Fluent French

The ninth Boston French Film Festival features the work of masters (Manoel De Oliveira, Jacques Rivette, Chantal Akerman) and veterans (Patrice Leconte, Claude Miller, Jacques Doillon) and the auspicious arrival of two clever young directors: Eugene Green and Isild Le Besco. As usual, sex -- both antic and erotic -- abounds. But there are also a significant number of kid-friendly movies, such as Richard Berry's "Moi Cesar," Le Besco's "Half-Price," and Green's "The Living World."

In such a well-programmed event, even the weak movies are entertaining. (The star-studded pileup "See How They Run" is worth some rubbernecking.) Here's an appraisal of a good portion of the 22-film roster, which opens Thursday night.

"Nickel and Dime": Jacky (Gerard Lanvin) hasn't been out of the joint a day, yet after a quick reimmersion in his old life, he's being pulled back into crime. Director and co-writer Sam Karmann wins your sympathy, cutting through all the thug cliches to the heart of his male characters' flaws, slashing away at their cool until there's nothing left but their self-destructive attraction to breaking the law. Karmann will be in attendance for the opening-night screening.

"Half-Price": The shortest, sweetest of the lot. Calling actress Isild Le Besco's first stint as a director a masterpiece would be too much, but OK, it's a tiny masterpiece. Focused on a boy and his two sisters, the film dances with itself, using all manners of impressionistic devices to communicate nothing in particular -- except the inside of children's psyches, where, for Le Besco, it's wildly dreamlike.

"La Petite Lili": Before a full discussion of Claude Miller's hokey and melodramatic update of Chekhov's "The Seagull" can get fully underway, there's this: Ludivine Sagnier nudity alert! Miller gets it out the way in the opening scene, so we can concentrate on more important things, like why Sagnier, who was the troublemaking slattern in "Swimming Pool," is still playing nubile ingenues. Here she's an actress dating a pretentious filmmaker (Robinson Stevenin) who's showing his latest work at a private screening for family and friends at a country estate. His mother (Nicole Garcia), another actress, denounces the work as boring. He flips out, but she's not wrong. Miller ("Alias Betty") gets further on Chekhov's coattails than he should with this collection of petulant artist caricatures.

"Eager Bodies": The festival's emotional high point. Xavier Giannoli's three-person psychodrama is a poisonous tangle of lust and compassion. Well under 30, Charlotte -- Laura Smet, who's devastating -- is diagnosed with lung cancer. She endures chemotherapy and the loss of her hair. But will she survive her suspicion that her forlorn boyfriend (Nicolas Duvauchelle) has been seeking refuge in the arms of her cousin? The soap opera you're trained to anticipate never materializes, and the movie gets deep under your skin and stays there as the relationships grow rawer and grimmer.

"The Living World": Compared with the realist titles in the lineup, Eugene Green's stylized fable is a movie from another planet -- and one the whole family can watch together without needing a shower afterward. Deadpan line readings from the four-person cast only enhance the strange enchantment. There's a murderous ogre out there in the forests, and he has a princess locked in her castle. To free her, the Lion Knight must slay the beast. The setting may be sylvan, but there's nothing natural about Green's staging, which is theatrical, economic, and dreamy.

"See How They Run": See how they run where? The French title of the fourth movie directed by actor Michel Blanc actually translates to something more like "Love Who You Want." Charlotte Rampling, Carole Bouquet, and Karin Viard have these thorns in their sides -- they're called husbands, and they're narcissists (well, the rich ones are). Based on a Joseph Connolly novel, the film luxuriates in the pampered and horny, including Clotilde Courau as a single mother who leaves her infant while she runs around the hotel with a Don Juan (Vincent Elbaz). She used to sleep with Rampling's hubby, played by Jacques Dutronc, who'll sleep with anyone. Blanc has cast himself as a paranoid husband who thinks his wife (Bouquet) is sleeping with Elbaz, too. You want the rug yanked from under these people in some Luis Bunuel magic trick, but only the less-well-off do any real suffering.

"Red Lights": Is Carole Bouquet aging backward? Like a lot of French actresses, as the years pass, she just gets more luminous. Some of her movies are a different story. In the new Cedric Kahn picture, she's stuck in another unsatisfying marriage to another pain-in-the-neck man. This time it's Jean-Pierre Darroussin. They play a couple heading to pick up their kids from camp. On the way, he keeps stopping at bars. Fed up, she hops on the train. The rest doesn't make much sense. Kahn made the equally ridiculous "L'ennui" in 1998, but that movie had real pathos and a dry but sincere performance from Charles Berling you could root for. This movie is sincerely dry.

"Monsieur N.": The festival's big period number is intermittently entertaining, focused almost exclusively on Napoleon's last years on the island of St. Helena, where he was kept under house arrest at Longwood fortress. Told partially from the point of view of a young British officer and with plenty of flashbacks, the film is vibrant and colorful, sometimes to its own detriment. There's a draggy love story and probably too much of Richard E. Grant, prissy as St. Helena's governor and Napoleon's jailer. But you do get a rarely glimpsed aspect of Napoleon (Philippe Torreton) in the doldrums.

"A Talking Picture": No kidding. But coming from Manoel De Oliveira, the gabbing on display serves an end. The 95-year-old director appears unstoppable, and he doesn't use an ounce of sex to pull it off. What begins as a history lesson between a mother and her wee daughter on a cruise ship turns into something a lot more fanciful, then plain shocking. And by "shocking" I don't mean the appearance of John Malkovich as the ship's captain and Catherine Deneuve as a ritzy guest. It's the ending -- which may pose a jarring metaphor of what's become of our sense of history.

"Work Hard, Play Hard": Philippe (Jeremie Renier) has just been hired to work for a big management consulting firm, and his first task is to cut workers from a company out in the provinces. Director and co-writer Jean-Marc Moutout captures the almost Faustian tug of working for the man, but the movie pairs its upstanding protagonist with a single mother (Cylia Malki) who ultimately exists to remind him that he isn't righteous enough. Those entrenched in the recent cinematic struggle of French laborers and executives might prefer the films of Laurent Cantet ("Time Out").

"The Story of Marie and Julien": This new number from Jacques Rivette ("Celine and Julie Go Boating," "La Belle Noiseuse") is the tale of a clockmaker (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) and the mysterious, occasionally catatonic woman (Emmanuelle Beart) he loves. The film has a healthy disregard for the logic of time -- clocks abound, but no one's watching them -- yet Beart's plight feels vague. Rivette's pacing can be lethargic -- "Marie and Julien" clocks in at 150 minutes -- and the formal and emotional surprises never quite pan out.

"Grande Ecole": This socially minded tryst-athon has its virtues. For one thing, the sexual power dynamic calls to mind Rainer Werner Fassbinder -- or Francois Ozon, who can be a glib, glossy Fassbinder. At an elite university, four pretty students and one pretty Arab groundskeeper explore the bounds of attraction. The film's sexual politics tend toward the cynical. Yet the excesses can be amusing. Look out for the Bastille Day fireworks that go off during sex, rather than instead of it.

Wesley Morris can be reached at wmorris@globe.com.