TRIAD ELECTION
Film Forum

Watching director Johnnie To’s “Election” and its sequel, “Triad Election,” which are playing at Film Forum through May 8, is like being abducted and tortured by gangsters for three hours, and that’s meant as the highest possible compliment. Lean, mean, and running a downright anorexic 99 minutes apiece, these flicks are political atom bombs — throat-searing screams from an economically devastated Hong Kong.

Early in “Election” a cop snaps, “Triads were electing their leaders a hundred years earlier than Hong Kong,” and that’s the bloody crux of the two films: Every two years the Wo Sing triad elects a new chairman, and their campaigns are brutal. Triads are like the Freemasons crossed with the Mafia: real-life Chinese criminal gangs that trace their roots back hundreds of years and mask their modern-day criminal activities behind elaborate rituals, loyalty oaths, and secret signs.

Mr. To has stripped his gangs of their romantic trappings to tell a tale of raw greed and naked ambition. If you thought the 2000 election was stolen, wait until you see an election in which elderly opponents are nailed inside wooden crates and rolled down mountains.

Grady Hendrix (April 25)

HOT FUZZ
R, 121 minutes

In the language of serial-murderer-catcher potboilers: “To mock a buddy cop movie, you must become a buddy cop movie.” In London, humorless, highly efficient star police constable Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) is transferred to the bucolic, provincial outpost of Sandford, where rocking the boat involves daring to check ID’s at the local pub and failing to appreciate the gravity of a municipal crisis involving an escaped swan.

Angel’s new partner Danny Butterman (Nick Frost) has spent his career trying to reconcile what he’s learned from watching cops and robbers movies with the dull realities of provincial police work. “Have you ever fired two guns whilst jumping through the air?” he asks Angel with deadpan sincerity. Danny’s sentimental identification with soulless Hollywood dreck like “Bad Boys II” is as endearing as it is ridiculous and speaks to the provincial dreamer in everyone.

Bruce Bennett (April 20)

PRIVATE FEARS IN PUBLIC PLACES
Unrated, 120 minutes

After decades of mind-boggling works about time and memory, 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.

Nicolas Rapold (April 13)

THE HOAX
R, 115 minutes

In 1970, McGraw-Hill announced it would publish a book written by 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 selfmade grace. He was a charismatic narcissist who couldn’t distinguish between truth and lies, friends and pawns, wives and lovers, or madeup characters and real people.

Director Lasse Hallstrom has a formidable and unlikely ally in Mr. Gere, who, for the first time in years, has rolled up his sleeves, and become a warts-and-all character.

B.B. (April 6)