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.THE ITALIANPG-13, 99 minutesAndrei Kravchuk’s “The Italian” shows how hope can sometimes seem like a dangerous obsession. The film follows the despair of one boy in a provincial Russian orphanage who has a rare opportunity to escape the drudgery of life there, but instead finds himself trading it all for a chance to meet his birth mother.Kolya Spiridonov imbues Vanya with heart, resolve, and bravery. But while this 6-year-old boy is the resolute core of the film, Mr. Kravchuk has composed a group of actors and nonprofessionals who bring a human element to the complex issue of illegal adoption in Russia. “The Italian” shows the practical decisions people make in a world of limited options.Meghan Keane (January 19)REGULAR LOVERSUnrated, 178 minutesAnyone besotted with the allure of French cinema in the late 1960s will take to “Regular Lovers” like refined absinthe. Shot in 2004 and shown at the 2005 New York Film Festival, the film is celebrated French director Philippe Garrel’s remembrance of revolutions past — or, rather, an autobiographical flashback to the days and weeks after the failed populist uprisings in the Paris of May 1968.Mr. Garrel’s son, François, plays a 20-year-old poet who evades the military draft and spends the rest of the film in a philosophical drift. The title alludes to his relationship to Lilie (Clotilde Hesme), a beautiful, slightly older sculptress who abides as an emotional focus — a prism through which to observe François and his circle as they grapple with their collective spiritual hangover.Steve Dollar (January 19)MAFIOSOUnrated, 102 minutesAlberto Lattuada’s 1962 mob comedy “Mafioso,” which made a successful run at this year’s New York Film Festival and is now playing theatrically in New York, is an intelligent, entertaining, and ultimately not so light-hearted skewering of Sicilian so-called manners. When Nino (Alberto Sordi) returns to the Sicilian village of his birth to reconnect with family and friends, old attachments threaten to drag him back to the childhood from which he thought he could escape. The most refreshing element of this early mafia picture is its irreverence, a quality absent from the later Hollywood treatments of the subject. Those films, even the ones (like “Goodfellas”) that lampoon mobsters, take the glamour seriously; what’s more, they are charmed by the Old World.Darrell Hartman (January 17)ALPHA DOGR, 117 minutesSomehow, Nick Cassavetes’s “Alpha Dog” manages to be both a funny stoner film and a brutal antidrug opus, an unlikely buddy tragedy that encourages us to identify and sympathize with — and condemn — a clique of young gangster wannabees as they make the biggest mistake of their lives. It’s a complicated mix of emotions, yet the movie draws us in with deceiving ease, inviting us along on the aimless, carefree romp of four teenage potheads. Unlike so many drug films, which follow the small-time dealer as he traverses the standard greedy arc of the rich kingpin, “Alpha Dog” is less about wanting money than wanting to be macho.S. James Snyder (January 12)

Arts+ Selects

Arts+ Selects

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