Departures

Starring Masahiro Motoki, Ryoko Hirosue, Tsutomu Yamazaki
Opens May 29

Departures—the Academy Award winner for best foreign language film—was a surprise upset over Waltz with Bashir and The Class at this year’s Oscars. So it's a relief to report that it's a well-deserved triumph. Yojiro Takita's film—about a failed cellist who returns to his childhood home in the Yamagata provinces and unwittingly becomes an “encoffiner” (or ritual embalmer)—sounds like a downer. But it's a full-blooded, often funny and beautifully meditative movie about, right, death, and also very much about the living. Masahiro Motoki—who looks like a young Japanese Lou Diamond Phillips—stars as the cellist Daigo who, with his loyal wife in tow (the delightful Ryoko Hirosue), takes up residence in his late mother's house. A classified ad in the local paper references a need for “departures,” which Daigo believes is for a travel agency. Turns out that's a typo—it was supposed to say “the departed”—but the pay is good, and Daigo embarks upon an apprenticeship in the art of “encoffinment” that's both humorous and undeniably touching. Takita's light touch fails him in two scenes that tip into over-sentimentality, but his missteps are rare, and his film, ultimately, respectful and stirring. —Dan Loughry

Easy Virtue

Starring Jessica Biehl, Kristin Scott Thomas
Opens May 22

Based upon Noel Coward's 1924 play, Easy Virtue is like a Merchant-Ivory period pic with a wink and a smile. Handsome young Englishman John Whittaker (Ben Barnes) brings his new wife, Larita (Jessica Biel), a beautiful American racecar driver, to his family's country mansion. Snobby matriarch Mrs. Whittaker (Kristin Scott Thomas) takes an instant dislike to Larita, so friction, mishaps and epiphanies within the entire household follow. A sort of seminal Meet the Parents, Easy Virtue isn't as witty or barbed as one might expect from Coward, and dramatic conflict/tension is in short supply, but a set piece involving the Whittakers' yapping Chihuahua, Poppy, is genuinely hysterical. With his first film in 10 years, Aussie director Stephan Elliott (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert)—whose back, pelvis and legs were broken in a 2004 skiing accident—again makes superb use of widescreen composition and adds a fun Baz Luhrmann-esque touch: Cast members occasionally break into song and recorded swingin' 1920s-style covers of “Car Wash,” “Sex Bomb” and—gag!—Billy Ocean's “When the Going Gets Tough.” —Lawrence Ferber

Séraphine

Starring Yolane Moreau, Ulrich Tukur
Opens June 5

For those who toil on their art in relative obscurity, the French film Séraphine will strike you as a bittersweet inspiration. The winner of seven Césars (French Academy Awards), Martin Provost's third film is a striking, austere exploration of the life of Séraphine de Senlis (Yolanda Moreau), a modern primitive painter discovered in 1913 by Wilhelm Uhde (Ulrich Tukur), a German collector. Séraphine is 48 years old when Uhde, escaping Paris to write and reflect in the countryside, chances upon the work of his cleaning woman. He doesn't exhibit or sell her paintings until years later, after she's been committed to the Clarmont de-l'Oise hospital, but the film is no mere portrait-of-an-artist-going-crazy. Moreau's Séraphine is touched—by God, whom she believes has commanded her to paint; by a passion for nature; and, ultimately, by insanity. It's a pitch-perfect performance, both earthy and ethereal, that rightfully brought Moreau the César for best actress. And although the paintings are considered primitive, the film itself is expressively framed and lighted, with cinematographer Laurent Brunet's green landscapes and dampened fields so vivid and tactile that you can practically feel the oppressive humidity in the air. —D.L.