Film critics – who can figure them out? One thing is certain: If you give them enough rope, they’ll bore you to death.

This point is driven home by the Museum of the Moving Image’s 18-film retrospective “Foreign Affairs” (January 7-February 12) – the New York Film Critics Circle’s seventh annual screening series. Eighteen big-deal film reviewers have each selected a movie that “examines what it means to be an outsider,literally or metaphorically visiting a different country.” David Schwartz, the curator of the series, notes,”In these xenophobic times, with such extreme nationalism and international turmoil, it seemed like a good idea to examine the idea of ‘foreign.’ “

And what do these critics have to say about the idea of foreign? The critic who selected Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket” (February 4) seems to think the foreign should be machine-gunned into giblets. Not that it’s a bad movie, but the only foreigners in it are either shrill hookers or vicious female snipers out to get the nice Americans.

Far more violent is “Hiroshima Mon Amour” (January 8), a classic of the French New Wave that now looks like a dusty example of existentialist chic. A French actress in Hiroshima to shoot a movie falls into bed with a local architect and – as if the atom bomb wasn’t bad enough for the citizens of Hiroshima – spends the entire movie upchucking her life story to the poor guy, who doesn’t get a word in edgewise. It doesn’t have a thing to say about foreigners, except that they’re good listeners, but it does remind us that wherever they go, French people are annoying.

While Alfred Hitchcock’s “Foreign Correspondent” (January 21 & 22) seems to have been selected solely for its title, most of the movies have been selected based on how boring they are. “Hamsun” (January 14), a long march through the disintegration of a marriage and the rise and fall of the Third Reich, leaves a trail of dead audience members strung out across its 2 1/2-hour running time.

Programmed as an act of willful perversity, “Zabriskie Point” (January 28 & 29) is Michelangelo Antonioni’s epic flick about the end of the hippie dream of peace, love, and understanding. I probably show my colors as a tacky American when I say that it’s one of the most boring and self-indulgent movies ever made. Martin Scorsese’s “Kundun” (January 21 & 22) is a perfectly fine movie, but does the world really need another ponderous hagiography of the Dalai Lama?

Every time this retrospective depicts the foreign, it reaches for cliches: Foreigners are noble; foreigners are inscrutable; foreigners are dangerous. It’s a little shocking that in a nation of immigrants,some of our best movie-heads buy into the worst stereotypes about people from other countries.

The world’s most common story of “an outsider, literally or metaphorically visiting a different country” is that of the immigrant leaving home and working overseas. It’s a global story, but it falls to Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the arrogant and manipulative darling of the New German Cinema, and Nicolas Roeg, the now-neglected British film wizard, to do it justice.

Mr. Roeg manages to harness David Bowie’s deeply weird magnetism and uses it to power “The Man Who Fell to Earth”(January 14 & 15), a super-smart flick about an alien who comes to Earth looking for much-needed water. Mr. Bowie’s Thomas Newton gets filthy rich with a series of high-tech inventions, but he’ll always be a stranger in a strange land. Western decadence – booze, sex, television – takes its toll on his soul, but it’s the establishment, deeply suspicious of illegal aliens, that destroys his road home.

Fassbinder crossbreeds Douglas Sirk’s juicy “All That Heaven Allows” with “Harold and Maude” and throws in a little Al Qaeda paranoia to make “Ali: Fear Eats the Soul” (February 11 & 12). Emmi, a broken-down cleaner, falls in love with a Moroccan who’s 20 years her junior.They get married and face stereotypical racism that occurs in such an orderly progression that it feels like a classroom racial-awareness film. It’s not until the movie’s second half, when the racism stops, that the movie takes wing to become something truly moving, putting forward the unfashionable notion that love just might save the day.

“Ali: Fear Eats the Soul” is one of only two movies in this series that suggest an alternative to fearing or revering foreigners. The other is 1939’s “Ninotchka”(February 5).Greta Garbo plays a stiff Soviet official who comes to Paris to oversee a business deal only to find herself falling for a callow gigolo. As Paris in the springtime thaws Ninotchka’s Soviet soul, director Ernst Lubitsch (himself an immigrant from Germany) suggests foreigners have the same hopes and needs that we do, only they go about fulfilling them differently.They’re not the other, they’re just us with different accents. And out of all the big-brained intellectual posturing in this series, this is the most radical notion of all.

From January 7 until February 12 (35th Avenue at 36th Street, Queens, 718-784-4520).