Blood is thicker than the mud, Sly Stone used to sing. And the family affair that is three generations of actors and filmmakers named Garrel — Maurice, Philippe, and Louis — can account for some of the most captivating, if sometimes maddening, DNA to infiltrate the French cinema in the last 50 years.

The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s BAMcinématek gave Philippe Garrel, much of whose ruthlessly personal work is rare to see in America, a major retrospective in 2005. This week and next, the repertory program revisits highlights from that series, as well as films featuring the elder Garrel — a powerfully Saturnine presence — and 23-year-old actor Louis, who made his debut as a toddler in 1988’s “Emergency Kisses.” His father often has appealed as a refined taste for moviegoers, particularly those with an affection for endlessly talky, emotionally turbulent dramas haunted by the failed revolts of May 1968. But the youngest Garrel has become a heartthrob who engages and popularizes much the same themes — in league with his elders and apart.

In Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Dreamers” (2003), Louis Garrel is part of a literal (and literary) ménage à trois, acting opposite Eva Green as rather intimate siblings who adopt an American student (Michael Pitt) they meet at the Cinémathèque Française on the cusp of the 1968 riots. The trio retreats into a sprawling Parisian apartment, where they indulge in mind and sex games before their play is truncated by public events.

It’s fairly toothless eye candy, though it sets up Louis Garrel’s far more effective turn in his father’s “Regular Lovers” (2005). The luminous black-and-white cinematography by William Lubtchansky imbues the screen with a fierce nostalgia for a lost time and place, while the actor, playing a disillusioned poet based on his father, channels an era he wasn’t born in time to know.

Unless you’re intrigued by a peculiarly French prurience, he is better seen here than in Christophe Honoré’s “Ma mere” (2004), which parades him as adolescent beefcake in a conscience-ridden torpor, opposite a coldly lubricious Isabelle Huppert, who redefines the meaning of “mommy dearest.” Okay, so it’s adapted from Georges Bataille. Consider it art-porn, and there’s no damage done. (The actor also is in Mr. Honoré’s new film, “Dans Paris,” which has a sneak preview Friday and is getting better reviews.)

As “Emergency Kisses” makes evident, Louis Garrel inherited more than his father’s angelic pale skin and proud promontory of a Gallic nose — among other qualities he displays. As an actor, 59-year-old Philippe Garrel, too, is an epic brooder and cross-examiner of his own psyche. The looping of art-as-life becomes vertiginous in this diaristic drama, in which Mr. Garrel directs his father (as his father), his then-wife (as his wife), and his son in the story of a director who rejects his own actress wife as the female lead in a film about his marriage, which is falling apart — largely because of the film they want to make. Insane, non? But once you submit to Mr. Garrel’s excoriating madness, his method shines through. Dismiss it as solipsism on a bender, but the feverishness of the director’s process is hard to shake.

His “Le Lit de la vierge” (1969) imagines Jesus Christ dragging his feet — ambivalence is a core Garrel theme — while late 1960s ice queen Nico sings on the soundtrack. The pair began as lovers with this film, and the relationship floats across much of Mr. Garrel’s subsequent work. “Wild Innocence” (2001) reflects on some of the side-effects of the troubled romance, when a young filmmaker acts as a go-between for a heroin dealer in exchange for production financing. The ironies are brutal: It’s an antidrug film, and the director’s actress girlfriend is turning into a junkie.

If the Philippe Garrel refuses to flinch from the darker sides of life, neither does his father, Maurice. Though showcased here mostly in Philippe’s films, the actor has one of his great roles in Arnaud Desplechin’s must-see “Kings and Queen” (2004). In one of this richly textured film’s parallel stories, he plays a very old man dying of a painful cancer whose daughter (Emmanuelle Devos) abandons her art gallery to care for him. The complex nuances of their relationship are gradually revealed, building to a third-act shocker that is no less a knockout punch for being expostulatory. The performance cuts straight to the bone. It’s a family tradition.

Through May 20 (30 Lafayette Ave., between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).