Americans’ perceptions of French film are so heavily influenced by the notion of the great or iconoclastic auteur — or else by the sort of art-house fluff beloved by the Weinstein brothers — that it’s easy to overlook the work that gets produced in the ebb and flow of a culture saturated in cinema. As it has done since 2002, the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s BAMcinématek offers a quick summary of new French Films this week, with five New York premieres. The series ventures into dark psychodrama (Michel Spinosa’s “Anna M.”), domestic tragedy viewed through wide-eyed childhood imagination (Laurent Archard’s “Demented”), and historical drama (Philippe Faucon’s “The Betrayal,” set in 1960s Algeria). But it also spotlights other facets that are lighter in tone if no less Gallic in circumstance.

Tonight’s opening film is the easiest with which to identify. “Very Well, Thank You” (2007) riffs on the plight of a contemporary Parisian accountant who shakes loose from his workaday complacency one day after getting a ticket for lighting up a cigarette on the Metro. Unfortunately, this only buys him an escalating heap of trouble. Actor Gilbert Melki, whose dark eyes and wiry hair convey a hound dog’s sense of exasperation, nails his performance as an everyman who falls into a sequence of Kafkaesque incidents that lead him to jail and a mental hospital, cost him his job, and severely aggravate his cab-driver wife. Director Emmanuelle Cuau, who will speak after the 6:50 p.m. screening, orchestrates the absurdity with a feel for nuance and restraint. At the same time, there’s a commentary on the country’s swing toward the right that makes the film more than an existential comedy.

Anyone afflicted with movie madness will take to “Je t’aime … moi non plus” (2004) as if it were popcorn. The breezy documentary, directed by actress Maria de Medeiros (“Henry and June,” “Pulp Fiction”) takes a camera around the sprawling circus that is the Cannes Film Festival. Ms. de Medeiros proves a charming and engaging interviewer, as she quizzes filmmakers and their critics on their symbiotic relationship. Given that some of her subjects include David Cronenberg, Pedro Almodóvar, Ken Loach, Wim Wenders, and Manoel de Oliviera, the film would be worth watching simply to hear these directors’ off-the-cuff comments on life and art. But since equal time is given to their critics — mostly European, though a few notable Americans, such as former New York Times critic Elvis Mitchell, slip in — the piece becomes much more about film (and film festivals) as a culture unto itself. (BAM will convene a panel of local film critics following the 6:50 p.m. Friday screening).

Segments are given titles like “First Kiss” and “Foreplay,” to underscore the nearly sexual connection with which the cineastes relate to their experiences in the dark, perhaps in homage to Pauline “I Lost It at the Movies” Kael. The interviews fulfill the premise. “I never leave a film,” the British critic Alexander Walker says. “Like a prostitute, I never refuse clients.” Mr. Walker may have intended to be zesty, but he inadvertently bolsters the public suspicion that journalists who write about entertainment are, in fact, whores.

Even so, they can still break hearts. The Canadian director Atom Egoyan relates how a chance encounter with a critic at a Portuguese festival led to a grave disappointment. Apparently, a writer for a marginal publication promised Mr. Egoyan a rave for his first film. The novice director waited patiently for the festival scrapbook, believing that the review would catapult his career into the stratosphere, only to find the critic had penned only a brief sentence. He laughs now, but it’s easy to imagine Mr. Egoyan’s face dropping like an ingénue who has been stood up by her prom date.

Through October 28 (30 Lafayette Ave., between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).