Celebrating its 10th anniversary, “Rendez-Vous With French Cinema” begins its first week at Walter Reade Theater with school days, tetchy actresses, byzantine adoption practices, good and bad cops, good and bad sisters, and that old standby of le septieme art, l’amour fou.

“Rebellion time!” boom the pubescent upstarts in Jean-Jacques Zilbermann’s “Bad Spelling,” (March 15 & 16) a tepid school-riot film in the tradition of Lindsay Anderson’s “If…”and Jean Vigo’s “Zero de Conduite.” Tubby, saturnine Daniel (Damien Jouillerot) attends the boarding school his parents oversee, catches May fever in 1968, and sets up a coup with an anarchist classmate. In rare moments, Mr. Zilbermann captures the hormonal flux of adolescence. But by the time of the uprising, you’ll wish they’d staged the revolution several semesters ago.

There is no revolution in Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s puzzling, pretty, boarding-school drama, “Innocence” (March 15 & 16). Set in an unnamed era of rotary phones and phonographs at a mysterious girls’ school in the woods, “Innocence” emphasizes the prison like aspects of childhood. “Obedience is the only path to happiness,” instructs Mademoiselle Eva (Marion Cotillard) to her charges. The film concerns a series of rituals – the nightly strolls deep into the forest by Bianca (Berangere Haubruge); a bizarre ballet the girls perform on a tiny stage – that cannily suggest the ways children cope with the arbitrary rules set by adults.

Isabelle Huppert, as the wrathful, shrill Parisian Martine in Alexandra Leclere’s “Me and My Sister” (March 16, 18 & 19), is stuck in her own psyche: “I scare myself sometimes. I can’t help being cruel,” she says to sibling Louise (Catherine Frot), a buoyant writer visiting from Le Mans. Martine still bears psychic wounds inflicted by their booze-hound maman; Louise, rising above narcissistic injury, finds the man of her dreams and a publisher for her first novel.

Hobbled by its broadly drawn characters, Ms. Leclere’s film has one fleeting bright spot: Martine and Louise catch Jacques Demy’s “The Young Girls of Rochefort” (1967), which features a marvelous pair of sisters singing along to “The Song of the Twins.” That film starred a 22-year-old Catherine Deneuve – about the age her character Cecile must have been when she first fell in love with Antoine (Gerard Depardieu) in Andre Techine’s elegant “Changing Times” (Today & March 13).

Now in his 60s, Antoine still aches for Cecile, who’s long forgotten him and lives in Tangiers with her Moroccan husband. Antoine, a wealthy real-estate developer, deliberately takes on a project in the Moroccan city to win her back. Mr. Techine loves messy emotions, as “Les Voleurs” (1996) and “Alice and Martin” (1998) illustrated. Yet “Changing Times” avoids histrionics, and the graceful performances of Ms. Deneuve and Mr. Depardieu seem more poignant in light of their many roles as on-screen lovers.

In Bertrand Tavernier’s misguided “Holy Lola” (Today & March 12) Pierre (Jacques Gamblin) and Geraldine (Isabelle Carre) also travel overseas in search of emotional attachment, to adopt a baby in Cambodia. The couple takes residence in a Phnom Penh hotel full of hopeful Gallic adoptive parents, doomed to endure red tape and bureaucratic caprice. Mr. Tavernier showed remarkable empathy for children in “It All Starts Today” (1999); here the Cambodian children are little more than backdrop.

Corrupt Parisian cops with gangland connections go mano a mano in “36 Quai des Orfevres” (March 11, 12 & 13), Olivier Marchal’s flashy, empty policier. Vrinks (Daniel Auteuil) and Klein (Mr. Depardieu) head rival factions of the flic force; only the one who brings down a Serbian mob will be promoted. Klein proves more venal, Vrinks more virtuous, setting up a bloody battle for the Big Payback – or the Big Ho-Hum.

The lives of criminal lovers on the lam unfurl hypnotically in Benoit Jacquot’s “A Tout de Suite,” (March 11, 12 & 13), shot in luscious black-and-white. Isild Le Besco, as the ripe, melancholy, moneyed 19-year-old nameless heroine, falls for a Moroccan young man (Ouassini Embarek), who robs a bank with an accomplice. The bandits persuade their lady friends to escape, bouncing from Madrid to Tangiers to Athens.

“A vacation for all time,” our heroine says dreamily in voice-over. But the holiday becomes a nightmare when she’s stranded in Greece, separated from her gun-toting man. Set in 1975 – the era of the SLA and the Baader-Meinhof gang – Mr. Jacquot’s film pays just the right amount of attention to period detail. But it is Ms. Le Besco’s brilliant portrayal of bliss, rage, and despair that “A Tout de Suite” burns in the memory – and makes it the brightest spot in Rendez-Vous’s first week.

Until March 20 (Lincoln Center, 212-875-5600).