• = highly recommended

What Jackie Knew

Moshe Ivgy plays a Tel Aviv literature professor stuck in a loveless marriage and struggling with midlife, an overactive libido, and a bad case of writer’s block. Things only get worse when the affair he’s having with a beautiful, soulful former student (Yael Abecassis) begins to founder. At first glance, this wistful romantic comedy seems to have taken as its muse Woody Allen in his Annie Hall mode. Fortunately, writer-director Michal Bat-Adam is interested in more than celebrating male arrested development, and the film’s glibness gives way to a richer and more emotionally honest take on relationships. In Hebrew with subtitles. 87 min. (RP) (Landmark, 5:00)

Distant

This creepily compelling film unfolds with the disordered logic of a fever dream, as a 13-year-old girl follows a blood trail that leads from her first period to an Afghan boy shot by drug dealers who’ve used him to smuggle coke. Dutch director Paula van der Oest, whose Zus & Zo was nominated for an Oscar for best foreign film, coolly pushes her heroine into extreme displays of teen angst as she and her “patient” flee a persistent assassin. Along their weird, picaresque journey they disguise themselves as handicapped sisters in matching first-communion gowns and later land in a deserted 15th-century Luxembourg town house, where they experiment with sex and drugs. Laurien van den Broeck’s masterful unblinking performance transcends the uneasy all-English dialogue; her costar, who speaks no European language, stays largely silent. 90 min. (RS) (Music Box, 7:15)

Shorts 1: Twisted

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This heartfelt but muddled farce from Bosnian filmmaker Pjer Zalica falls well short of its models, Emir Kusturica’s Underground and Milos Forman’s The Fireman’s Ball. When the corrupt mayor of a Bosnian village learns that President Clinton is scheduled to visit, he and the townspeople scramble to erect a facade of communal respectability, even disguising the prostitutes as folksingers. Despite the proliferation of half-baked subplots and a grossly underdeveloped love story, the film retains a rollicking energy and a corrosive edge. In Serbo-Croatian with subtitles. 105 min. (AK) (Music Box, 9:30)