Ifc Films

At last, a great contemporary holiday movie that's strictly for grown-ups - a holiday movie that really is a moviegoer's holiday from desultory daily fare. Arnaud Desplechin's A Christmas Tale maintains a humorous sangfroid about matters of life and death, then explodes into epiphanies. Catherine Deneuve has never been more magnificent - or should we say magnifique? - as Junon, a matriarch who approaches terminal illness and family upheaval with breathtaking directness. The zesty-if-sad-eyed Jean-Paul Rousillon plays Abel, her sane, salt-of-the-earth husband.

At first, all they wanted was for their little movie to survive through the cinematic onslaught of Memorial Day. Four months and more than $57 million later, My Big Fat Greek Wedding has turned into Hollywood's unlikely success story of the summer. Without the benefit of lightsabers, special effects or marquee stars, the movie, which cost a mere $5 million to make, is on track to gross more than $100 million worldwide. Its low-budget, grass-roots marketing campaign - pitched initially at Greek Americans nationwide - is almost laughable by current standards of the industry, in which mass-marketed mega-movies such as Spider-Man and Star Wars: Attack of the Clones open on thousands of screens in their first weekends and cost many millions to promote.

The Polish phantasmagoria The Saragossa Manuscript would be a perfect midnight movie if it weren't three hours long. Luckily, the Charles' Saturday revival series will screen it tomorrow at noon. The movie is an epic piece of japery: It celebrates visions and magic with the sort of labyrinthine storytelling that bends minds with its own twisted sorcery. Flashbacks within flashbacks make up the story, catalyzed when two soldiers on opposite sides of an unexplained, early 19th-century war stumble upon a manuscript that transfixes them with potent, sexy words and images.

Disturbing, maddening, often confusing, but also charming, engaging and challenging in all the best ways - first-time writer-director Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know is an absolutely fearless film that isn't afraid to push an audience's buttons. There's a lot to like here, perhaps just as much to dread, but a tremendous amount to admire. At its core the story of Christine (July), an insecure performance artist pursuing a tentative relationship with Richard (John Hawkes), a wary and emotionally stunted shoe salesman, Me and You is really about how people talk and relate to one another ... or don't.

For Americans, Gomorrah will play like every other Mafia epic - and no other Mafia epic. The movie is named for Sodom's sister city and for the crime syndicate Camorra, which has made a Gomorrah out of Naples, Italy. The director, Matteo Garrone, working in the charged, realistic style of his predecessor Francesco Rosi (Salvatore Giuliano), achieves a journalistic drive on a scale so broad that it takes your breath away. Like Rosi, Garrone puts together a machine-gun mosaic as he depicts the Camorra's domination of everything from public housing to toxic-waste disposal and high fashion.

Was Mel Gibson an anti-Semite showing his true colors early Friday? Or was he just a drunk saying something offensive, as some observers suggested? Hollywood insiders and religious leaders speculated yesterday on how Gibson's career would be affected by his drunken tirade during a traffic stop, in which he reportedly blamed Jews for "all the wars in the world" and asked the arresting deputy, "Are you a Jew?" "When Mel Gibson gets pulled over by an officer ... and starts ranting about Jews around the world, it begins to look like a very dark character defect," says film historian Pat McGilligan, author of a forthcoming first biography of pioneering black filmmaker Oscar Micheaux.

NEW YORK - What do women want? That's what cable television is trying to figure out. Women used to want life as it should be, according to the thinking behind the Romance Classics cable network. Now, Romance Classics, whose centerpiece was a lineup of romantic movies, is set to become WE: Women's Entertainment. It seems the research showed that women are more interested in life as it is, and how to make it easier. Cable viewing is growing by leaps and bounds, and the medium has more and more money to spend on original programming and marketing.

Our Song takes you by surprise: Everyone should discover its robust poignance for themselves. The movie records a series of conversations and casual encounters among three teen-age girlfriends in Crown Heights, Brooklyn during the fading weeks of summer. Every now and then, it gets an adrenaline charge from glimpses of the 63-member Jackie Robinson Steppers, their super-syncopated marching band. But the girls' chatter and silences are what give the movie its sinuous, poetic development.

Like a soldier squirreled away in a bunker months after the end of a war, the tortured hero of Rebecca Miller's The Ballad of Jack and Rose remains on an island commune in 1986, a decade after the waning of the counterculture. A Scottish engineer, Jack knows America isn't the country he hoped it would become when he bought his land, applied for citizenship and established his radical enclave. But staying self-sufficient, keeping his distance from commercial pressures and commercial culture make him feel as if he can save his soul - and protect his teenage daughter, Rose, from the ugliness of the outside world.

Will American art-house moviegoers finally catch up to Chekhov? They didn't turn out in huge numbers even for Louis Malle's glorious Vanya on 42nd Street. Let's hope they show up in force for the Chekhovian comedy-drama Summer Hours. Writer-director Olivier Assayas' buoyant film about a French family in flux is based on an original script that's a cousin to Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard. It may play better now than when it hit the festival circuit a year ago. Since we've gone from a period of rage and euphoria to one of wait and see, audiences may feel closer to the people in this film.