Harvesting the first of what will hopefully be a bounteous fall crop:

A Girl Cut in Two is a coolly distanced, mischievously closed-off French thriller from a man who knows the territory: Claude Chabrol. As director and co-writer (splitting screenwriting duties with step-daughter Cecile Maistre), Chabrol frugally reveals insight into the desires of his heroine (Ludivine Sagnier), a young woman who must choose between two equally dangerous men (Benoit Magimel and Francois Berliand). Since this is a Chabrol film, it’s not until the very end that you realize you’ve been watching a thriller. By holding back until the very end, Chabrol is able to convey a sizable amount of impact with a single act of violence—a neat trick.

Momma’s Man is a micro-budget comedy about a young man (recently married, lately upgraded to father) who swings by his parents’ New York loft for a brief visit and can’t bring himself to leave. The premise has a touch of Bunuelian absurdity, but Azazel Jacobs’s film flowers into a sublime tribute to the agony of growing up. The term “personal film” is given special meaning by the casting of the director’s real-life mother and father, longtime avant-gardists Ken and Flo Jacobs, but the deep well of emotions into which the film taps are for anyone who’s every agonized over adulthood. The loft itself, a spontaneously arranged jungle of artsy bric-a-brac, is an off-kilter space that continually rewards attention.

All Coen brothers incline toward comedy, but few are as unforgiving as Burn After Reading, their C.I.A. farce set in Washington, D.C. The perennial theme of man’s enduring stupidity in the midst of an unfeeling universe is given perfect expression in the story of two slow-witted gym instructors (Brad Pitt and Frances McDormand) who ineptly attempt to blackmail a retired analyst (a superbly enervated John Malkovich). The unflattering portrait of humanity on display might well be intolerable if the film weren’t so well acted, so well modulated, so well done. But Joel and Ethan Coen, expert plot-thickeners and consummate shot-makers, keep the tensions mounting and laughs coming. They also allow plenty of opportunity for us to consider the unusual shape of Malkovich’s skull, and the inimitable way in which he enunciates his lines. (Notice the way he articulates “memoir.”) Viewers might expect more from the Coens after the meat-and-potatoes of No Country for Old Men, but they shouldn’t overlook the care that went into this comedy, bitter-tasting as it may be.

Sukiyaki Western Django is a nearly unwatchable western-horror pastiche that numbs the brain with an overbearing mixture of blood, sex, and superficial splurges of “style.” The director is Takashi Miike, an underground filmmaker with no visible plans to come above ground, but who is nevertheless audacious enough to have earned the respect of Quentin Tarantino, who chips in with a supporting role. (The less said about his atrocious performance the better.) The film features a lot of preening, pretty Asian actors speaking mostly incoherent English as a sort of tribute to American Westerns, while the title derives from a 1966 Italian horse opera.

Appaloosa is a legit western from Ed Harris, who in addition to starring and directing, sings over the closing credits. Built solidly on tried and true notions of justice, personal integrity, moral courage, etc., it’s additionally well dressed and well decorated. (The sets have an authentic, lived-in look.) The lawmen played by Harris and Viggo Mortensen, hired by the timorous mayor to protect the township of Appaloosa from a gang of outlaws led by Jeremy Irons, are so intimate as to be perceived as different parts of the same person. (Mortensen is always finishing Harris’s sentences, a woman played by Renee Zellweger falls in love with both.) As such, they make an interesting and compelling team. The gun battles are both realistic (when one of the characters gets shot in the knee, he doesn’t get up right away, and so on) and brief, so that you end up wanting more, not less. If the film leaves a little something to be desired, that’s because it has no delusions of grandeur. Its main fault is hardly a fault at all: an excess of modesty.

Miracle at St. Anna is an overstuffed, overbearing, over-everything WWII movie, distinguished only by a few low-to-the-ground tracking shots—a Spike Lee trademark. Biting off more than he can chew, Lee attempts to wrangle themes of racial discrimination, faith, myth, and miracles, but lacks the focus or conviction to do justice to any of them. The mystery plotline is weakened by a rambling, random structure that keeps the audience grasping at straws. Occasionally, the film rises ferociously from its catatonic state to deliver a powerful action sequence, but only after we’ve well given up on trying to make meaning out of the chaos.