PAPRIKA
R, 90 minutes

Japanese animation auteur Satoshi Kon has successfully staked out his own exhilarating style with such affecting, intricately meta movies as the mind-stalker thriller “Perfect Blue” (1998 ) and the cinehistorical epic “Millennium Actress” (2001). His latest, “Paprika,” is another absorbing work, a hurtling, haunting adventure about a stolen dream machine. With its psychological dam bursts and its canny gloss on multimedia excess, it’s an intelligent and peculiarly suitable piece of counterprogramming for the summer season of blockbuster franchise installments.

Paprika is the spunky alter ego of Dr. Chiba (voiced by Megumi Hayashibara), a buttoned-down researcher who works in a sci-fi form of psychology resembling guerrilla dream therapy. Using a slender, headset-like device called the D.C. Mini, Dr. Chiba can patch into someone else’s dreams, Matrix-style, to watch or participate. When one of the D.C. Minis is stolen, all Boschian hell threatens to break loose.

Nicolas Rapold (May 25)

9 STAR HOTEL
Unrated, 78 minutes

When the Israeli filmmaker Ido Haar caught a glimpse of illegal Palestinian workers lurking in the thick expanse of pine trees not far from his village, he decided to expand that glimpse, turning his camera toward these tightly knit groups of men, whose existence on the margins adjacent to suburban construction sites fosters a unique kind of brotherhood. The resulting documentary is currently playing at Film Forum.

The phrase “9 Star Hotel” refers to the makeshift shelters the men construct, using work-site refuse to create tiny settlements. There, weary after long days drilling and plastering together future luxury apartments, they do what men do on any frontier: share simple meals around a campfire, sing, tell jokes and stories, and reminisce with a keen sense of longing and a looming melancholy.

Shooting in a basic, cinema-verité style, Mr. Haar lets his subjects speak for themselves. He obviously cultivated their trust, and digs in close for what is sometimes a painfully intimate portrait of grime and grind.

Steve Dollar (May 24)

ORANGE WINTER
Unrated, 72 minutes

On November 21, 2004, Ukrainian citizens went to the polls to cast their ballots in a run-off election for a new president, a right they had only enjoyed for eight years since their nation’s constitution came into being.

Ukraine has a long history of political upheaval and conflict dating back to the tsars, and true to historical form, the 2004 campaign had been both a close one and a dirty one. Challenger Viktor Yushchenko, a former prime minister and leader of the Our Ukraine Party, had suffered a near fatal dose of dioxin poisoning. His opponent, the incumbent Viktor Yanukovych, was long rumored to have ties to organized crime, and Orange Party loyalists naturally assumed that Mr. Yanukovych’s followers had something to do with the chemical assassination attempt.

In Andrei Zagdansky’s documentary “Orange Winter,” playing now at the Pioneer Two Boots Theater, the events that followed the runoff election were even more bizarre. “Power, the people, chance or fate, providence — the interplay of these forces is what makes history,” the film’s narrator says. Mr. Zagdansky shuffles a deck of images and footage showing history being made fast — both in the halls of government and in the street. And while he misdeals a few of his cards here and there, “Orange Winter” is a candid and exciting nonfiction account of a fascinating contemporary popular struggle.

B.B. (May 23)

28 WEEKS LATER
R, 91 minutes

“28 Days Later” was a movie about awaking on doomsday and not knowing what to expect, first from an unknown global “rage” virus, then from the thousands of infected, bloodthirsty souls roaming Britain, and ultimately from the few remaining survivors struggling to cope with the primal everyman-for-himself scenario. By contrast, in “28 Weeks Later,” the Juan Carlos Fresnadillo-directed sequel, we see the original fear-ofthe-unknown mutate into a fear of our own inadequacy in allowing history to repeat itself.

Twenty-eight weeks after the initial outbreak and devastation, the U.S. Army has landed in Britain, removed the corpses of the starved monsters, and declared that the “war against infection” has been won and that the reconstruction of the country can begin — first in a heavily fortified safe zone. But this newly designed and meticulously protected military sanctuary is not the haven it appears. As it tends to do, human nature finds a way to buck best-laid plans, and as the virus finds its way back into this confined population, the army initiates “Code Red,” a horrific, ruthlessly designed protocol to isolate the outbreak.

S.J.S. (May 11)