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At the core of "Mother" is the complicated relationship between a simple, perhaps mildly disabled young man named Yoon Do-joon (Won Bin) and his unnamed mother (played by Korean TV legend Kim Hye-ja), the widowed proprietor of a small flower shop. Both actors were previously unknown to me, but even as the plot of "Mother" spirals from normal domestic drama into nightmare, they portray the haunted nuance of the mother-son bond with extraordinary complexity and compassion. Do-joon's mother has grown prematurely old with worry, literally tormented by the thought that something terrible could befall him. (And so, of course, it does.)

As for Do-joon, he may be a socially maladroit, lovable-looking mop top who lacks an adult-level intellect, but that doesn't mean he's mindless or stupid. If Kim Hye-ja's wounded, scheming, half-mad performance is the showstopper here, running the gamut from Medea to Miss Marple to Lady Macbeth, Won Bin's may be even better. One of the keys to "Mother" is that Do-joon knows and understands more than he lets on, the whole way through the story, and feels the same conflicted emotions toward his mom -- love and loathing, intense yearning and a desire for independence -- as does any other post-adolescent male.

At this point in Bong's career, he seems to specialize in taking well-established narrative formulas -- the monster movie in "The Host," the police procedural in "Memories of Murder" -- and pulling them apart at the seams. This one you might call the wrong-man thriller. "Mother" has a slow and relatively genial opening, but a muttering, ominous undertone runs beneath it the whole time. Do-joon and his no-account best friend, Jin-tae (Jin Goo), get in trouble for attacking a group of rich and prominent golfers after a traffic accident, but the incident is only a comic preview of the tragedy to come. When a local schoolgirl is found dead -- the first murder local cops can remember -- Do-joon becomes an easy target. He was wandering the neighborhood drunk and alone, has no alibi, and walked right past the girl minutes before her death. He can't even remember how he got home, and when the police ask him to sign a confession, he does. Case closed.

Do-joon's mother is of course the only person in town who believes he is innocent, and in the face of public indifference and ridicule must turn gumshoe, defense attorney and shrink in her efforts to free him. Entirely alone, she must hunt down Jin-tae -- who seems to have disappeared, perhaps after framing Do-joon -- hire thugs, pursue missing witnesses and investigate the dead girl's family, which has secrets of its own. More important still, she must shake Do-joon from his prison lethargy and somehow jog his memory, since the evidence suggests he was very near the murder scene.

You could certainly describe "Mother" as an impeccably realized murder mystery, whose clues are so cleverly woven into the story that you won't see them until they all click into place. But Bong is pushing past the constraints of the genre into claustrophobic psychological portraiture: Kim's increasingly disheveled and obsessive character is both hero and monster, protector and destroyer. She is driven by the most basic of human emotions -- a parent's unconditional love for her child -- and also blinded by it, to the point that she barely notices her own amoral and ruthless behavior.

This is a radically different kind of movie from "The Host," which was constructed around a lovable if ridiculous group of central characters. Bong never allows us to fully understand Do-joon and his mother, let alone like them, and he preys on the misguided assumptions we're likely to make. Some viewers will find "Mother" a cold or mannered film by comparison, and I guess it is. But its combination of dazzling cinematic craft, psychological insight and black humor make this one of the year's moviegoing musts -- and even or especially at her most deranged, Kim Hye-ja's amazing mother is profoundly, passionately human.

"Mother" is now playing in New York and Los Angeles. It opens March 19 in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle and Washington; March 26 in Austin, Texas, Hartford, Conn., Honolulu, New Haven, Conn., Phoenix, Portland, Ore., Sacramento, Calif., and Santa Cruz, Calif.; and April 2 in Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Monterey, Calif., Nashville, Salt Lake City and San Antonio, Texas, with more cities to follow.

The thanks he gets amounts to a blank gaze and a muddy restating of the nonfact in question. But Miller won't be lulled into the becalmed state of believing everything he hears: He presses forward, to the point of disobeying orders, trying to uncover a truth that no one around him much cares about, simply because it threatens to disrupt their own ambitions and plans. His dogged earnestness is what gives "Green Zone" its sense of wayward, zigzaggy momentum: This is a movie that recognizes there's no straight line to the truth, which is part of what makes it vaguely unsatisfying -- though it's also what keeps it honest.

"Green Zone" is fiction, a jittery, idealistic thriller adapted -- by screenwriter Brian Helgeland -- from elements of Rajiv Chandrasekaran's 2006 exposé "Imperial Life in the Emerald City." The director is Paul Greengrass, a filmmaker who has divided his time and attention between "serious" pictures (like the extraordinary "Bloody Sunday," about the 1972 Derry massacre, and the beautifully crafted but excruciating "United 93") and intelligent crowd-pleasers (like "The Bourne Supremacy" and "The Bourne Ultimatum") that, whatever their flaws might be, at least feel like movies made for grown-ups. Similarly, "Green Zone" comes off as a picture made by a person with a brain as well as a conscience, though the movie's big flaw may be its unblinking insistence that we've been lied to -- you don't have to read too much between the lines to see how adamant Greengrass is about that fact, though he isn't telling us anything particularly new.

But I think the value of "Green Zone" lies less in what Greengrass is telling us than in the mood of helpless dread he takes so much care in building. Miller is an honest and good soldier, not a loose cannon: He's completely willing to look for those WMD, even though he's also become a bit ground down by the fact that he hasn't been able to find any. His mistrust of a slippery-eel government lackey (played by Greg Kinnear, in yet another one of those slippery-eel roles he was born to play) leads him to get into bed -- not literally, of course -- with a CIA analyst (Brendan Gleeson) who fears that the United States' plan to outlaw Saddam Hussein's Baath party will lead to a bloody civil war. As he searches for what he hopes will be the truth -- that note of uncertainty is intentional, the eternal question mark around which the whole movie revolves -- he presses an Iraqi citizen, Freddy (Khalid Abdalla), into service. Freddy insists he only wants to help his country; the complication is that no one -- least of all the U.S. military -- knows what his country really needs.

Woven into a plot that's often murkier and more convoluted than it needs to be is a journalist (Amy Ryan) who's something of a stand-in for Judith Miller (except for the fact that this one actually has principles). Greengrass' methods of visual storytelling aren't as sharp as usual: He's chosen to tell this story in faux-documentary style, which means he uses lots of "Bourne"-style shaky cam and jitterbug cutting. Greengrass generally takes extreme care to craft clear action sequences, in which it's always possible to tell who's coming from where. But the action in "Green Zone" is sometimes uncharacteristically wayward and confusing. And while Greengrass may have been, up to this point, one of the most skillful users of the hand-held camera, there's nothing particularly interesting or effective about its use in "Green Zone." Keeping the camera stationary would have been a far more surprising and suitable choice.

Still, "Green Zone" shows an emotional rawness that's likely to hit home for anyone who still feels shafted by the U.S. government's ineptitude in Iraq. This is a movie made up of exposed nerve endings; it never capitulates to the idea that it's OK to smooth out the facts. In his forward to the recent paperback edition of Chandrasekaran's book, Greengrass writes, "Sometime in early 2004, I began work on a film set in Iraq. I wanted it to be a thriller -- urgent, contemporary, filled with intrigue: A movie that would hopefully take some of the huge audience that had enjoyed the Bourne series to a real-world setting and encourage them to consider whether the mistrust and paranoia that characterized Bourne's world was so far-fetched after all." And while I find myself repeatedly asking myself if Matt Damon really is all that good an actor, watching him in "Green Zone" reminded me that there's a particular type of guileless, principled guy that he often plays perfectly. In that respect, his Roy Miller is a lot like Jason Bourne, a man who's been trained to be a tool of the system but who insists on thinking for himself -- not to be contrarian but as a way of staying true to some standard of decency he's set for himself. Near the end of "Green Zone," we see Damon's Miller, weighed down by full combat gear, getting ready to leave the luxury room, located in an appropriated palace, where he's temporarily set up operations. Damon, with his all-American honest-lad good looks -- not to mention his sand-colored fatigues and combat boots -- looks out of place amid all that grandeur. And somehow -- even though his face wears the dutiful blank expression of a good soldier -- he also looks disgusted by it.

At Sundance 2009, the film was acquired by Senator Entertainment, a then-new distribution venture backed by German money and headed by former THINKFilm president Mark Urman. If that seemed like a foolhardy time to launch a new indie distributor, it was. Senator fared even worse than Urman's previous defunct company, existing for a few months (mainly on paper) and then going belly-up without even bothering to release any movies first. Overture Films -- another relatively new company, but one with such releases as "The Visitor," "Law Abiding Citizen" and "Capitalism: A Love Story" on its résumé -- sifted through the wreckage for salvageable pieces, and so we're finally seeing "Brooklyn's Finest" in theaters, albeit without much hype or marketing muscle behind it.

This remains an agreeably chewy, pulpy work of old-fashioned crime cinema, a fair bit overcooked and overlong, but worth catching for its acting, its atmosphere and its action set-pieces. A dark, deterministic cop opera that verges on self-caricature at times, "Brooklyn's Finest" is also a mightily impressive visual spectacle that reestablishes Fuqua's claim to be the hip-hop generation's heir to Martin Scorsese. Screenwriters Michael C. Martin and Brad Caleb Kane focus on a classic trio of troubled New York cops, each devoured by the job in different ways, whose paths eventually intersect by accident in a notoriously crime-plagued housing project in the Brownsville neighborhood. While Fuqua doesn't quite match the crackerjack narrative intensity of his 2001 "Training Day," what he's crafted here is a brooding, violent, slow-digesting tragedy of considerable power. 

For my money, Richard Gere gives one of his best performances in years as Eddie Dugan, an embittered, depressed beat cop in his last week before retirement. Eddie's fighting a losing battle against his own disgust and apathy, and trying like hell to pretend that the prostitute he patronizes is actually his girlfriend. Ethan Hawke plays detective Sal Procida with a hackneyed "yo, Vinny" Italian-American accent, but also provides a complicated portrayal of a family man and star narcotics officer who uses his position to steal drug money and mete out vigilante justice. Don Cheadle, excellent as always, plays another star detective, Tango Butler, who's gone way too deep undercover inside a drug gang, and may be transferring his loyalty from the NYPD to a vicious, charismatic drug lord (Wesley Snipes, in one of his oiliest and most irresistible performances).

Fuqua's dandy supporting cast also includes Ellen Barkin, who gets just two scenes as a ball-busting, queen-bitch FBI agent and eats them whole, along with nice turns from Lili Taylor (as Sal's wife) and Brian F. O'Byrne. If Fuqua is unusually skilled at unleashing actors, he has more trouble managing scripts, and I think this one gets away from him, finally becoming a construction just as mechanical as "Crash," if far more fatalistic. Speaking as a Brooklynite who lives maybe four or five miles from the projects depicted in the film, Fuqua makes them seem a lot more dire and doomed than they are. Still, that's his job, right? Nothing illustrates the timidity of present-day Hollywood more completely than the fact that Fuqua had to go outside the current studio system to make something that so strongly resembles a late-'70s/early-'80s Hollywood film. At least it's a decent one.

"Brooklyn's Finest" is now playing in many major cities. Wider release may follow.

Nobody's saying that this year. While Pixar's "Up" (also nominated for best picture) is considered the likely winner, it's definitely nothing like a formulaic kid-flick -- and it's also the only computer-animated film among the five nominees. After more than a decade of CGI dominance, handmade is suddenly all the rage: Even Disney's nominated "The Princess and the Frog" was hand-drawn, as if in a deliberate effort to suggest that company's great tradition. Nominees also include two stop-motion literary adaptations aimed at a kidult crossover audience, Henry Selick's "Coraline" and Wes Anderson's "Fantastic Mr. Fox."

But those movies had all been widely seen, favorably reviewed and discussed as possible Oscar fodder. Nobody, and I mean absolutely nobody, was prepared for the nomination of "The Secret of Kells," a dazzling, not to mention utterly charming, hand-drawn fable about a 12-year-old boy's adventures in early medieval Ireland. "We thought we might be in line for some Irish and European awards, and that would be that," says director Tomm Moore. "The Oscars? No way. That never entered my mind."

A haunting blend of history, fairy tale and pure invention, Moore's film follows a young student monk named Brendan, who has spent his whole life inside the fortified walls of the Abbey of Kells, whose forbidding abbot (voiced by Brendan Gleeson) has built it as a sanctuary against the Viking raiders who are pillaging and burning Irish villages at will. (It's somewhere around the year 800 A.D., give or take.) Into Brendan's cloistered life comes a playful monastic wanderer named Aidan (Mick Lally), who apparently studied with the legendary St. Colum Cille (aka St. Columba) on the Scottish isle of Iona, and carries with him perhaps the single greatest treasure of medieval Ireland.

That treasure is neither gold nor jewels but a book -- a lavish illustrated manuscript version of the Gospels that in centuries to come will be known as the Book of Kells. (Today it is considered Ireland's most important single cultural artifact, and can be seen under glass in the Old Library at Trinity College in Dublin.) Brendan's yearning to help Aidan complete the manuscript, and safeguard it from Scandinavian marauders, leads him outside the walls of Kells into the magical forest around it -- and also out of the then-new Christian world into the pagan past.

Borrowing a wide range of illustrations and motifs from the Book of Kells and numerous other medieval and indigenous sources, Moore and his team of Irish, Belgian and French animators send Brendan on a mystical voyage. He is aided by an irrepressible forest sprite named Aisling ("ASH-ling"), but must go alone to face the terrifying Crom Cruach, an ancient and perhaps demonic Celtic deity who -- at least in some legends -- required the sacrifice of first-born children to ensure the harvest.

All this is a freewheeling and fanciful blend of art and legend; Moore doesn't pretend to offer a historical account of how the Book of Kells was created, or a coherent version of the collision between paganism and Christianity in Ireland. Rather, "The Secret of Kells" is a gorgeous transcription of medieval decorative art and its themes into a contemporary animated narrative, one that should enthrall children older than 8 or so, along with the adults lucky enough to watch with them. (My guess, so far, is that the invading Viking hordes and the Crom Cruach sequence are probably too scary for my 6-year-old twins. They have a difficult time with the evil stepmother in "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.")

American distribution rights for "The Secret of Kells" belong to GKIDS, an independent producer and distributor of children's entertainment whose main property is the New York International Children's Film Festival. To its credit, the company responded to the unexpected Oscar nomination by pushing the film into one New York theater this weekend, with wider release and a DVD version soon to follow. I had hoped to meet Tomm Moore in person during his New York visit, but both of us were snowed in after the recent blizzard and decided to talk on the phone instead.

It's such a wonderful idea for an animated film, but also a pretty unlikely one. Tell me how and when you came up with it.

I had an idea along these lines when I was in college in '99, and I started to develop it with a group of friends -- the idea of trying to translate Irish art, Celtic art, into animation. To do something along the lines of, say, what they did in "Mulan" with Chinese art.

After I got out of college we set up an animation studio in Kilkenny and we were doing commercials and other kinds of jobs. So this was a pet project we could never get off the ground until 2005, when we met the producers of "Triplets of Belleville" [the French-Belgian animated feature, Oscar-nominated in 2003]. We were able to put the financing together and work on a final script. We had many years of development prior to that, in terms of the art style. But in 2005 we were finally able to hit the ground running.

Talk about the art style. Obviously you drew on the Book of Kells itself. Was there other medieval art, or art from other periods, that you looked at?

At a certain point it was the Book of Kells itself, and then we started looking at medieval art in general, the triptychs and other things. Basically anything in and around that whole era -- European medieval art and also anything involving indigenous folk art that had been translated into animation. We looked at, like, the Hungarian folk-tale series that had been done in Eastern Europe, where they had taken Hungarian art and animated that. Or American things like "Samurai Jack," where they'd taken Japanese and other indigenous art and adapted it into TV animation. We took all of that as reference points, and tried to come up with our own style.

I know this is a work of fiction, not history. But how much research did you do? Did you want to paint something close to an accurate portrait of that era?

We started off with a fairly dry version of the story, which was even a little bit too historical. Then we started working with a screenwriter named Fabrice Ziolkowski, this French-American guy, and he helped us tease out more of the hero's-journey story. That opened it up to allow us to bring in some of the legends and fantasy that surrounded the history, which might have made the story skew a little bit younger, and also made it a bit more fun for the animators doing it.

Telling the story through this young boy, who's a kid but also a monk -- or, I guess, a student monk -- was an interesting choice.

We were always telling the story through Brendan's eyes, but I think I was looking too much at Aidan and the Abbot in the first draft of the script. Seeing the world through Brendan's eyes is much more interesting. Imagine the suggested world of a kid in the Middle Ages who's never been outside the walls of this abbey -- that gave us another way of looking at the whole movie. So he became central rather than secondary.

Was the Abbey of Kells really this kind of fortified bulwark, the way you portray it? Is that part historical?

Yeah, basically it is. The land was given to Cellach, who was a historical character, by a local nobleman. Iona had been burned out and sacked so often that they decided to come into the center of Ireland [County Meath, roughly 40 miles north of Dublin] and try to get away from the Vikings. Of course the Vikings just came up the rivers and wound up sacking Kells in the end anyway. Maybe the walls weren't that big! We exaggerated that a bit, now.

It's fascinating that you depict the monks at Kells as being not just Irish, or not even principally Irish, but as coming from all over the world -- Italy, Africa, the Middle East. What's the historical basis for that?

Well, this is what we found most interesting and surprising when we did research into the Book of Kells. One of the things they don't understand is that there are inks and patterns and designs in the Book of Kells that come from all over the world. There's some ink that seems to have come from Afghanistan; there are patterns they've linked to Morocco. It's fascinating stuff: They've found bones of pet monkeys, things like that. Stuff we didn't even use in the movie. There was a lot of trade and interaction, a lot of people coming to Ireland from mainland Europe for refuge. Maybe it was all down to trade and dialogue, and maybe there were all sorts of people from all over the world living in Ireland at the time. We thought it was a nice reflection of how cosmopolitan Irish society has become today.

Right. As you and I both know, Ireland in the 20th century was, at least at times, a pretty provincial place, somewhat cut off from the world.

I grew up in an Ireland where basically all my friends were Irish people with good Irish names, all of that. My son now goes to an Irish-speaking school where he's got friends from Burma, Poland, you know, everywhere. So I thought it was interesting to see that in the Middle Ages Ireland had an influx of people from everywhere, which parallels what's been going on just in the last 10 years.

Wait -- your son goes to school with Burmese and Polish kids who are learning Irish?

Yeah.

That's fantastic! I wish my dad, who was a Celtic scholar, was still around to see that. It seems like you're trying to address the old-style Irish nationalist stereotype, the idea that there was some pure culture that had been handed down from ancient times.

Ah, no. We're a mongrel breed and that's for sure. A lot of Irish people are surprised by how rich a cultural history we had around that time.

Talk about the way you use the pagan and pre-Christian iconography in the movie, especially the ancient Celtic god Crom Cruach, whose image was supposedly destroyed by St. Patrick.

What I found most interesting about that period -- I've done a couple of graphic novels about St. Patrick, and what I really learned was how the ancient Celtic gods had been transmuted into the new Christian pantheon. A lot of the saints, like St. Colum Cille, had all these amazing legends around them: His hand glowed, so he could write at night! All this strange stuff. It would always be this confluence of the old pagan beliefs and the more modern -- well, not modern -- but the newer Christian stuff.

I found that the Crom Cruach story seemed to be linked to this old duality, with Lugh as the sun god and Crom as the god of the underworld. There were all these legends about human sacrifices that St. Patrick stopped by defeating Crom Cruach. I sort of thought, maybe that's where the idea of the snakes being driven out of Ireland came from, St Patrick defeating Crom. Even though Crom is most often represented as a worm or a giant, a giant idol, we picked on serpent. We thought there was symbolism we could use from the Book of Kells, where they have all these Ouroboros, these snakes eating their own tails, going around the pages. So we thought, let's make Crom into something Brendan imagines after seeing some of the Book of Kells.

And then there's Aisling, your little forest sprite. Where does she come from?

I don't know if you know much Gaelic, but Aisling means "dream," and there's this tradition of Aisling poems, more from the Celtic Revival period, you know, the William Butler Yeats era. They used to write these poems where Aisling would be a girl the poet would see, who would tell tales about Ireland's woe or whatever. We thought it would be fun to make her a little girl rather than a woman, make her this symbol of the matriarchy that Christianity was replacing, but also something like a little sister to Brendan. I based her on my own little sister, you know? She's always trying to best him, and she's got all these powers. Because she's a fairy she can transform into any creature. She's kind of a mixture of this wise old pagan deity and a pesky little sister.

Tell me a little bit about the techniques and technology you used. This is all hand-drawn animation, or mostly?

The animation is 95 percent hand-drawn. We did 20 minutes of animation in Kilkenny, and that was the lead for all the other studios. In Belgium they colored all the characters on the computer, and we did some CG, like the Crom Cruach sequence and the Viking attacks. We had to use CG for the crowd scenes, but we tried to make it all look hand-made, keep it looking like medieval art. That was the goal.

Surprisingly, you're up against another hand-drawn animation ["The Princess and the Frog"] and two stop-motion films, along with "Up."

It's amazing to me. When we started making this movie in 2005, hand-drawn animation was basically dead, except in Japan. It's a mad year to be in the Oscars. Basically we're all in the shadow of "Up," which I think is a great movie. We kind of won big just by getting this nomination. We never thought that could happen.

"The Secret of Kells" opens March 5 at the IFC Center in New York, with other cities to follow.

"A Prophet" is an atmospheric, tense and often violent film that spends most of its two-and-a-half-hour running time amid the thoroughly amoral, sub-Machiavellian culture of prison. Malik does what he must to survive, including working as an errand boy and hit man for César Luciani (marvelously played by Niels Arestrup), the thoroughly sinister Corsican crime boss who dominates the prison. But "A Prophet" is much more than standard-issue downbeat criminal realism, as its pile of awards around the world may attest. (It won the Grand Prix at Cannes and the BAFTA, or British Academy Award, for best foreign film, before its foreign-language Oscar nod.) Instead, it's a highly original film made in a familiar context, and an exciting moviegoing experience you shouldn't miss.

Malik is less an antihero, in fact, than an old-fashioned hero who triumphs over his appalling circumstances and never loses the audience's sympathy. Although he does terrible things, Malik never descends to the desperate level of the men around him. He takes no pleasure in violence or cruelty, takes revenge only on those who have wronged him, and does nothing to cause suffering to innocents. What makes "A Prophet" more enthralling than depressing, along with its rigorous technical brilliance, is the sense that Malik's rise to power stems from something mysterious within himself, an inexplicable moral center that may be related to the premonitory visions he has (which give the film its half-ironic title).

As a bilingual, French-born Arab who is not an observant Muslim, Malik is immediately an ambiguous figure in a prison divided between Luciani's ruling Corsican gang and a rival Arab-Muslim faction. Luciani sees his value right away, and coerces him into murdering Reyeb (Hichem Yacoubi), an Arab prisoner who is prepared to testify in a case against the Corsican mob. This grueling, bloody episode — Malik gets into Reyeb's cell on the premise that he's willing to trade sexual favors for drugs, but has a razor blade stashed in his cheek — is the key to the rest of the story in several ways.

The killing assures Malik's status as a prison tough guy and places him under Luciani's protection. But Malik's brief encounter with the courtly, educated Reyeb has a more profound effect on his life than his long-running, abusive father-son relationship with Luciani. A burly, gray-haired man who affects an avuncular demeanor, Luciani is supremely uninterested in Malik as a person, whereas Reyeb — in the 10 minutes they spend together before Malik slits his throat — offers to lend him books and help him learn to read. "The idea is to come out of this place less stupid than you came in," he says.

Malik seizes on this advice, not merely learning to read and write French but teaching himself the Corsican-Italian dialect that Luciani and his cronies speak among themselves. This makes him an ever more essential part of the crime boss's operation; he is seen by the Corsicans as an Arab and by the Arabs as a Corsican, but can speak to (or eavesdrop on) everyone in the prison. At the same time, Malik begins to build his own criminal enterprise, joining forces with Ryad (Adel Bencherif), an Arab friend who will soon be leaving prison, and Jordi (Adel Kateb), a Gypsy drug dealer.

It's probably fair to say that Malik feels anguished about having killed a fellow Arab, a man he liked, on the orders of a white crime boss — Reyeb's ghost occasionally turns up in his cell, a silent, admonitory presence — and in the long arc of the story, the murder sets Malik and Luciani on a collision course. As Malik draws near the end of his sentence, Luciani begins to send him out into the world, on one-day passes to Paris and Marseille, to help the gangster keep an eye on his outside business interests. Malik has been studying his boss carefully, and these glimpses of a wider world offer him a chance to set his own plans in motion.

But Audiard, a supreme craftsman of French genre films, isn't much interested in the story's pop-psychological aspects or ethnic politics. As with previous Audiard works like "The Beat That My Heart Skipped" or "Read My Lips," this is a crime film that stretches the form to its outermost limits, resisting the most familiar kinds of characterizations or narrative clichés.

For the most part, Audiard and cinematographer Stéphane Fontaine shoot "A Prophet" as a well-made wide-screen entertainment (complete with an awesome soundtrack based in American rap and rock), but the action is sporadically interrupted by freeze-frames, on-screen titles and an effect Audiard calls "La Mano Negra," in which the screen goes black except for a tiny, wobbly pinhole image at its center. To some extent, these are just auteurist signatures — reminders that we're watching a manufactured work, rather than real life — but as I've said, there are also hints in the movie that Malik possesses extraordinary powers of vision.

Within the French context, and maybe in the American context too, it's unusual to see an Arab character who is first and foremost an individual, and for whom group identity is a fluid and secondary concept. Polite, industrious and thoroughly self-made, Malik is a man of the new Europe. He may be a rootless orphan who emerged from darkness and has lived his entire life outside the law, but his future is not yet written.

"A Prophet" opens Feb. 26 in New York and Los Angeles, with wider release to follow.

In the "Red Riding" trilogy, a powerfully addictive series of interlinked crime dramas made by Britain's Channel 4 and adapted from the genre-shifting "Northern noir" series by novelist David Peace, doubt is the only constant. Arguably, the point of the "Red Riding" series, both in print and on screen, is to turn conventional crime fiction upside down and expose it as a comforting sham that's designed to shield us from the real world's brutality and greed. Guys like Dunford and Hunter may style themselves after Raymond Chandler's knights errant -- men who can walk the meanest streets of Yorkshire because they are not themselves mean -- but the social cesspool beneath the superficial provincial quiet of late-'70s northern England sucks away their morality, their decency and even their courage.

Peace's daunting and extraordinary quartet of novels -- something like a toilet-bowl "Ulysses," awash in bodily fluids, acts of pointless violence, unexplained backstory and shifting points of view -- is so internalized, so literary and so fantastical as to be anti-cinematic. Screenwriter Tony Grisoni has performed radical surgery on the books, extracting a few major characters, themes and storylines and abandoning many more. His version of '70s Yorkshire looks like a sun-kissed Polynesian paradise next to Peace's nihilistic, sub-Dante landscape of rape and vomit. Still, in their relatively viewer-friendly fashion the three films capture Peace's central vision and organizing principle: the idea that the notorious real-life "Yorkshire Ripper" serial-killer case, by far the biggest crime story of that time and place, was merely a symptom of a much deeper and more contagious social disease.

While the Ripper investigation forms the background for Peter Hunter's investigation in director James Marsh's "Red Riding: 1980" -- most gripping and cinematic of the three films -- it's more a parenthesis than the centerpiece. Hunter is at least as interested in ferreting out corruption, incompetence and cover-ups within the West Yorkshire police as he is in catching the killer. When Eddie Dunford returns to Leeds at the beginning of the series, in Julian Jarrold's grimy, shot-on-16mm "Red Riding: 1974," he has washed out as a Fleet Street journalist "down South" (i.e., in London) and the Ripper killings haven't even started, or at least haven't formed a discernible pattern.

Eddie notices something different: the abductions and/or murders of a series of schoolgirls, which all seem ambiguously linked to the grandiose development schemes of a local business tycoon named John Dawson (Sean Bean, infusing the role with tight-trousered braggadocio). Eddie naively assumes, at least at first, that the West Yorkshire cops actually want to catch the child-killer, and that they're only scared of Dawson because he's well-connected and rich. As one of Eddie's colleagues warns him, before dying in a suspicious car wreck, the real story is far more convoluted and sinister.

Peace's novels, each of them almost incomprehensible in itself, gradually fit together into a gigantic psychological jigsaw puzzle. In three 90-minute films, Grisoni can't possibly retain that degree of complexity, but elements remain: The outburst of vigilante violence at the end of "Red Riding: 1974" is fruitlessly investigated by Peter Hunter in "Red Riding: 1980," but not fully explained until the end of the trilogy, when Anand Tucker's "Red Riding: 1983" finally offers some possibly overcooked passages of explication. Of course the films and the books each have to stand on their own, but Grisoni's stripped-down narrative definitely offers advantages, throwing some of the story's archetypal themes into sharper relief.

"Red Riding" is a story of failed escapes and thwarted homecomings: Dunford, Hunter, a teenage male hustler named B.J. (Robert Sheehan) and an overweight, second-rate lawyer named John Piggott (Mark Addy) have all been drawn back to Yorkshire to face their destiny. For all its profanity and violence, "Red Riding" is also an old-fashioned morality tale where the wages of sin is death; everyone in the series who is guilty of a personal, private failing -- the betrayal of a spouse or lover -- is punished severely. Finally, the nexus of money, power and media in "Red Riding" is absolutely corrupt, and corrupts absolutely. Would-be white knights who believe they are immune to this law, like Dunford and Hunter, are the most deluded of all.

It's not coincidental that the only effective examples of heroism in the entire series come from people far from the levers of power, like the shlubby and depressed Piggott, who takes on the hopeless case of a retarded boy beaten into confessing the child-killings, and the victimized B.J., who makes a living on his knees in bus-station bathrooms but also knows many things people like Dunford and Hunter never understood. Their only counterpart within the police is the owlish, inscrutable Maurice Jobson (David Morrissey), a man so deeply implicated in corruption and conspiracy he has come out the other side into a disillusioned clarity.

This version of "Red Riding" is far more conventional and episodic than the novels, but there are still snatches of Peace's hallucinatory internal monologues, and Grisoni and the directors have slipped in a few Easter eggs for fans of the books. Boozy, doomed reporter Jack Whitehead and ambitious young police sergeant Bob Frazier (characters in Peace's novels who grasp important strands of the story) make brief but telling appearances -- and why is the mysterious Rev. Martin Laws (gravel-voiced Peter Mullan, enjoyable as always) so handy with power tools?

Opinions vary widely on how close the "Red Riding" books and movies come to capturing the real ambiance of the Ripper years in the depressed North of England. (If Ridley Scott's contemplated Hollywood version comes to fruition, that one will be even farther from reality.) As deprived and depraved as life in '70s Yorkshire may have been, it's worth noting that, crime-wise, it was nowhere near the level of any middle-sized American city. After a massively bungled investigation plagued by infighting and incompetence, the real-life Yorkshire constabulary caught the man who'd been brutally killing local prostitutes -- a truck driver named Peter Sutcliffe -- more or less by accident in 1981.

As the "Red Riding" films tell the story, Sutcliffe was little more than a pathological bystander, a solitary creep who inadvertently forced the North of England's establishment, in those dark years of recession, chronic unemployment and IRA guerrilla warfare, to spill some of its darkest secrets. Arguably Peace's yarn, with its subtextual narrative about a money-ruled, crypto-fascist pseudo-government lurking alongside the official one, has far wider applications than Yorkshire in the 1970s. On the other hand, it is about a particular time in a particular place, which may be why native Yorkshireman David Peace has lived in Tokyo for many years.

The "Red Riding" trilogy opens Feb. 5 at the IFC Center in New York and Feb. 12 at the Nuart Theatre in Los Angeles, with wider national release to begin Feb. 19.