The French new wave had run its course even before Jean-Luc Godard became a Maoist. But its heady influence and stylistic exuberance can still be felt across the cinematic globe. Filmmakers as diverse as Quentin Tarantino and Wong Kar-wai took much of their filmmaking ethos from the nouvelle vague, particularly early-to-late-'60s Godard. (I guess Pauline Kael was wrong when she predicted that nobody would dare follow in Godard's footsteps.) The latest movie to emerge swathed in the romantic fatalism and go-for-broke experimentation of the new wave hails from a most unlikely source. First-time writer-director Joachim Trier's Reprise may be Norwegian by nationality, but it's internationalist to the core.

One of the most accomplished and stirring debut efforts in recent memory, Reprise is, of course, beholden to Godard. Yet Francois Truffaut, particularly his 1962 masterpiece Jules and Jim, exerts just as strong an influence. Like so many of the cinephilic reveries that emerged from France 40-plus years ago with their impassioned dialectic between form and content, unconventional sexual couplings and reverence for the printed word, Trier and co-writer Eskil Vogt have chosen young men and literature as their conjoined subjects.

An alternate title for Reprise could be Portrait of Young Men as Artists, which, considering the near-Joycean density of its flood of words and images, makes a kind of sense. The film opens as boyhood friends Erik (Espen Klouman-Hoiner) and Philip (Anders Danielsen Lie) are preparing to mail their first novels out to potential publishers. What happens next is a matter of conjecture. Voiceover narration — a la Alfonso Cuaron's Y Tu Mama Tambien, another movie indebted to the French new wave — fills in some of the cracks, but trying to decipher reality from fantasy is as futile as it is beside the point.

Time becomes as relative a concept as "truth." Whether the events chronicled in Reprise are fact, fiction, nightmare or dream, Erik and Phillip's literary and romantic misadventures have the sting of real-life experience. Trier's non-linear approach to narrative structure is as Godardian as his melancholy lyricism (and playfulness) recalls vintage Truffaut. Women, naturally, are involved, particularly a lissome beauty named Kari (Viktoria Winge) whose resemblance to onetime Godard wife/muse Anna Karina is surely intentional. An attempt by Philip to rekindle his romance with Kari by returning to Paris — a city revered by both lovers and intellectuals — disastrously backfires, leading to his mental meltdown. Like much of Reprise, it's a tragedy that's laugh-out-loud funny, and a comedy guaranteed to make you cry.

One of the glories of the nouvelle vague was the thrill of infinite possibility you experienced while basking in a new film by Godard or Truffaut. Reprise brings back that same sense of discovery and exhilaration. Maybe that's why I found it so exquisitely moving and deeply nostalgic. — Milan Paurich

Reprise: Opens Friday at the Cedar Lee Theater, 2163 Lee Rd., Cleveland Heights, 440-564-2034, clevelandcinemas.com.

Planet B-Boy

Breakdance, we're told, is one of the four cornerstones of hip-hop culture, alongside turntabling, graffiti tagging and rap (other documentaries actually told me there are five cornerstones; guess messing with stupid suburban whitey film critics' heads makes it six). But soon after breakdance broke out in the mid-'80s (drawing inspiration from everything from kung-fu movies to the mad choreography of James Brown), it became rapidly commercialized, camped up and kitschified. Sights such as Ronald and Nancy Reagan beamingly beholding an onstage breakdance spectacle did the cultural equivalent of a drive-by to the art's street cred (the documentary doesn't choose to mention feature films on the level of Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo, but I'd suspect that Hollywood was even more guilty). Breakdancing thus fell from favor, except for pockets of grassroots devotees, or "b-boys," mainly outside the US. They seem almost universally male and more or less marginalized and "at risk" in their given societies (wait through the end credits for a clumsy PSA on that). In the 1990s some enterprising Germans decided to stage an international breakdancing competition World Cup — the award plaques actually look like Domino's Pizza boxes — in the hamlet of Braunschweib.

Planet B-Boy first assures us with quick, eye-filling visits around the globe that break-dance is not dead. Behold the incredible athleticism of the Japanese troupe Ichigeki. From the North African-colonized town of Chelles, outside Paris, hails the troupe Phase T, with a scene-stealer in the form of a precocious little white kid called Lil Kev (his politically incorrect mother, obviously a savory find for the filmmakers, proceeds to make Don Imus-type statements over anxiety at her small son mixing with big black men). South Korea is a latecomer to the b-boy scene, yet has compensated with two especially world-class crews, Last for One and Gamblerz. In 2005 they all converge on Braunschweig in a spirit of high-energy competition and fellowship. Well, maybe not quite total fellowship. An American team member, sensing the hostility, complains he feels like he's accused of personally electing Bush.

The dazzling dance-offs (and a terrific remix-heavy soundtrack) are reason enough for this documentary to exist, but a recurring theme in Planet B-Boy nonetheless emerges, the one summed up by those hip-hop immortals DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince in their hit "Parents Just Don't Understand." Around the world, the conservative older generation grapples to accept the unconventional career/lifestyle paths of their b-boy offspring, not just Lil Kev's maman but straight-laced, hardworking salarymen in Japan and South Korea, chagrinned that their sons seem so ill-suited to becoming worker drones or soldiers. The verisimilitude of the documentary format (not to mention the rapid-fire editing) let this movie get away with what would seem unbearably contrived in a scripted narrative about driven, distant Asian fathers and their misunderstood sons. Call it The B-Boy Luck Club. — Charles Cassady Jr.

Planet B-Boy: 7:20 p.m. Thursday, July 17 and 9:05 p.m. Friday, July 18 at Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque, 11141 East Blvd., 216-421-7450.

My Winnipeg

Winnipeggian fabulist Guy Maddin ran into some trouble a few years back when he attempted to graft his quirky, one-of-a-kind cinematic style onto a bigger-budgeted canvas in The Saddest Music in the World. What felt so blissfully ineffable — and ineffably strange — in early Maddin treasures like Careful teetered on the verge of self-parody, or worse. But with last year's masterful nouveau-silent Brand Upon the Brain, Maddin seemed to have recharged his creative batteries by returning to his bare-bones outsider roots. The director's latest "whatzit?" is an equally uncategorizable, similarly dazzling hybrid of documentary and Proustian (or is that Maddin-ian?) memory piece. The hypnotic, dream-like tone is set by Maddin's drolly purplish voiceover narration ("Snowy, sleeping Winnipeg ... always winter, always sleepy") which both celebrates and bashes his Manitoba hometown, sometimes for the same virtues/failings. Octogenarian Ann Savage (star of Edgar G. Ulmer's 1945 noir classic Detour) plays Maddin's mother in mock simulations of his formative years spent atop a Winnipeg beauty parlor. Is the "Winnipeg" of My Winnipeg truly real or merely a figment of Maddin's overheated, if vastly amusing imagination? Who cares when the results are as laugh-out-loud funny and moving as they are here? — MP

Opens Friday at the Cedar Lee Theater, 2163 Lee Rd., Cleveland Heights, 440-564-2034, clevelandcinemas.com.

Tuya's Marriage

Even with the surprise success of a certain "early-days-of-Genghis-Khan" biopic that's currently raking in the bucks on the arthouse circuit, the Mongolian Steppes still remain a fairly exotic locale for US moviegoers. That Wang Quan An's Tuya's Marriage seems so familiar despite its Inner Mongolian location has less to do with setting than genre. It's easy to picture this same story as the basis for an early '50s Anthony Mann Western. Tuya (the formidable Yu Nan) lives with her crippled husband Bater and two small children in an isolated rural community whose primary source of income derives from sheep herding. Because she's still attractive and of "marriageable" age, everyone tries convincing Tuya that she should divorce Bater and find herself another husband who might better provide for her and the kids.

Among the most zealous advocates for Tuya finding a new mate are Bater and his widowed sister Zhaya. After badly injuring herself trying to help free a man from an overturned truck, Tuya reluctantly decides to pursue her options. The catch is that husband number two must agree to take care of Bater and the children. With the simplicity of a fable, Tuya's Marriage plays out as you would expect. There isn't much more to the plot, which is part of the film's charm as well as its limitations. Tuya, Bater, Zhaya and Baolier, a childhood classmate of Tuya who becomes her most likely marriage prospect after striking it rich, remain archetypes unburdened by psychology or nuance. The Freudian symbolism may have been comically broad in films like Mann's The Furies or King Vidor's Duel in the Sun, but at least we knew what made those characters tick. — MP

Tuya's Marriage: 7:15 p.m. Saturday, July 19 and 8:50 p.m. Sunday, July 20 at Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque, 11141 East Blvd., 216-421-7450.