Charlotte Fich and Anders W. Bertelsen in "Just Another Love Story," left, and Maria Pankratz in "Silent Light."

After years of covering the indie-film beat, I'm pretty well convinced of the dogma that drives the business: The audience for art-house films is still out there, no smaller or larger than it ever was. But it's carved up differently, and the demands on its attention are far more various than they were in the days when reverent big-city throngs lined up for the latest Bergman or Fellini flick.

Basically, the movies that are most daring and strange -- and often the most extraordinary -- don't get much of a shot. They have to stop off in a few theaters on the way to video-on-demand or DVD, because otherwise people like me don't pay attention and the public never hears about them at all. But outside the world of movie bloggers and their readership (hi, guys!), even films that might have provoked furious debate 20 or 30 years ago will just come and go, momentary blips on a bewildering radar screen.

Consider the cases of two movies about adultery, the Danish thriller "Just Another Love Story" and the Mexican rural drama "Silent Light," pictures that were rapturously received on the 2008 festival circuit. Whatever their virtues and flaws, they're both arresting and accomplished films that evince a visionary sensibility, reject ordinary storytelling forms and seek to take the viewer on an unpredictable journey. I'd recommend both to any serious film buff. Both are getting quickie releases in Manhattan theaters this week, with some wider release (but not much) to follow. If you don't live in New York or L.A., very likely your next chance to see them will be in your living room. So it goes these days.

As you may have surmised, the title of writer-director Ole Bornedal's "Just Another Love Story" is meant to be ironic. Bornedal has made a bloody, showoffy, self-mocking noir, the kind of movie that presumes nothing good ever comes of two people falling in love. It's narrated by Jonas (Anders W. Bertelsen), whom we see in the opening shot lying prostrate in the rain on a Copenhagen street, evidently bleeding to death. A blond woman arrives to moan and shriek over him, but he isn't impressed. "The woman," he tells us in tones of resignation. "There's always a woman."

Actually, the blond shrieking woman isn't the woman. Instead she's his long-suffering wife, Mette (Charlotte Fich), whom he abandoned some months earlier to go live with the sultry and mysterious Julia (Rebecka Hemse), renegade heiress to a publishing fortune. You see, it's no wonder Jonas finds himself dying in the street, since he's violated at least three of the cardinal rules of the film-noir universe: Never leave your wife for the Other Woman; never take the suitcase that doesn't belong to you; and never pretend to be someone you're not.

Punishment awaits those who break those rules, of course, and Bornedal's task is to make all those forbidden fruits completely irresistible to Jonas and bring him full circle, from dying in the street to upstanding family man and back to, well, dying in the street. "Just Another Love Story" is a monumentally implausible tale told with a bravura array of flashbacks, flash-forwards, dream sequences and slo-mo incidents, and involving a beautiful woman suffering from both amnesia and blindness, an undead boyfriend, a mysterious fellow wrapped in mummy-style bandages, and a suicide pact in a Hanoi junkie hotel.

When Jonas' piece-of-crap car stalls out on the highway, with wife and kids aboard, Julia swerves to avoid it and nearly dies in a head-on collision. She's just arriving from Frankfurt, where she got off a plane from Vietnam, where she was fleeing a poisonous relationship with a boyfriend named Sebastian (Nikolaj Lie Kaas), whom she met in Asia. But her super-rich family have never met this mysterious paramour, and when Jonas shows up at the hospital to check on the comatose Julia, they all assume that he's Sebastian. Within minutes he's been assigned to kiss her and murmur in her ear, bathe her naked body with a loofah glove, and accept a blank check tucked into his pocket by Julia's publishing-magnate papa.

Look, I said it was ridiculous. Of course when Julia wakes up she can't see anything and doesn't remember the real Sebastian anyway (who has reportedly been murdered in Hanoi) and, hey, Jonas has gotten kind of bored with life with Mette and the kids anyway. Work all week, shop on Saturday, have some friends over to dinner -- why not chuck all that away and shack up with blind, ultra-rich amnesia-babe, anyway? As you have figured out by now, there are many reasons why not, and those all come together in a crashing finale.

You could call "Just Another Love Story" nothing more than an exercise in style, but A) Bornedal's got style to burn and B) that's not quite fair. Beneath all the dazzling cinematography, propulsive score and overcommitted acting, I found this movie an affecting, mordant comedy about male midlife crisis in its most extreme form. As Jonas observes to his best friend -- who's eager to get his paws on Mette, if Jonas doesn't want her -- his own behavior makes him sick. Which doesn't mean he can stop.

Mexican director Carlos Reygadas -- a one-time attorney who reinvented himself as an art-cinema auteur -- also has a flair for opening shots. His last film, "Battle in Heaven," began by bringing us up close and personal with a punk-hippie chick administering an enthusiastic blow job to a remarkably ugly man. In "Silent Light" he goes in a somewhat different direction; the film opens with a six-minute shot of the night sky gradually giving way to dawn, accompanied by a chorus of birds and insects (and ends with a similar shot in reverse, as evening moves into night). It's amazingly beautiful and it tests your patience; both things are par for the course with Reygadas, After that, you've either surrendered to his idiosyncratic sense of rhythm, or you're out of there.

Unlike Bornedal, Reygadas has no interest in mimicking or tweaking conventional film genres. Despite the in-your-face sexuality of his earlier films, they're ambiguous and nearly plotless dramas featuring nonprofessional actors and long, contemplative takes, whose roots lie in the cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky or Abbas Kiarostami. "Silent Light" both departs and does not depart from Reygadas' pattern. There's no explicit sex at all, but the setting and subject are certainly peculiar. This is presumably the first Mexican film ever made that isn't in Spanish, as well as the first film from any nation made in Plautdietsch, a Germanic language or dialect spoken (at least in recent centuries) only by isolated communities of Mennonites.

I don't know how in the world Reygadas recruited Mennonites from the Mexican state of Chihuahua -- where about 50,000 Plautdietsch-speakers still hang on -- to act in his film. I don't even know how many of them have ever seen a film. (Unlike their Amish brethren in the United States, the Mexican Mennonites do not universally reject modern technology, but I doubt that movies play a large role in their lives.) Regardless, the results are astonishing. "Silent Light" brings us intimately into the private world of this esoteric society without ever feeling like ethnography or gawkery; at the risk of cliché, this prodigiously atmospheric fable of love and faith feels both timeless and modern. Reygadas deliberately evokes biblical parable and Bergman's "The Virgin Spring," but also features a wonderful scene where two men work on an old Chevy pickup and sing along to a norteno hit on the radio.

Like "Battle in Heaven," "Silent Light" is at least nominally about an individual's internal moral struggle. Johan (Cornelio Wall), the taciturn father and husband in a Mennonite farm family, has conceived a powerful romantic passion for Marianne (Maria Pankratz), who runs a coffee shop in the nearest town. Johan is too upstanding not to tell his wife, Esther (Miriam Toews), everything, including the fact that he has physically transgressed their marriage vows. For her part, Esther seems determined to bear it all in silence. Advised by a friend that his love for Marianne may be sacred in nature, and by his father (played by Wall's actual father) that it's "the work of the Enemy," Johan is trapped by indecision, which leads first to tragedy and then to miraculous sacrifice and transfiguration.

But as usual with Reygadas, the story accounts for maybe one-quarter of the film's impact and meaning. His spectacular, ultra-long takes focused on the rituals and details of rural life each become their own little movie, animated by the interaction between the dramatic Chihuahua landscape and the faces and figures of these handsome, stoical people. Are Wall and Pankratz and Toews "acting," in the normal sense? It's tough to say. There's a scene when Johan and his children go for a swim, clad in Mennonite long underwear, in their homemade outdoor pool that's among the most gorgeous things I've ever seen in a motion picture. It isn't fiction but also isn't exactly documentary, and it has a passion and mystery and immanent vitality that, for my money, outstrips the film's somewhat forced conclusion.

"Just Another Love Story" opens Jan. 9 at Cinema Village in New York, with other cities and DVD release to follow. "Silent Light" is now playing at Film Forum in New York, with other cities to follow.

Images from top, left to right, "Encounters at the End of the World," "The Secret of the Grain," "Momma's Man," "A Christmas Tale," "The Order of Myths," "Flight of the Red Balloon," "Man on Wire," "Chop Shop," "Reprise" and "Waltz With Bashir."

As I reported a few days ago, film industry insiders at all levels of the business say, universally but almost in a whisper, that it was a remarkably strong year for movies in theatrical release. Says distributor-turned-filmmaker Jeff Lipsky, "I don't know why the mainstream media, or whatever is left of it, isn't talking about the fact that our business has been thriving, almost contemporaneous with the collapse of the stock market." Well, here I am, Jeff, the last man standing on the Titanic that is pseudo-serious entertainment journalism. Consider it done.

That said, I heard a contrarian argument just now from Zeitgeist Films co-president Nancy Gerstman, whose films this year have included the Oscar-plausible Katrina documentary "Trouble the Water" along with the haunting Andes plane-crash doc "Stranded," a rare marketplace flop for her small and selective company. When I suggested that a "wide range" of films have succeeded in the marketplace this year, Gerstman snorted at me (if you can snort by email).

She said it was wonderful to see an unexpected hit like the French thriller "Tell No One," which went unreleased in the United States for several years before a tiny distributor called Music Box Films took a flyer on it. "That sort of thing gives a small distributor hope," Gerstman writes. "It can happen. But count the amount of films released this year and then look at what you consider a 'wide range.' Maybe 10 or 20 of the small to midsize indie films made it. The others sank like a stone! This is a major problem -- there are just too many films. With critics dropping like flies, theaters closing and younger audiences shrinking, it can only get worse -- unless we are truly in a lengthy cycle in which theatergoing can revive."

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Courtesy of Sony Pictures Classics

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Before the invention of Wikipedia, I might never have discovered that there's a recognizable history of animated documentary filmmaking (above and beyond "Schoolhouse Rock," that is) which long predates Israeli director Ari Folman's extraordinary war memoir "Waltz With Bashir." Legendary cartoonist Winsor McKay made a ripped-from-the-headlines short called "The Sinking of the Lusitania" in 1918, Max and Dave Fleischer made a film called "The Einstein Theory of Relativity" in 1923, and Walt Disney concocted several animated docs, including "Our Friend the Atom" in 1957. (I want to see those last two really, really badly.)

Still, even if Folman's film isn't quite the first animated documentary feature ever made -- that same Wiki article references a 1964 astronomy film called "Of Stars and Men" -- within a few seconds of its opening you know you've entered a new world, like Alice plunging down the rabbit hole. "Waltz With Bashir" is nominally about the Israel-Lebanon war of the early 1980s, but it's really set in a darker landscape than that one, and it literally begins inside a nightmare. A boy or young man is being chased through deserted city streets by a relentless pack of wild dogs; they never quite catch him but show no signs of stopping.

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You can tell it's a French film when one of the actresses gets naked inside five minutes. But in the case of Abdellatif Kechiche's richly enjoyable and consistently surprising "The Secret of the Grain," that first naked-chick scene is deceptive. If I tell you that the movie starts with a buxom honey-blond enticing the handsome tour guide below decks on a Mediterranean port-city cruise for a little hands-on demonstration, and that it ends with a teenage girl staging her sexual awakening in public, in the form of a vigorous belly-dance performance in a crowded shipboard restaurant, you'll think, oh, it's that kind of European film. Except that it isn't. "The Secret of the Grain" is much more the other kind of European film, one that appears plotless and unstructured and is actually finely honed and sharply pointed, one that tries to combine tragedy and comedy and social observation and human fallibility and adventuresome technique into one ungainly and beautiful package. Those two scenes that bookend the film are the only remotely sexy scenes in it. In between Kechiche offers a saga of a laid-off immigrant shipyard worker pursuing an impossible dream, set against a bewildering welter of extended-family conversation, shot with a handheld camera in tight quarters, which you just have to ride until it starts making sense.

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Clockwise from top left: Kent Mackenzie, Fox Searchlight Pictures, Samuel Goldwyn Films, Strand Releasing

Clockwise from top left: images from "The Exiles," "Slumdog Millionaire," "Fireproof," and "The Edge of Heaven."

[This article has been updated since its initial publication. See below.]

You might reasonably assume from the outside, or even from the inside, that an article about the state of independent film in 2008 is going to be a tale of gloom and woe. The national economy is not just in the toilet but circling the drain. Overall, the movie business seems artistically and financially stagnant (if propped up this year by "The Dark Knight" and a couple of big animation hits). Several "Indiewood" distributors, meaning the quasi- independent divisions of major studios, were folded or swallowed by their parent companies this year, including Picturehouse, Warner Independent and Paramount Vantage. Several smaller distributors are in bankruptcy or close to it.

There was no "Juno" or "Little Miss Sunshine" this year, bursting out of the indie ghetto to win America's heart. It always depends on what production methods and distribution pathways you're willing to consider independent, but this year's top-grossing indie was, quite plausibly, the Christian- themed marriage drama "Fireproof," at $33 million and counting. I haven't seen the film and have no cause to disparage it, but I'll go ahead and guess it's not ending up on a whole lot of top-10 lists.

There are some Indiewood pics in the Oscar mix, as usual -- "Milk" and "Slumdog Millionaire," for sure, but also maybe "Frozen River" and "Rachel Getting Married" -- but no whopper critical fave-raves on the order of "No Country for Old Men" or "There Will Be Blood." (Lance Hammer's lo-fi Mississippi drama "Ballast," one of the best-reviewed films of the year, has done virtually no business.)

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IFC Films/Teresa Isasi

Director Steven Soderbergh, left, on set with Benicio Del Toro and executive producer Gregory Jacobs.

Steven Soderbergh has never lacked for ambition, or for the eclectic range of his tastes. It's not easy to fathom how the same guy could have made remakes of the Rat Pack heist flick "Ocean's Eleven" and Andrei Tarkovsky's enigmatic sci-fi classic "Solaris," or how directing George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez in "Out of Sight" fits with directing a cast of nonprofessional unknowns in "Bubble."

Even by Soderbergh's standards, a two-part, four-hour movie about Latin American revolutionary Che Guevara -- shot fast, on digital video, with not enough money, in a language the director and much of the cast do not speak -- seemed like a foolhardy endeavor. And perhaps it was. "Che" is a prickly, not terribly friendly picture that could well go down in history as one of the legendary "film follies" of all time (to borrow critic Stuart Klawans' phrase). It's neither a hagiography of the Marxist hero nor an attempt to dynamite his legend; Soderbergh has effectively pissed off left-wing critics, right-wing critics and a certain number of mainstream viewers who just wanted a conventional, psychological-realist biopic.

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Courtesy Oscilloscope Pictures

Michelle Williams in "Wendy and Lucy."

When Kelly Reichardt's delicate, slow-motion film about two old friends on a camping trip, "Old Joy," appeared on the festival circuit in 2006, I assumed at first that Reichardt must be a man. "Old Joy" seemed so attuned to a specific subgenre of male experience -- to the rueful sadness and silence that can build itself up, like an implacable wall, between two guys who shared a period of Dionysian youthful excitement and have since grown away from each other -- that it seemed Reichardt also had to be an ex-hipster dude on the cusp of middle age.

Maybe she is most of those things, but Reichardt is only a dude in the loosest, most colloquial usage of the term. Although "Old Joy" seemed to come out of nowhere as one of '06's critical fave-raves, Reichardt was actually an indie-scene veteran who had worked on Hal Hartley's "The Unbelievable Truth" in 1989, directed her first feature in 1994 (a blend of Lynchian crime drama and Jarmuschian road movie called "River of Grass"), and made several experimental shorts after that. With her new film "Wendy and Lucy," which premiered at the Cannes and New York festivals, Reichardt is suddenly a recognized auteur, albeit one who makes movies on next to no budget in the Pacific Northwest, movies most Americans will never hear about, let alone see.

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Janus Films

From left to right: Bruno Zanin, Luigi Rossi, Alvaro Vitali, Bruno Scagnetti, and Bruno Lenzi in Federico Fellini's "Amarcord."

Pitched somewhere between genuine childhood reminiscence and an outlandish, "Arabian Nights"-style collection of tales, Federico Fellini's 1973 "Amarcord" captures the great Italian director at the peak of his cinematic powers. Although it's undoubtedly not as "important" or as self-serious a picture as "8 1/2" or "La Dolce Vita" or "La Strada," "Amarcord" -- the word means "I remember" in the Romagnese dialect of Fellini's youth -- is a massively enjoyable entertainment infused with more than a little wry wisdom, pathos and mystery.

If you're pursing your lips disapprovingly and getting ready to ask whether "Amarcord," like most of Fellini's later movies, isn't simultaneously sentimental and sexist, here's my answer: Well, yeah. Kids, dogs, wisecracking old men and well-proportioned female derrieres take up a significant portion of screen time in "Amarcord," and the film's point of view never wanders far from that of Titta (Bruno Zanin), the desperately horny teenage boy in the seaside town of Rimini whose mom still has him in short pants. But it's all a question of what Fellini does with those ingredients and with that perspective, which is to create a highly complicated work of memory and fantasy, a grand, theatrical blend of comedy and tragedy that addresses both what he loved and what he hated about the rural Italian character.

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Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics/Jory Sutton

Melissa Leo, looking more and more like a plausible Oscar nominee for her role in "Frozen River."

There's nothing organizers of the two indie-oriented year-end awards -- those would be IFP's Gotham Independent Film Awards and Film Independent's Spirit Awards -- hate worse than being perennially confused with each other. So that's exactly what I'm going to do. Given that the organizations' transcontinental rivalry resulted in a train wreck of competing press releases this week, I'm guessing that your average entertainment consumer is even more confused than I am, if that's possible.

Herewith, some clarity. The Spirit nominations were announced on Tuesday morning in Los Angeles (with the awards ceremony to be held, as usual, on Santa Monica Beach one night before the Oscars). Then, on Tuesday night, the Gothams -- traditionally the kickoff event of awards season -- actually held their ceremony in New York.

Here's what you need to know about how the various categories shake out in both awards, and how this may or may not be shaping the contours of the Oscar race:

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Simultaneously seductive and irritating, raunchy and precious, Israeli filmmaker Yair Hochner's reinvents the city of Tel Aviv as an erotic pleasure dome for gay men -- and as a folkie coffeehouse that never closes for their lesbian sisters. It's a little silly to talk about a "new queer Israeli cinema" when what you mean to this point is three directors and, at most, half a dozen films. Still, it's true that the explosion of new movies from Israel has included a distinctly gay mini-wave. That trend reached its apotheosis with director Eytan Fox's international hit "The Bubble," which depicted a love affair between two men, one Israeli and one Palestinian, that cannot quite escape from the overdetermined political situation that encloses it.

Maybe progress has been made, of a certain kind; "Antarctica" feels almost like a sequel to "The Bubble," with its surface attractiveness and inch-deep themes, but the Palestinian question is never mentioned and Judaism comes up exactly once, as a jokey aside. Hochner's Tel Aviv is a fantasyland for beautiful gay boys whose mothers just want them to get married (to other beautiful gay boys), a city evidently located in an unexplored corner of Mediterranean Europe, closer to Nice and Barcelona than to Damascus or Beirut.

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