DAY NIGHT DAY NIGHT
Unrated, 94 minutes

“Day Night Day Night,” the verité-style chronicle of a young suicide bomber, resembles its title: stark, descriptive, but enigmatic. Taking place over two days and nights, Julia Loktev’s disciplined debut feature follows a teenager (the newcomer Luisa Williams) as she is prepared and sent out to detonate a backpack bomb in Times Square. The reserved, small-scale approach, which frustrates explanation or condemnation, yields a riveting work that, strange to say, extends the fragile possibility of hope.

The movie, playing at the IFC Center, is a handheld, point-ofview affair that stays physically close to the character but keeps us at arm’s length in other ways. We accompany the nameless girl as she meets her contact at a bus station, trains with masked handlers in a drab hotel room, and gets outfitted by bomb makers in an mysterious hideaway. But we are not privy to what led her down this terrible road to begin with. The identity and agenda (besides mass murder) of those shepherding her along, all unnervingly cordial, remains tantalizingly unspecified.

Nicolas Rapold (May 9)

PARIS, JE T’AIME
R, 120 minutes

Paris is so naturally cinematic, and so mythically aligned with the idea of romance, that the city could generate hundreds, if not thousands, of episodes such as the ones that make up “Paris, Je T’aime.” This compendium of glancing vignettes is only the latest variation on a theme, 18 postcards of l’amour fou and l’amour perdu dispatched from all but two of the 20 arrondissements loosely connected through geographical proximity and twinkling star power.

Where one story ends, another begins, with directors drawn from a who’s who of indie/Euro/arthouse faves: the Coen Brothers, Gus Van Sant, Alexander Payne, Alfonso Cuaron, Gerard Depardieu, Tom Tykwer, and others.

Each filmmaker is required to shoot against a specific backdrop (the throbbing red lights of Place Pigalle, for instance), typically using the talents of renowned American or European actors (Juliette Binoche or Elijah Wood), and keeping it to about six minutes. The cumulative effect suggests a city teeming with simultaneous love adventures, each an instant of magic or bedevilment, cruel fate, or pixilated whimsy.

Steve Dollar (May 4)

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) gets a much-deserved promotion to sergeant. But because his arrest record is 400% better than any other bobbie patrolling London, he’s making the rest of the force look bad. Angel’s kick upstairs, his superiors cheerfully inform him, comes with a mandatory transfer 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 on DVD with the dull realities of provincial police work. “Have you ever fired two guns whilst jumping through the air?” P.C. Butterman asks Sergeant Angel with deadpan sincerity. His whole-hearted 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)