box every day next to a deli just off Washington Square Park. But it takes an incredible turn when the two witness the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, together while shooting. Soon, they realize how the event relates to Jimmy's past as a prisoner in America's internment camps during World War II and his ongoing resentment of the country he calls home.

S. James Snyder (March 2)

BREACH
PG-13, 110 minutes

Far too many spy films have tried to explain everything in excruciating detail. (Last year's disappointing "The Good Shepherd" comes immediately to mind.) Thankfully, the director Billy Ray approaches "Breach" in a fundamentally different manner, denying us the dramatics until we can first appreciate the players who will act out the drama.

Enter Chris Cooper, an actor who has turned being shrewd into an art. When he zeroes in and squints at someone, his wheels churning as he measures credibility, there is an impenetrability that makes him an endlessly fascinating actor to watch. He is inscrutable and detached, and without question the perfect man to play the part of Robert Hanssen, the notorious FBI agent arrested in 2001 and charged with selling American secrets to Moscow for $1.4 million in cash and diamonds during a 15-year period.

S.J.S. (February 16)