Nothing beats that fleeting magic moment when, after endless months of too much heat or not enough, you remember what it feels like to sit in your apartment with the windows thrown wide open. Ah, spring in New York; the season for houseplant repotting; bike rides in Central Park; drinking in Brooklyn backyards; and debating the appropriate contexts for wearing flip-flops. Please tell me some of us are still debating that.

For the avid moviegoer, spring is the time to start ignoring your Netflix queue and stop complaining that it’s too cold to stand in line at Film Forum, trek out to the Museum of the Moving Image, or spend an entire week going to movies at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. The latter has an especially strong season coming up, beginning with a retrospective of the daring French filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin (April 13 to 17), followed by a terrific pro gram of rare Godard (April 21 to 26), and ending with a smart, focused tribute to the late great cinephile Susan Sontag (May 10 to 12).

A major figure in the deuxieme vague resurgence of French filmmaking in the 1990s, Mr. Desplechin garnered a local reputation with the release of “My Sex Life … Or How I Got Into an Argument” (April 13), his exhilarating, exhausting study of postgraduate Parisian intellectuals. Better still is his previous film, “The Sentinel” (April 17), a strange and seductive melange of espionage thriller and sociological study. In the vein of “Looking for Richard” and “Vanya on 42nd Street,” the never-released “Playing in the Company of Men” (April 16) deconstructs its eponymous production to intermittently enthralling effect.

Cahiers du Cinema hailed Mr. Desplechin’s “Esther Kahn” as its film of the year, but Stateside critics were wildly divided over the auteur’s first and very perverse period piece. Summer Phoenix is irreducibly bizarre as a 19th century pauper in London’s Jewish ghetto. Possessed of a shaky accent, inscrutable personality, and monomaniacal passion to act on the stage, Esther is either one of the most fascinating idiot savants of recent cinema or one of its most idiotic, depending on how you take this notorious, must-see film maudit.

Due in theaters this May, “Kings and Queens” is the latest triumph for this crafty, rambunctious cineaste. A vigorous two-hander featuring Desplechin regulars Emmanuelle Devos and Mathieu Amalric, the film is a rollicking melodrama infused with mythological themes and Shakespearean conceits.

“Before and After: Jean-Luc Godard” at BAM is too good to be true. In the rep coup of the season, his all-but-unseen 1969 provocation “British Sounds” (aka “See You at Mao”) will screen with two shorts (April 21). A pair of little-seen features from the 1980s (the elegant “Detective” on April 22 and the crazy “King Lear” on April 23) will be followed by two essential works of the 1990s (the atonal “For Ever Mozart” on April 24 and the sublime “Hail Mary” on April 25). The program concludes with an omnibus program of shorts ranging over his entire career (April 26).

Mr. Godard makes a final spring appearance in an excellent memorial program devoted to Susan Sontag. His 1994 short “Je Vous Salue Sarajevo” keeps company with Chris Marker’s “Cuba Si,” Joseph Strick’s “Interviews with My Lai Veterans,” and, in an inspired touch, all six of Sontag’s screen tests by Andy Warhol (May 12). Josef Von Sternberg’s “The Devil and the Woman” (May 10) and Abbas Kiarostami’s seminal “Close-up” (May 11) complete the three-day tribute.

Elsewhere on the repertory scene, Film Forum presents the 35 mm restoration of Sam Peckinpah’s “Major Dundee” (April 8 to 19), featuring 12 minutes of new material, a new score, and a digital sound mix. In April, Anthology Film Archives hosts “Films of the Situationist International,” a heady program devoted to the films and ideas of influential theorist Guy Debord.

Speaking of the society of the spectacle, May brings the first round of big Hollywood blockbusters. This year we get the last (fingers crossed) of the soulless “Star Wars” prequels, as well as “Kingdom of Heaven,” a megaproduction of the Crusades, from soulless Ridley Scott. But the most shamelessly entertaining pop spectacular of the season, if not the year, is the slaphappy “Kung Fu Hustle,” opening citywide on April 8.

Like Stephen Chow’s previous crowd-pleaser, “Shaolin Soccer,” this new action comedy is an old-school underdog tale given new-school pixel zip. Referencing everything from Road Runner cartoons to silent comedy to “The Matrix” and drawing deep from the well of Chinese action cinema, “Kung Fu Hustle” is every bit the pomo pastiche “Charlie’s Angels” or “Kill Bill” is. But there’s an irresistible freshness here, a wide-eyed, optimistic generosity missing from those decadent American films.

It may play the fool – this is the silliest movie in ages – but “Kung Fu Hustle” is smart, splendidly crafted entertainment, as masterly a stylistic exercise as “Hero” or “House of Flying Daggers.” Mr. Chow’s vulgar exuberance is no less virtuosic than Zhang Yimou’s high art solemnity – and infinitely more fun.

Spring comes to a flabbergasting finale with the release of “Tropical Malady” (May 20), a beguiling masterpiece by the most exciting and adventurous young filmmaker in the world, Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Like his previous wonder, “Blissfully Yours,” it is an experimental love story divided into two parts. In the first, largely urban section, two young men strike up a hesitant, naive, seemingly chaste romance. After a strange, animalistic gesture of consummation, the narrative spirals into a void, triggering the launch of a new narrative staged in a mysterious, mythic jungle landscape.

Mr. Weerasethakul ventures into places no one else has ever imagined. He reaches deep into the roots of human consciousness, down in the chthonic stratum of desire. “Tropical Malady” is genuinely visionary, brainy, and bold. Kudos to Strand Releasing for taking a chance on such a tricky, subtle film: They’re giving us a genius of cinema in the springtime of his art.