Clean
dir. Olivier Assayas

Stop me if you've heard this plot before. An aging rock star overdoses and dies. His common-law widow (Maggie Cheung, looking fried in a black nimbus perm) survives him, only to face widespread incrimination, disinterest, and long, grueling days bereft of glamour. Waiting tables in Paris doesn't suit her. Neither does calling in favors from begrudging friends of the deceased. But she wants her kid back—and a record contract couldn't hurt—and in order to get custody, she has to prove she's a competent parent. To no one's surprise, the kid's custodial grandparents (Nick Nolte and Martha Henry) aren't eager to give him up.

Director Olivier Assayas (Irma Vep) never stoops to manipulate us with addiction-recovery clichés, but what's left is a trilingual, transcontinental film about behaviors, not people. It's as carefully compiled as a case study, and about as inviting. (Assayas and Cheung famously signed their divorce papers on the set; whether this accounts for the film's pervasive chill will be for the biographers to decide.) Cheung won the best-actress prize at Cannes for her—admittedly faultless—performance as a woman whose personality has been distorted by a demonic cocktail of fame and heroin. But psychology only takes a viewer so far, and for most of the movie, I couldn't help but root for Nick Nolte to keep the kid safely hidden from the harpy. (That is, until I got a glimpse of the kid, one of the most irritatingly declamatory child actors I've seen in a long time.)

What makes Clean almost worthwhile is its precision imagery—the soothing glint of a red spotlight on a rock-club stage; the unsettling beauty of a harbor at dawn, smokestacks churning steadily in the distance. It's the work of a sensitive filmmaker (along with cinematographer Eric Gautier)—and by film, I mean celluloid. Light matters in Assayas's movies, and when you see the whispery pure glow that suffuses Clean, you'd be forgiven for indulging in a passing nostalgia for cinema's predigital days. ANNIE WAGNER

Stolen
dir. Rebecca Dreyfus

The one thing greater than a masterpiece in mystique is a stolen masterpiece. Johannes Vermeer's The Concert is the defining example. It vanished from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston before last call on St. Patrick's Day in 1990, when the city's legendary celebrations were still underway in nearby quarters. Two unarmed men pretending to be police officers snatched the rare, tender Vermeer painting of two women and an unseen man in the midst of an afternoon of chamber music—along with 12 other artworks, including Rembrandt's only seascape, The Storm on the Sea of Galilee—and 16 years of investigations and a $5 million reward haven't brought the works back. They may be lost forever.

Those are only the facts of the case. Pretty good start for a documentary film, Rebecca Dreyfus must have thought. She couldn't have known how good until she got going. The reactions to the theft only amplify its power. As Gardner's biographer Douglass Shand-Tucci tells Dreyfus, "The Gardner [Museum] is now touched with evil." It was always tinged with loss. Gardner (voiced by Blythe Danner) devoted her life to erecting it after her 2-year-old son died.

Devotion and intrigue drive the mostly elegant film (one slow, jerky close-up is a laughable exception). A parade of ex-cons suggests the art is in the Irish underworld, and one says the only way to get it back is if Senator Ted Kennedy calls the IRA and makes a deal. Two people cry, both men: Vermeer biographer Anthony Bailey and 45-year gallery attendant Frank DiMaria, who was a ward of the state until he was "adopted" by Gardner's spirit and her museum.

However, the clear hero is a man as sympathetic as the art is elusive: the noble 75-year-old art detective Harold Smith, who wears a bowler hat, an eye patch, and a prosthetic nose, and suffers from skin cancer that has him wearing different bandages on his face and hands from one scene to the next. He worked on the case until the week before he died last year, trying, in his quiet way, to make things whole again. JEN GRAVES

Overlord
dir. Stuart Cooper

Overlord is so strangely understated it's hard to know whether to recommend it. The plot is ordinary: A British infantryman kisses his trusty parents goodbye, fetches a copy of David Copperfield, trundles through boot camp, falls in love, and is less than heroically fed to the perilous beaches at Normandy. The film's construction isn't ordinary. The fictional narrative is told through meticulously distressed black-and-white footage from 1975, and it's supplemented with archival shots of various World War II machines and locations. The splicing is seamless: The only indication the film was produced by London's Imperial War Museum is the way it lingers tenderly over images of bombs falling airily over the countryside or whirling spiky-jawed tanks designed to chomp up barbed wire.

As the baby soldier Tom Beddows, Brian Stirner is endearing. ("I was going to ask you to keep one of the puppies," Tom writes home dolefully, the night before D-day. "But I don't think there's much point.") The girl (Julie Neesam) has no personality and badly plucked eyebrows, but her lack of affect pays off when Tom indulges in a ghoulish fantasy about losing his virginity after he's dead. Overlord is flat and odd and committed to a passive martyrdom that looks creepily old-fashioned, but there's something attractive about propaganda that couldn't even inspire you to put on your shoes. ANNIE WAGNER