Even when I proclaim that much of “Casa de Mi Padre” is not funny on purpose, and that people who complain about that are missing the point — well, I might be missing the point too, right? Will Ferrell became rich and famous as an entertainer who makes people laugh, and the audience that wants to watch him push outside that box, into some anxious zone of post-Situationist conceptual art, is probably a lot smaller. But Ferrell has been moving in that direction for a while. I’d argue that his best bits in “Anchorman” or “Talladega Nights” or “The Other Guys” or even way back in “Old School” come when he stretches beyond conventional comedy into strange and uncomfortable places. (He also played a straight dramatic role last year, in the universally ignored alcoholism drama “Everything Must Go.”)

But let’s get back to my original question: Is “Casa de Mi Padre” brilliant or pointless? Indubitably it’s both, as Ron Burgundy might put it. It’s a parody of something so specific that it never quite existed in the first place: the Mexican telenovela plus the spaghetti western plus the straight-to-VHS action flicks of the ’70s, maybe. If you fell asleep in the hot-tub time machine and woke up stoned in 1982, this is the movie you’d find yourself watching on some UHF channel (right after the soccer match between Tigres and Toluca). Some of its gags absolutely fall flat — having a climactic action scene replaced with still photos of miniatures is pretty funny, while an on-screen note apologizing for it is not — but considered as a whole it’s a wonderful and hilarious phenomenon, most of it is executed to Dadaist perfection.

“Casa de Mi Padre” gets funnier as it goes along, especially if you’re paying enough attention to notice the constant continuity errors, editing glitches, mismatched musical cues and recycled backdrops. It’s funniest of all if you speak at least a little Spanish, the better to appreciate Ferrell’s perfectly stilted line readings — if you want to look at it this way, he’s playing a bad actor, playing a dumb but noble character, in another language — or the delicious supporting performances of Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna as a pair of slime-oozing narcotraficantes. I have no idea how “Casa de Mi Padre” will play with Latino and Latin American audiences, but as Rene Rodriguez’s largely sympathetic review in the Miami Herald suggests, they’re likely to get a lot more of the gags. (Initial release of this film is limited to 600 or so theaters, many of them in heavily Latino areas of the West and Southwest.)

Ferrell, Piedmont and Steele have faithfully captured a certain strain of ’70s and ’80s Mexican pop entertainment, in which the rise of the drug lords (fueled in their turn by Yankee greed) is contrasted with a highly sentimental depiction of the rugged and noble Mexican spirit. That spirit is here embodied in Ferrell’s stolid and none-too-bright Armando Alvarez, a rancher in the rural north who pines for the approval of his landowner papa (legendary Mexican film and TV actor Pedro Armendáriz Jr., in his final role) and yearns for a woman who will love the land and water and starlit skies as he does. Armando delivers this monologue straight into the camera, while inspirational music abruptly kicks into gear on the soundtrack and his father and his sleazy, sideburn-wearing brother Raul (Luna) shift uneasily on their feet. But Raul’s ultra-hot Mexico City girlfriend, Sonia (Genesis Rodriguez, an actual Mexican soap star), is overcome with emotion. If no one else notices that she’s the woman for Armando, she does.

How you respond to that scene might determine how you feel about “Casa de Mi Padre.” It’s hammy, shamelessly melodramatic and technically inept (all of that intentionally) — but it’s supposed to work on you anyway, if you’ll let it. Similarly, a barroom confrontation between Armando, Raul and the supremely evil drug lord called La Onza (Bernal), begins as pure shtick and eventually becomes an evisceration of United States drug and immigration policy that would be completely impermissible in an American film. (I can’t remember which one of them first refers to Americans as a race of “shit-eating monster babies,” because I was laughing too hard.)

That moment of biting social criticism comes and goes, as does the dynamite norteño musical number “Yo No Se,” performed by Ferrell with Adrian Martinez and Efren Ramirez (playing a pair of loyal-sidekick ranch hands). There’s a completely unmotivated and splatterific shootout at a wedding, which tragically interrupts an awesome Spanish cover of “Whiter Shade of Pale,” performed by Venezuelan pop star José Luis Rodríguez (aka “La Puma”). There’s a vision quest led by an outrageously fake animatronic white leopard, and loaded up with the psychedelic, pseudo-Aztec claptrap that’s such a central element in Mexican pop culture. Then there’s the completely schizophrenic depiction of Americans, who are corrupt and mendacious morons in one scene, and John Wayne white knights in the next. (This movie was made by a bunch of gringos, but they’ve done their pinche homework.)

Inevitably, people are comparing “Casa de Mi Padre” to “Death Proof,” the fake ’70s exploitation flick that was Quentin Tarantino’s half of “Grindhouse.” (I would also suggest “Rubber,” French director Quentin Dupieux’s meta-meditation on the no-budget American horror film.) In both cases, asking what the point is becomes an unanswerable Zen koan: If you’re posing the question, the movie already didn’t work for you. I think the point of “Casa de Mi Padre” is that a major Hollywood comedy star made a preposterous and delightful low-budget movie in Spanish, for no reason except that the absurdity of the premise appealed to him, and because he wants to push his celebrity in unexpected directions. But maybe it’s not even that complicated. Maybe it’s just that when Bernal’s unctuous drug lord makes a phone call from poolside, surrounded by girls in tiny bikinis, he uses exactly the right ultra-high-tech toy from 30-odd years ago, and it’s beautiful and funny and expresses a lot of things without saying a word, and that’s quite enough.

I’d like to claim that “The Kid With a Bike,” which is arguably sunnier and more accessible than previous Dardenne films, will bring the Belgian duo a larger American audience. But I’ve made those predictions before and been wrong. The Dardennes are celebrated auteurs in the Francophone world, having twice won the Palme d’Or at Cannes (for “Rosetta” in 1999 and “L’Enfant” in 2005), but they represent a strain of low-budget, social-realist cinema that has little traction in the United States, even on the indie fringe. If you’ve never seen any of the Dardennes’ movies, they’re likely to sound medicinal and non-entertaining no matter how much I insist otherwise — but once you see one, you’ll get it. The brothers create lean, elegant, often haunting fables about unglamorous characters in moments of crisis, facing enormous moral questions or matters of life and death. They generally shoot in and around their home city of Liège, a French-speaking metropolis near the Dutch and German borders, often exploring its inept criminal underworld and probing the weak spots in Europe’s decaying social democracy. (I don’t imagine the local tourist board is fond of them.)

Dardenne films have a distinctive rhythm; although they convey the feeling of real life, they are tightly edited and exciting dramas, where not a single second of screen time is wasted and every scene has a purpose. Their characters are constantly in motion, both physically and emotionally. In “The Kid With a Bike,” 11-year-old Cyril (played by the irresistible discovery Thomas Doret) is somewhere between a human turbine and a wild animal, with so much energy and desire in his pre-adolescent frame he can’t possibly contain it. Cinematographer Alain Marcoen’s camera flows alongside the characters, but never in a way that focuses your attention on technique. The Dardennes borrow plot twists and narrative beats from the world of thrillers, but invest them with a tragic potential we rarely see in actual thrillers. We’re constantly aware that the destiny of actual human beings — in this case, the entire life of a boy who has not yet entirely lost his innocence — rests on the outcome of an idiotic criminal scheme hatched by Belgian lowlifes.

When the story begins, Cyril has neither a dad nor a bike. He’s a nearly uncontrollable kid in a group home, ferociously dedicated to escaping and finding his dad, and completely immune to the mounting evidence that his father has bailed out and wants nothing to do with him. During one of his escape attempts, he tries to hide in a doctor’s office and winds up clinging to a woman named Samantha, played by the wonderful Cécile de France, a well-known French actress who is Belgian by birth. “Not so tight,” Samantha tells Cyril, as the youth counselors gradually pry him loose. “You can hold onto me, but not so tight.” That becomes the motto for their improbable relationship.

The Dardennes are great believers in the present tense, which can be difficult for viewers used to back story and psychological exposition. Cyril’s missing mother is never mentioned. (I suppose the possibilities are limited and obvious: She’s dead, she’s in prison, she ran away.) When Cyril and Samantha finally catch up with Cyril’s dad, Guy (played by Dardenne regular Jérémie Renier, in another of his blond, feckless dude roles), he has almost nothing to say for himself. He’s working in a restaurant across town, and has made no effort to contact Cyril. Yeah, he moved without leaving so much as a phone number. Yeah, he sold Cyril’s beloved bike to some guy at a gas station, to raise a little cash. He doesn’t bother apologizing: He was “in the shit,” financially speaking, and he tells Samantha that seeing Cyril just stresses him out. As deadbeat dads in movies go, Guy’s pretty much the prince of the tribe. He doesn’t even have an unbeatable heroin habit (like the guy Renier played in “Lorna’s Silence,” the Dardennes’ last film) or gambling debts to gangsters or whatever. He’s just a total loser.

For that matter, what makes Samantha, a single and childless hairdresser with middle-class aspirations, take such a sudden parental interest in a thoroughly un-housebroken kid who nearly choked her on their first encounter? (Among many other efforts to make amends to Cyril for his crappy life, she tracks down his bike and buys it back again.) I guess the point of “The Kid With a Bike” is that questions like that matter a lot less than the question of what Samantha and Cyril are going to do now. And the movie’s second half sees Samantha locked in an increasingly dangerous competition for Cyril against a neighborhood gang leader named Wes (Egon Di Mateo), one of the Dardennes’ patented low-rent thugs. A charismatic, semi-tough teenager with a car, a PlayStation and a mini-fridge full of beer and soda, Wes moves right in on this fatherless kid’s obvious weak spot, seducing him into a criminal scheme that’s both cruel and stupid, a bad idea doomed to go wrong.

If the brief, sunny idyll of Cyril and Samantha’s life together is interrupted by an act of terrible violence, this time around the Dardennes are more focused on the redemptive possibilities of their Dostoevskian universe than on its bleakest pits of despair. Cyril makes a bad mistake and must pay for it, and by falling for the wrong substitute parent he injures the only person who’s ever offered him unconditional love. But he turns out to be the hero of a fairy tale after all, as well as the toughest kid you’d ever want to meet, and he’s better than most adults at admitting his mistakes and adjusting to reality. If Cyril has what remains of his innocence stripped away from him during the denouement of “The Kid With a Bike,” he still has the moral freedom symbolized by that bicycle — and he still has a fairy godmother who hasn’t quite given up on him.

“The Kid With a Bike” opens this week in New York and Los Angeles, with wider release to follow.

“Detachment” was the biggest conversation piece at last spring’s Tribeca Film Festival, and is finally getting a theatrical release thanks to the festival’s distribution arm. It’s an easy film to pick apart, a scattershot, melodramatic would-be epic set in and around a New York high school, with an ensemble cast headed by Oscar-winner Adrien Brody, who plays a substitute teacher struggling with his own barren emotional life. (It also features Christina Hendricks, James Caan, Marcia Gay Harden and Blythe Danner, along with Liu.) This is an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink movie, in several genres at once, with a level of ambition that suggests Fellini mixed with Orson Welles. (I’m not claiming it hits that mark, necessarily.) Kaye blends animated sequences along with dreams, memories and fantasies, snippets of documentary interviews with real-life teachers, dogmatic lectures about the failings of our society, and quotations from Albert Camus and Edgar Allan Poe. Carl Lund’s screenplay hits a lot of flat notes and the acting is uneven. Ultimately I didn’t care about the multifarious flaws of “Detachment” — I was swept along by the spectacular visual journey and the wrenching emotional experience. People will either love “Detachment” or hate it, and either way it provides powerful testimony to the unrivaled passion and undiminished craft of Tony Kaye, whose notoriety within the movie industry is matched by his near-total invisibility to the general public.

If you’ve heard of Kaye at all, it’s almost certainly because of his 1998 debut feature “American History X,” which is now a revered cult film but was a historic flop on its initial release, plagued by an entertaining and highly public three-way feud between Kaye, star Edward Norton Jr. and distributor New Line Cinema. Kaye tried to get his name taken off the film and replaced with the credit “Humpty Dumpty” (even threatening to legally change his name to that effect). He reportedly suggested — after the film was shot, edited and in the can — commissioning a new script from Caribbean poet Derek Walcott and starting over again from scratch.

Once you start with the Tony Kaye stories, you don’t want to stop. He then spent $100,000 of his own money on ads in the Hollywood trade papers abusing Norton and the film’s producers. Which I guess echoes the time, years earlier, when— as a nearly unknown director of British TV commercials — he bought an ad in a London broadsheet announcing that “Tony Kaye Is the Greatest English Director Since Hitchcock.” Kaye once shot more film for a 30-second Volvo commercial than Woody Allen had used in making “Hannah and Her Sisters.” At the peak of his advertising success in the mid-’90s, he used to buy one of every item in the seasonal Comme des Garçons catalog. As he told a British interviewer a few years ago, “I did a lot of very insane things. A lot of very, very, very insane things.”

With his filmmaking career in ruins after the “American History X” debacle, Kaye briefly came under the wing of Marlon Brando, who hired him to film a series of seminars Brando was leading with Michael Jackson, Sean Penn and Jon Voight. (Of all the unfinished Kaye projects, that one may be the weirdest.) But Kaye’s penchant for showing up at Los Angeles nightclubs dressed as Osama bin Laden — in the fall of 2001 — succeeded in alienating even the legendarily antisocial Brando, who died before the two could reconcile. So began Kaye’s period in the outer wilderness of the entertainment industry, before he began to work his way back by completing his memorably gruesome 2007 abortion documentary “Lake of Fire,” most of which had actually been shot during the culture wars of the Clinton administration.

I’m not Tony Kaye’s shrink and I’m not sure it’s worth speculating about why he did all the crazy things he did; when I interviewed him at the time “Lake of Fire” was released, he explained it all as a kind of act, in emulation of idols like Erich von Stroheim or Francis Ford Coppola. “All the work of the directors I really liked,” he said, “those directors seemed to be tyrannical, egotistical, arrogant, mad. They were my gods, so I thought, ‘Well, I’d better be like that.’ I’m not really like that.” That sounds like clear-sighted rearview analysis, but I’m not sure it’s adequate. When I ran into Kaye last year in the Tribeca festival’s press room, I didn’t recognize him. When we met in 2007 he was bald and clean-shaven, but by 2011 he had long hair and a shaggy beard in the mad-monk Rasputin vein, and was approaching journalists with a hand-lettered paper sign that read, “I HAVE A SPEECH PROBLEM. MY NAME IS TONY KAYE (‘American History X’). I WANT TO TALK TO YOU ABOUT MY MOVIE ‘DETACHMENT.’” I have to ascribe that to the basic Tony Kaye modality that’s half ironic and half sincere, partway between performance art and publicity stunt. (It’s true that Kaye had a speech impediment in childhood and says he avoids talking on the phone to this day. But he can conduct an ordinary conversation perfectly well.)

Yes, it would be great if we could talk about “Detachment.” Kaye is such an intriguing and irresistible character that he throws his own movies into the shade, and that’s not serving his interests or anybody else’s. In announcing himself as the greatest English director since Hitchcock back in 1980-whatever, Kaye was being an arrogant jackass, but his insight into his own potential wasn’t incorrect. In some alternate universe a few ticks away from ours, things went a little differently before or during or after “American History X” and Kaye is now widely seen as one of the greatest living mainstream filmmakers, along with Scorsese and the Coen brothers and David Fincher and whomever else you’d like to nominate.

But that universe isn’t this one, and it’s anybody’s guess how much of a comeback Tony Kaye can mount at age 58, with the manner of a 19th-century European anarchist and a heavily allegorical high school drama that’s going to sound, the more I describe it to you, like about seven (or 17) other movies you’ve already seen. “Detachment” has a terrific central performance from Brody, probably his best since winning an Academy Award for “The Pianist.” What became of Brody’s career is probably worthy of another article. How did this sly, seductive, intelligent actor with the impressive honker slide so far and so fast from Oscar-land that he’s selling electric razors on TV, and trying to make a comeback alongside Tony Kaye? Many of the other elements in the film, however — the sympathetic fellow teacher Brody’s character starts dating (Christina Hendricks), the hardass but well-meaning principal (Marcia Gay Harden), the teen hooker Brody adopts off the street, with predictable and semi-disastrous consequences (newcomer Sami Gayle) — seem like stock archetypes, at least until you actually sit down and watch the film.

I’m absolutely not promising that you’re going to love “Detachment”; it’s a frustrating film in many ways, but one that plays to my admitted prejudices (which include tremendous affection for both Kaye and Brody). But you won’t regret watching it, partly because Tony Kaye has more cinematic talent than a great many more famous directors, but even more because of what he can do with it, even in a highly imperfect movie that uses the pointless but noble struggle of high school to stand in for lots of other pointless and noble forms of struggle, like making art and being alive and trying to pursue the things you love even (or especially) when the world is ignoring you. What I take away from Tony Kaye’s struggle is that he may have been a difficult personality — and may still be one — and expended way too much energy early in his career on behaving like a jerk. But he has never, ever, surrendered to cynicism or callousness. He cares passionately and prodigiously about this movie and everything else he’s ever done, arguably too much. If he has thrown away a promising career as a result, then his failure is better than most people’s success.

“Detachment” opens this week in New York; March 23 in Los Angeles; and March 30 in Dallas, Palm Springs, Calif., Phoenix and San Diego, with more cities to follow. It’s also available nationwide on-demand from many cable and satellite providers, VUDU and iTunes.

At this point, the success of the “Hunger Games” film franchise seems like a sure thing. Questions of how big and how much remain to be answered, and should occupy accountants, semioticians and breathless entertainment-industry reporters for several years to come. But the question of where “The Hunger Games” came from is arguably more interesting than the question of where it’s going. If you think that Collins’ ingenious yarn about a dystopian future North America where enslaved teenagers are forced to fight each other to the death — as both televised entertainment and a form of social control — feels vaguely familiar, you’re not alone.

If you prowl the universe of online science-fiction aficionados, you can discover entire constellations of theory, speculation and accusation around “The Hunger Games,” much of it focused on the idea that Collins was influenced by (or simply ripped off) the similarly themed Japanese cult franchise “Battle Royale.” First an Orwell-goes-pulp 1999 novel by Koushun Takami, then a manga (or graphic novel) and then a splatterific and highly effective 2000 film directed by Kinji Fukasaku, “Battle Royale” concerns a group of junior-high students abducted by the Japanese government, transported to an isolated location, and forced to hunt each other down.

For some fans of “Battle Royale,” Collins stands convicted of plagiarism — and, still worse, of plagiarizing their beloved gore-fest while wimping out on the explicit violence and inserting a girl as the hero. One especially enlightened comment I encountered described “The Hunger Games” as “the pansy version (or the ‘Twilight’ version) of ‘Battle Royale.’” But I’m not here to poke holes in random ignorant teenage straw men, and in fairness most of the Internet discussion of the relationship between “The Hunger Games” and “Battle Royale” (and “The Running Man,” and many other things besides) has been far more nuanced than that. It doesn’t take a Ph.D. in literature or history to grasp that both works have their roots in long-standing traditions of science fiction, social satire and mythology, and that both endeavor to be simultaneously contemporary and ancient.

Suzanne Collins has said that she’d never heard of “Battle Royale” until after she had completed the first “Hunger Games” book, and I can see no reason to doubt her. When you get down to granular details, the two stories start to feel quite different: While Collins’ Hunger Games are both a tool of social control and an elaborate public display dressed up with a veneer of fairness, and are broadcast throughout the nation as near-mandatory viewing, Takami’s Battle Royale is a clandestine military experiment conducted in total secrecy. As I see it, both authors were inspired by Orwell’s “1984″ and by the real-life history of totalitarianism, but in different directions: Collins imagines a society of total spectacle, in which entertainment becomes an aspect of state power, while Takami imagines a police state that operates in darkness, holding each individual’s life in its fist.

In fact, Collins herself has cited almost too many inspirations for “The Hunger Games,” from the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur — in which seven Athenian boys and seven Athenian girls are sent into the Cretan labyrinth as sacrifices to the bull-headed monster — to the gladiatorial games of the Roman Empire to television coverage of the Iraq War to “Survivor” and its many offshoots. All of that is in there, to be sure. But to some degree she’s supplying ex post facto, overly intellectual analysis of something that’s really much simpler.

“The Hunger Games” taps into a vibrant current of pop culture and indeed of Western civilization in general, one that never really runs dry. It’s the idea that our species remains cruel and barbarous at heart, that the strong will always rule the weak by whatever means necessary, and that our collective obsession with sports and games and other forms of manufactured entertainment is a flimsy mask for sadism and voyeurism. Collins’ only real innovations to this formula are a post-Buffy female action hero at its center — clearly a crucial component of her success — and a slick, propulsive packaging with very little scene description or social context. (The first-person, present-tense, limited-omniscient narration of “The Hunger Games” feels more like a movie treatment than a conventional novel.)

If Collins didn’t rip off “Battle Royale,” there are all kinds of books and films from the past few decades that might have helped shape “The Hunger Games,” whether consciously or not, or that at the very least develop similar ideas and themes. One could go still further afield, beyond the action thrillers and science-fiction movies I’ve listed here. (Some people see echoes of William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” and Orson Scott Card’s “Ender’s Game” in “Hunger Games,” for instance. Sure, maybe, a little.) Here’s my arithmetical formula: Take the universe of “Logan’s Run” and “The Running Man,” the hero of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” the setting of “Survivor” and the action of “The Most Dangerous Game,” and then add the overall story arc of “Gladiator” or even “Spartacus.” Sounds like a winner, right?

Here are a few of the most obvious precursors, ancestors and cousins of “The Hunger Games.” I don’t view this as in any way an exhaustive or definitive list. Want to make a case for Italian director Elio Petri’s 1965 “The 10th Victim,” in which Ursula Andress must go after Marcello Mastroianni with a high-powered shotgun, in order to please her corporate sponsor? I’ve never seen it — but it sounds awesome!

“The Long Walk” (novel, 1979) As Stephen King archly observed in his 2008 EW review of “The Hunger Games,” there were two novels by “some guy named Bachman” (along with Takami’s “Battle Royale,” which he also mentioned) that described and inhabited the same “TV badlands” as Collins’ book. Richard Bachman was of course a pseudonym used by King early in his career; in fact, “The Long Walk,” although not published until 1979, was reportedly the first novel King ever completed. It concerns a deadly competition in a nightmarish America of the future, in which 100 teenage boys walk south from the Canadian border, without stopping, until only one is left alive. The melodrama of constantly shifting teen alliances, the relentless cruelty of the game and the backdrop of an amorphous fascist government are all strikingly similar to that of “Hunger Games.” Indeed, one has to wonder whether King’s mild irritation with Collins’ book, which he compared to “one of those shoot-it-if-it-moves videogames” and accused of “authorial laziness,” has a personal component.

“The Running Man” (novel, 1982, and movie, 1987) This is the second of the Bachman novels mentioned by King in his “Hunger Games” review — and boy, is it a doozy. Set in a 2025 version of the United States on the edge of financial and social collapse, where participation in a kill-or-be-killed game show offers impoverished citizens an instant payday, this book displays King at his most anarchic and subversive. (Even a decade-plus after 9/11, the climactic scene of this book will shock you.) While the basic setup of “The Running Man” is somewhat similar to that of “The Hunger Games,” King is pursuing a much darker and more brutal variety of social satire. Paul Michael Glaser’s delirious, trash-classic 1987 movie version, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as the Running Man who becomes an accidental celebrity, is only loosely based on the King/Bachman novel. (Supposedly it was inspired by a German TV show, itself inspired by a Robert Sheckley novella.) But it prefigures “The Hunger Games” in all sorts of ways, notably the supporting cast of grotesque characters and the sophisticated interplay between the game’s audience, creators and contestants.

“The Most Dangerous Game” (1932) “Hunt first the enemy, then the woman,” says Russian expatriate Count Zaroff (Leslie Banks) to the famous American hunter and author (Joel McCrea) who’s been marooned on a remote island. Mwoo-ha-ha-ha! The influence of this schlocky but juicy pre-Code hit (which is now freely available on the Internet) on “The Hunger Games” and all other humans-huntin’-humans novels and movies is probably overstated. But on a thematic or psychological level, you can certainly argue that it introduced various ancient storytelling elements — physical isolation, barbarism masquerading as civilization, one-on-one physical combat as both a brutal and noble pursuit — in a modern context.

“Rollerball” (1975) Although drenched in machismo, from its eponymous ultraviolent sport to the lead performance of James Caan and the direction of Norman Jewison, this thoroughly engrossing science-fiction masterpiece — arguably the high point of the dystopian ’70s wave — presages “The Hunger Games” in many ways and on many levels. I would argue that it offers a far more plausible vision of the human future, in which the nation-state has essentially withered away, to be replaced by multinational corporations, but everybody has their own favorite apocalypse. As in “The Hunger Games,” the sport of rollerball is meant both to sate collective blood lust and to crush all thoughts of individual initiative and resistance, and as eventually happens in Collins’ trilogy — spoiler alert! — one winner eventually becomes big enough to throw the game back into the overlords’ faces. (I’m not going to insult you by bringing up the 2002 remake, except to suggest that it was an official production of the National Rollerball League and their corporate masters.)

“Logan’s Run” (1976) In terms of plot, this classic of post-’60s youth-oriented sci-fi, with Michael York and Jenny Agutter as young lovers in a world where no one lives past 30, is clearly the grandparent of last year’s modest Justin Timberlake hit “In Time.” But the combination of love story and apocalypse feels a bit “Hunger Games”-ish, as does the sense that the dictatorial old world is a paper tiger ready to be swept away by the wind of youthful rebellion. Let’s take a moment to celebrate the news that the long-contemplated Hollywood remake is apparently back in production, with Ryan Gosling and his “Drive” director, Nicolas Winding Refn.

“Series 7: The Contenders” (2001) It was still early in the reality-TV era when writer-director Daniel Minahan’s dystopian spoof premiered at Sundance and went on to slight, fringe-y acclaim. Let’s consider: “Series 7″ depicts a murderous reality show (“Real People in Real Danger!”) whose contestants are selected at random in a nationwide lottery. It’s evidently impossible to refuse (although the mechanism of control is never explained), although if you win the game you can retire to a celebrity afterlife. Unlike any other entry in this genre that I can find, it has a female hero, although Dawn, the protagonist of “Series 7,” is an adult woman and eight months’ pregnant to boot. Admittedly, “Series 7″ goes to some whacked-out media-satire zones that “The Hunger Games” never even imagines (not to mention completely falling apart in the last act). But I’m calling major unacknowledged influence here; this movie was just big enough that Suzanne Collins almost certainly heard about it, but also obscure enough that everybody had pretty much forgotten it by 2008.

“The Condemned” (2007) A semi-notorious box-office flop (that then cleaned up on home video), “The Condemned” stars WWE wrestler Stone Cold Steve Austin as one of a group of 10 death-row convicts who must battle to the death in the Australian outback, as part of an illegal televised sport. Exactly how you broadcast an illegal sport I don’t know, since I haven’t seen the movie and don’t intend to. This was released only months before the publication of “The Hunger Games,” and I’m not seriously positing a connection, except on the Zeitgeist level. Several critics at the time compared this movie to “Battle Royale” and “The Most Dangerous Game,” and there you go.

Furthermore, “Footnote” has two of the best performances I’ve seen in world cinema over the past year: One from Shlomo Bar Aba (apparently best known in Israel as a stand-up comic and stage actor), playing the aging, bitter philologist Eliezer Shkolnik, and the other from Lior Ashkenazi, one of the country’s best known movie stars, as his son and rival, Uriel. Both men teach at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, but all is not well between them. In the opening scene, as Uriel thanks his father in a loquacious speech accepting his nomination to a prestigious academy, Eliezer can barely listen. He sits, hunched over and frowning, as if suffering from gout, headache and intestinal cramps all at the same time.

Eliezer embodies the patient, painstaking and utterly unsexy discipline of philological research, piecing through dozens or hundreds of ancient Talmudic scrolls in search of an authentic text — or rather, authentic bits of text, since hoping to re-create the whole thing is too grandiose. (Let me admit that I cannot possibly be an impartial consumer of this story: My father was a philologist, albeit in the quite different but just as geeky realm of Celtic languages.) Uriel, on the other hand, is a New Age-flavored rising star, both inside and outside the academy. As Cedar shows us in an amusing, partly animated montage, he is invited around the world to give talks on the social and moral issues raised by the Talmud. He makes guesses, speculates freely, aims his words at a wide popular audience and attracts wide-eyed graduate students who hang on his every word. If his father is a garrulous, uncompromising old bastard, Uriel is a bit of a pompous ass.

Cedar, an American-born Israeli filmmaker whose last work was the claustrophobic “Beaufort” (also an Oscar nominee), about a group of Israeli soldiers holed up in a one-time Crusader fort during the Lebanon war, has a genuine gift for atmosphere and dialogue. The basic comedy of the tense relationship between Eliezer and Uriel is sharply observed, and has a bristly, bitter undertone that isn’t funny at all. The outrageous plot twist that upends their relationship is both dreadful and hilarious, and also entirely too believable (since it derives from bureaucratic error). Let’s just say that Uriel is called upon to make an unexpected sacrifice for his father, which then blows up in his face, and the two men are left to wonder how much of their family life they’ve destroyed in the pursuit of academic glory. Does the Talmud feature a particular anecdote illustrating the principle that no good deed goes unpunished?

There are some distinctive moments of edgy, slapstick humor that will probably have particular resonance for Israeli viewers: A secret meeting held in a government office so small that everyone in the room must stand up whenever anyone enters or leaves, or the constant presence of security checkpoints and armed guards, who seem to have a particular fascination with the beleaguered, Job-like Eliezer. Both actors are tremendous: Bar Aba has the air of a near-boiling teakettle or an unexploded bomb, while Ashkenazi’s Uriel looks on with a mixture of bafflement, exhaustion and reluctant affection. Furthermore, “Footnote” is an Israeli film that has nothing to do with suicide bombings or cross-border invasions or the legacy of the Holocaust (except perhaps at several philosophical removes), and one with an acrid quality all its own.

“Footnote” is now playing in New York and opens March 16 in Los Angeles, with wider release to follow.

Made during World War II in defiance of the collaborationist Vichy regime’s restrictions, and premiered in Paris a few months after the Liberation, “Children of Paradise” came to be seen as a symbol of the unquenchable and distinctive quality of French culture. Although a tale of backstage skulduggery, debauchery and romance in the Parisian theatrical world circa 1830 would seem to have nothing to do with the realities of life under Nazi occupation — which was why Carné could make the film in the first place — “Children of Paradise” is full of coded meanings. Early in the movie, Garance, the cynical and mysterious femme fatale at the center of the story, played by French superstar Arletty, is arrested on suspicion of stealing a rich man’s watch. She’s released, thanks to the hilarious nonverbal testimony of street mime Baptiste Deburau (Jean-Louis Barrault), who is fatefully smitten with her. (Needless to say, Garance is not entirely innocent, of the theft or of flirting with Baptiste or anything else you care to name.) When the policeman tells her she’s free to go — “Vous êtes libre” — she tosses her head and replies, “J’adore la liberté.” No French viewer, now or then, could possibly miss the significance.

There’s no point denying that “Children of Paradise” — the title refers to the cheapest, uppermost seats in a theater, known in that era as le paradis — presents some challenges to contemporary viewers. It’s in black-and-white, of course, and everything about the sets and costumes and compositions and occasionally forced backstage antics is redolent of a bygone era. Some people will simply find the whole package too off-putting, and that’s not a moral failing. But if you’re willing to give this landmark of cinema history a try (or if you’ve seen it before and remember it as scratchy, faded and ancient-looking, as all previously available prints and digital versions have been) then you simply can’t miss this gorgeous new restoration from the French studio Pathé. Laboriously scanned and remastered from the badly damaged original camera negative and other early sources using a high-resolution 4K digital process, this “Children of Paradise” has a level of brilliance, tonality and detail — and as a result, an intimacy and humanity — that was never previously possible.

As a result, if you give this movie time to work on you, the elements that seem overly artificial or impossibly distant from our own time fade into insignificance, and you’re left with a complicated and wonderful romantic drama that’s full of surprises. I’ll be honest and say that after 20 minutes I felt a little fidgety — but then the time flew past, and I was utterly lost. When the movie ended, nearly three hours later, I was startled. I’d happily have watched it again the next day. “Children of Paradise” is like a Balzac novel rendered into cinema, full of dramatic transformations and unexpected revelations: Rivals in love see their rivalry play out onstage, and then become the rival stage stars of their age, while remaining affectionate friends; the lovable hero is revealed as a dreamer and coward, the vain philanderer as a man capable of nobility and self-sacrifice, and the criminal villain as a figure of cruel but indisputable integrity. But Jacques Prévert’s screenplay has no literary source — he based it upon extensive research, and most of the characters are historical — and “Children of Paradise” is a work of cinema first and foremost, magnificently photographed by Roger Hubert and delivering at least three or four of the greatest acting performances in French film history.

Garance, played by Arletty with a sort of vulpine, ferocious intelligence, is not so much a great beauty or great lover or great actress as she is a survivor. “Children of Paradise” is arguably not really Garance’s story, although she’s the spoke at the center of the wheel, but the story of four men who love her but for different reasons cannot have her. Prévert’s dialogue doesn’t give her much chance to express her biography or inner life, but Arletty makes the most of it. When Garance tells Baptiste that she grew up in hardscrabble Ménilmontant — a working-class neighborhood identified with rowdy nightlife and left-wing politics — and that her mother died when she was young, he murmurs sympathetically, “So you were all alone.” She gives him a long look that seems to be equal parts pity, contempt and yearning and remarks that 15-year-old girls in places like that don’t remain alone for long.

That scene, in fact, sums up the “poetic realism” of Carné and Prévert’s approach in a nutshell. Baptiste is an innocent, a tremendous talent weighed down by ideals. He believes in true love, and so in his own way does aspiring Shakespearean Frédérick Lemaître (Pierre Brasseur), a vain and ambitious serial seducer who steals Garance away from Baptiste when offered the tiniest opening. Around this central triangle hover two seemingly ruthless men: the quasi-anarchist writer and criminal Lacenaire (Marcel Herrand), who professes to believe in nothing and no one, and the Count de Montray (Louis Salou), who believes only in money, power and aristocratic honor. But they are evidently in thrall to Garance as well — and despite everything life has taught her about the uselessness and impracticability of love, she of course ultimately can’t help falling hard for one of the four men (the one she can’t have).

As the undoubted apex of French studio filmmaking before it collapsed in the postwar years, “Children of Paradise” represents a road not taken for big-budget movies. (It occurs to me as I write that the closest American cognate, on various levels, is “Gone With the Wind.” Take it away, film scholars!) It violates contemporary Hollywood norms not just through its old-fashioned affect, but also because it’s a grand entertainment aimed at adult sensibilities that strives for both emotional sweep and complicated moral intelligence. None of the characters is quite what he or she seems to be on the surface; if you find the performances of Brasseur and Herrand overly mannered, for instance, it’s because they’re playing egotistical but uncertain young men who are putting on airs and puffing themselves up. Barrault is far more appealing as the tender-hearted and large-spirited Baptiste, but that too is deceptive; as we learn in the harrowing final scene, Baptiste’s romantic idealism conceals a level of cruelty and selfishness that makes the lecherous Frédérick and the murderous Lacenaire look like models of chivalry.

It’s patently unfair to compare a great work of novelistic, dramatic and cinematic craft like “Children of Paradise” to the hidebound American romantic comedy of the 21st century, which remains locked into a formula that has changed only superficially in 80 years. It’s a little like complaining that “Bridget Jones’s Diary” isn’t “Anna Karenina.” Still, in the Paris of 1945 “Children of Paradise” was an enormous popular hit — it didn’t gain its critical reputation as a masterpiece until later — which suggests that you don’t always have to spoon-feed audiences the nebulous, happy-ever-after version of romantic love for them to love the movie. Maybe the film’s success was a product of the moment; like Garance riding away down the Boulevard of Crime, Parisians had had their hearts broken and survived. But this movie is both a delicious entertainment on a grand scale and a subtle essay in the most painful and noble aspects of human nature, and its operatic tale of drama and heartbreak can sweep you away now as much as ever.

The newly restored version of “Children of Paradise” opens this week at Film Forum in New York, and also plays March 10 only at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco. Dates in Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle and elsewhere will follow, with home-video release to be announced.