A documentary, directed by Philippe Béziat, about the soprano Natalie Dessay's preparation for the role of Violetta in a staging of "La Traviata." In French. Opening May 15. Film Forum. Reviewed below in Now Playing. Opening May 17. A comic drama, directed by Pema Tseden, about a young Tibetan man whose attempt to sell his family's dog sparks conflict. In Tibetan. Museum of Modern Art. A comedy, set in 1958, about a French secretary (Déborah François) who is in training for a speed-typing competition. Co-starring Romain Duris and Bérénice Bejo. Pauline Chan directed this drama, about an Australian man (Guy Pearce) who meets the Chinese orphan (Zhu Lin) whom he has long sponsored. Robert Bresson's last film, from 1983, adapted from a story by Tolstoy, features Christian Patey as Yvon, an oil-truck driver who is paid by a client in counterfeit bills. Arrested for passing the bills and convicted of the charges, Yvon loses his family while imprisoned; when he gets out, he puts his blankly contained and righteous rage into action. Bresson captures the moral weight of small gestures in brisk, graphically precise images, and conveys the cosmic evil of daily life through one of the all-time great soundtracks, full of the rustle of bills and the clink of change, the click of a cash register and the snap of locks. These noises resound like the rattle of diabolical spirits, and the exchange of labor and goods for money comes off as original sin itself. Bresson builds a brilliant sequence from an oppressive succession of doors - of a paddy wagon, a store, and a subway car, along with the hellish series of barriers that separate a prisoner from his freedom. A spiritual filmmaker, Bresson is fascinated by violence; a non-cinephile, he revives and revises a classic moment from "Psycho" in a terrifying wink and reveals the making - as well as the meaning - of a sacred monster. In French. - Richard Brody (BAM; May 19.) Claude Chabrol's second film, from 1958, is set in and around Paris, in the director's own milieu of university students and their bohemian friends. He cuts loose, both in style and in substance, with the story of Charles (Gérard Blain), a naïve and provincial mama's boy who moves to Paris to study law and moves in with Paul (Jean-Claude Brialy), his dashingly decadent Parisian cousin, who initiates him into the alluring distractions of night life and romance. In effect, Chabrol tells the classic story of the ant and the grasshopper - and tilts it in the grasshopper's favor, despite the oblivious arrogance of Paul's swinging and sophisticated exuberance. The director flaunts the immoral implications of his cynicism: the riotous students in Paul's circle exhibit a sybaritic and sexualized brutality that finds a political parallel in the Germanophile Paul's obsession with firearms and Nazi paraphernalia, as well as a visual parallel in the brash and scathing flamboyance of the images. Here, the director tackles his great theme - the puncturing of bourgeois moralism, albeit at a price - with a joyful, quasi-Nietzschean derision. In this 1950 swashbuckler, starring Burt Lancaster as Dardo, the leader of a peasant revolt in twelfth-century Lombardy against the Hessian overlords, the director Jacques Tourneur, working with a script by Waldo Salt, turns the medieval action-adventure tale into a symbol of the French Resistance in the Second World War and locates its roots in class warfare. Tourneur also makes exuberant use of his star's acrobatic gifts, casting Lancaster's former circus partner, Nick Cravat, as his sidekick, Piccolo, and incorporating their astounding leaps and catches, balancing acts and high-wire daring, into their revolutionary raids. The plot highlights the sexual thrill of illicit power in the romantic backstory - Dardo's wife, Francesca (Lynn Baggett), has run off with Count Ulrich (Frank Allenby), the commander of the Teutonic occupation, known as the Hawk, both for his falconry and for his predatory cruelty, and left Dardo with their five-year-old son, Rudi (Gordon Gebert). The action is sparked by the Hawk's kidnapping of Rudi, whom he holds hostage (in the guise of raising him as a prince) in an attempt to break Dardo's spirit. But the hero, of course, rises to the intrepid occasion. Visions of a rebel camp amid Greek ruins suggest political redemption through the marriage of popular and classical arts, as does Norman Lloyd's sparkling turn, as a troubadour who captures the insolent spirit of revolt. - R.B. (Film Society of Lincoln Center; May 20.) As Helgeland tells it, Robinson doesn't easily make friends with the white players who like him; he's distant and impersonal, which makes psychological sense - and may also be true - but leaves us longing for a more internalized view of him. With its homages to modern French classics, music cues from Truffaut films, and a veritable Paris holiday in the middle, Noah Baumbach's new film - which he co-wrote with its star, Greta Gerwig - links the already classic themes and moods of New York independent filmmaking to those of the New Wave and its successors. Gerwig's Frances - an eternal fledgling dancer at twenty-seven with dwindling status, shrinking income, an evaporating love life, and a fraying best-friendship with Sophie (Mickey Sumner), her soon-to-be-ex roommate, is, in effect, being flayed alive in the big city and somehow manages to smile through it all. Reduced to living as a perma-guest, her artistic dreams thwarted, her loving family far off (in Sacramento) and unable to help, Frances, with a rictus affixed to her agonies, nonetheless has the one thing that her trials and tribulations can't take away: her idiosyncrasy. With her exquisitely touching spontaneity and the spin of verbal and gestural invention with which she inflects the slightest interaction - and despite her embarrassingly impulsive self-revelations and equally awkward deceptions - Frances is an artist whose medium is life itself, and Baumbach, his camera open with calm adoration, channels her waves of wonder and possibility. Co-starring Adam Driver and Michael Zegen. - R.B. (In limited release.) As the Long Islander with the big house, Leonardo DiCaprio still has his golden glow, and, at thirty-eight, he has developed a foxy, appraising stare. Tobey Maguire brings his grainy but distinct voice and his asexual reserve to the role of Nick Carraway, and looks at DiCaprio's Gatsby with amazement and eventually with admiration. Their relationship is the strongest emotional bond in the movie. The rest of Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece is pretty much a disaster. Long stretches of it feel like an overproduced music video marked by a thrashing impress of "style" (Art Deco turned to digitized glitz), hurled at us with whooshing camera movements and rapid changes of perspective exaggerated by 3-D. Gatsby's big parties are a seething mass of flesh, feathers, dropped waists, cloche hats, swinging pearls, flying tuxedos, fireworks, and breaking glass. There are so many hurtling, ecstatic bodies and objects that you can't see much of anything in particular. With Carey Mulligan, weak-willed and touching, as Daisy; Joel Edgerton, adorned with an unattractive mustache, as the brutal Tom Buchanan; and the Indian actor Amitabh Bachchan, bizarrely cast as the Jewish gangster Meyer Wolfsheim. Jay-Z (an executive producer on the film) contributed to the soundtrack, not all of which is redolent of the Jazz Age. Craig Pearce co-wrote the script with Luhrmann. Shot in Australia, on sets. - D.D. (5/13/13) (In wide release.) At first, he merely corrects them, and advises on style; soon, however, he is drawn into the experiences that they record - the life, and the love life, of a bourgeois family, and its vulnerability to Claude's mysterious intrusions. The result is endlessly playful, although the rules of the game, in Ozon's hands, could hardly be graver, and what can be at stake, in the act of storytelling, has seldom been more elegantly sketched. The title refers to those children born at the stroke of midnight when India became independent from Britain, in August, 1947, especially Saleem (Satya Bhabha), who is able to conjure up other such children, including his increasingly evil doppelgänger, Shiva (Siddharth). Bhabha's starring performance is weak, but many of the women, including Shahana Goswami and Shriya Saran, are entrancingly beautiful and lively. Deepa Mehta directed. - D.D. (In wide release.) There are a few alien scavengers left over from a catastrophic war, but humanity is represented by only Jack Harper (Tom Cruise) and his partner, Victoria (Andrea Riseborough), who lead a sleek and frictionless existence, mostly in midair. The plot defies - and may not deserve - explication, and when other characters enter the fray (and even when two of them are played by Morgan Freeman and Olga Kurylenko), they make surprisingly little impact. The entire dazzling panoply of Nance's artistry comes off as a vast performance on the stage of life to woo Minter; romantic obsession has rarely been filmed as sweetly, love's labors have rarely been revealed so insightfully as their own reward. - R.B. (In limited release.) One regular client, Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub), boasts of his fabulous wealth, and Lugo decides to get hold of it by kidnapping him, enlisting a mild-mannered gym colleague, Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie), and a mighty, penitent ex-con, Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson), to help. The director Kim Ki-duk realizes the schematic perversity of this contemporary gangster melodrama with occasional flashes of grotesque cleverness, which he buries under weighty intentions. Kang-do (Lee Jeong-jin) is a young Seoul loan shark with an angle: he forces his debtors to take out disability insurance, and, when they fail to pay, he disables them and collects. He lives alone in order to avoid facing the same treatment he metes out - the targeting of family members of those who cross him. Then a woman (Jo Min-soo) claiming to be the mother who abandoned him at birth turns up and moves in, enduring his appalling abuse as she feeds, clothes, and nurtures him - and opens his eyes to the nature of his enterprise even as his victims lurk in quest of vengeance. Kim builds the story around the politics of business, setting the action in a crumbling part of town where, because of encroaching demolition and gentrification, small and venerable workshops are unable to get bank loans. It's a good idea, but Kim doesn't develop it; he's mainly interested in the bloody particulars of mutilation and reduces his themes - desperation, revenge, and sacrifice - to slogans. In Korean. - R.B. (In limited release.) The action concludes with one of the great last lines of recent times. - R.B. (In limited release and as video on demand.) Gary Cooper, as an honorable Confederate colonel who becomes a soldier of fortune in Mexico, asks the key question for this and all the South-of-the-border Westerns that followed: What gets into Americans down here? Robert Aldrich's Superscope and Technicolor spectacle, co-starring Burt Lancaster as Cooper's greedy sometime partner, introduces the dynamic cross-cultural imagery and iconoclasm later explored in such films as "The Magnificent Seven" and "The Wild Bunch." Aldrich keeps the editing spry and the action splashy as his North American mercenaries attempt to profit from the conflicts of native revolutionaries, wily French aristocrats, and the transplanted Austrian prince who became Mexico's Emperor Maximilian (the peerlessly imperious George Macready). In this film (as opposed to, say, in "Juárez"), Maximilian is more cynical than any of them: when he tries out a new Winchester repeating rifle, shooting at torches held by butlers, he halts after two hits and a miss. "Perhaps I'd better stop," he quips. We have a servant problem as it is. Lancaster brings his flashing dynamism and Cooper his sardonic nobility to this exotic, entertaining shoot-"em-up. Released in 1954. - Michael Sragow (Film Society of Lincoln Center; May 18 and May 21.) PEEPLES: In wide release. SIGHTSEERS: In limited release. Walter Reade Theatre, Lincoln Center (212-875-5610) - "Man of Steel: Burt Lancaster at 100." May 21 at 12:30, 4, and 7:30: "Vague" (2010, Mohamed Ben Attia; in Arabic) and "Les Secrets" (2009, Raja Amari; in Arabic and French). Except where noted, all films are in Mandarin. May 20 at 7: "The Adventures of Robin Hood" (1938, Michael Curtiz and William Keighley). 35th Ave. at 36th St., Astoria (718-784-0077) - Special screening. 200 Hudson St., at Canal St. (212-601-1000) - "Rip-Off Cinema: Italian Edition." May 16 at 7:30: "Conquest" (1983, Lucio Fulci; in Italian).