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

SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY
Unrated, 105 minutes

“It’s a kind of magic for living,” is how the Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul recently described the power of movies. His words are only slightly less enigmatic than the title of his latest feature film, “Syndromes and a Century,” which is showing at the IFC Center. But in experiencing this marvelous work of gentle beauty and serenity, you begin to understand what he’s talking about.

What makes “Syndromes and a Century” special is hard to describe but easy to feel. The disparate scenes of life, love, chatter, absurdity, all set in and around a Thai hospital, are less important than the disarming sense of joyous being with which they are imbued. There’s nothing quite like it elsewhere in movies today, and Mr. Apichatpong, who alchemized the feeling with desire for the mythopoeic tiger tales of 2004’s “Tropical Malady,” has found an uncommon purity of expression.

Nicolas Rapold (April 18)

PRIVATE FEARS IN PUBLIC PLACES
Unrated, 120 minutes

After decades of mind-boggling works about time and memory, replete with modernist feats of fragmentation, the 84-year-old French master Alain Resnais has turned decisively to theatrical sources. His last film, “Not on the Lips,” was a spirited and precise adaptation of a rascally 1925 operetta last filmed in 1931; his latest, “Private Fears in Public Places,” adapts a minor stage comedy by contemporary British mainstay Alan Ayckbourn.

The results are modest but deceptively simple. The rueful story of six melancholic Parisians has such preternatural clarity and immaculate artifice that one might suspect the formalist director of hiding something up his sleeve. But a lateperiod voice can be mistaken as plain; Mr. Resnais is simply letting the autumnal mood seep in with an experienced serenity.

N.R. (April 18)

THE HOAX
R, 115 minutes

In 1970, McGraw-Hill announced it would publish a book written by the ultra-reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes in collaboration with Clifford Irving, a writer with only a single title to his credit and no discernable track record as a journalist. With thousands of copies set to hit bookstores and an excerpt just about to appear in Life Magazine, Hughes refuted claims to authenticity.

As art, forged or otherwise, runs afoul of commerce, Irving (Richard Gere) begins his slow fall from self-made grace. Well before Hughes’s debunking phone call, the film says, the jig was up for Irving, a charismatic narcissist who couldn’t distinguish between truth and lies, friends and pawns, wives and lovers, or made-up characters and real people.

Director Lasse Hallstrom has a very formidable and unlikely ally in Mr. Gere, who, for the first time in decades, has set aside his posing seducer persona, rolled up his sleeves, and become a warts-andall character.

Bruce Bennett (April 6)

U-CARMEN
Unrated, 120 minutes

“U-Carmen” is not just a vivid re-imagining of Georges Bizet’s beloved 1875 opera (which has already been handled on film several times), but a veritable treatise on how new technologies can, if properly used, serve the oldest works of art. Newcomers to the story will discover an opera with teeth, grit … and close-ups — the antithesis to the carefully measured, big-budget visions of such recent musicals as ” Chicago” and “Dreamgirls.”

As with most timeless works of art, “Carmen” is endlessly open to interpretation. Pauline Malefane’s heroine is more intense and self-sufficient than other incarnations have been. The actress imbues her with the fiery allure one would expect from a Carmen, but also with gravitas — commanding the screen in a full-figured blue sweatsuit — to makes this tragic character a strong, independent, and unmistakably modern variation on the old theme.

S. James Snyder (March 28)

OFFSIDE
PG, 88 minutes

“Offside,” a film about Iranian girls who risk arrest, incarceration, and the crippling disapproval of their community in an attempt to attend a soccer match, looks like a documentary. Director Jafar Panahi shot most of it at an actual game, relying to a bit of chicanery to gain permission (he submitted a fake synopsis to Iranian authorities, using a pseudonym) and nonprofessional actors. The female cast is made up of students, many of them diehard soccer fans in real life. The characters they play are devoted to the sport but also motivated by love of their country.

Throughout “Offside,” conversations and a shared sense of national pride allow the girls and their eventual captors to achieve a surprising intimacy. But this progress is repeatedly stunted by the shadow of a nameless authority.

Darrell Hartman (March 23)