Fast Forward: Mother knows best; "Cyrano" in a Paris bistro; dazzling Manhattan repartee; at long last, a French homage to "Jeepers Creepers"

Remember when we used to sit through long-winded European existential dramas for the hot sex? Well, Christophe Honoré's "Ma Mère," starring Isabelle Huppert as a floozy mom a bit too interested in her teenage son's love life, will carry you back to those golden days. Adapted from Georges Bataille's semi-legendary erotic novel, "Ma Mère" transports its cast of depraved French people to the permanent party zone of the Canary Islands. It's pretentious highbrow trash, but as far as that goes it works pretty well.

Hey, if Huppert was my mom I might have Oedipal issues too; you may want to tell pious, earnest young Pierre (Louis Garrel) to bonk her and get on with life. Instead, dangerous Hélène (Huppert) entrusts him to her slutty friends, one of whom performs an act on him in public I really can't describe, even in Salon, while the other turns out to be an almost-nice girl he might fall for. (OK, she has a slave boy, but whatever.) Mom boozes heavily, turns tricks and flashes strangers to stay clear of Pierre, but ultimately she can't keep her mitts off the lad, and we head for a nasty climax. (Now playing in New York and Los Angeles; opens June 10 in Dallas, Houston and Philadelphia, June 17 in Minneapolis and July 8 in Boston and Washington, with other cities to follow.)

When somebody in Hollywood remakes Pierre Salvadori's romantic comedy "Après Vous," as they certainly will, it might not be much more lightweight than it is already. But they'll have to strip out the nastier moments, like the 90-ish grandma who gets vicious epithets written on her in lipstick, or the appealing girlfriend who gets unceremoniously ditched by both the main character and the movie. They also won't have Daniel Auteuil, the appealing Chaplinesque Everyguy of French cinema, as the harried maître d' at a Parisian bistro who saves a guy from killing himself, and is then stuck with him.

The would-be suicide is Spanish-born comedian José Garcia, and the girl he's killing himself over is Sandrine Kiberlain, a gamine blonde who looks like she got stretched on the rack, to the extra-thin and extra-tall setting. Somebody order that girl some steak et pommes frites! Auteuil's character devotes himself to extracting Kiberlain from her sideburn-wearing current beau and getting her back with Garcia, but in the process -- well, you know where this is going, right? Besides the great Auteuil, some modestly amusing restaurant high jinks and the knockoff "Cyrano de Bergerac" plot, "Après Vous" offers nice sound design and an unfussy presentation of middle-class Paris. It comes and goes with no unpleasant aftertaste. (Now playing in New York and Los Angeles, with a wider release to follow.)

Not French, but the kind of American movie that wishes it were: "Heights," an ensemble drama about an interlocking group of Manhattanites facing a day of crisis, has a great cast, a lot of lively talk and an approach to sexual morality that might have seemed daringly adult in 1965. All that reflects its origins as a stage play (by Amy Fox), and while director Chris Terrio (a former assistant to James Ivory) does a nice job of taking the production outdoors, there's something essentially boxy and static about it.

Glenn Close is the real reason to see this one. La Glenn gets all four canines into a juicy role as Diana Lee, a theatrical grande dame who's playing Lady Macbeth on Broadway and preying upon New York's hunky young waiter-actor population. A lot of that population, unhappily for her, doesn't like girls, and Close's photojournalist daughter (Elizabeth Banks) is planning to marry a bemuscled attorney (James Marsden), whose nude portrait has just turned up in the portfolio of an infamous and lecherous gay photographer. And what's the connection between all these people and Alec (Jesse Bradford), a young waiter-actor who's curiously indifferent to Diana's interest in him?

We see Isabella Rossellini and George Segal, among others, in small roles, all pretty much conveying the sense that we're watching a new-generation Woody Allen movie in which the characters have appropriate-size apartments. As enjoyable as Close is, "Heights" as a whole is a mannered simulation that only occasionally and accidentally feels like real New York life. "We don't know how to be people of passion!" Close tells her Juilliard acting students early in the film. "We're not even people of ice. We're tepid as dishwater." Um, yeah. That's it exactly. (Opens June 17 in New York and Los Angeles, with more cities to follow.)

Finally, since American filmmakers have been ripping off French classics for years, perhaps the world is ready for a French horror flick, in homage to "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," "Last House on the Left" and "Jeepers Creepers," among others. Alexandre Aja's "High Tension" is a dark little girl-vs.-slasher opus, complete with a personable star (the androgynous Cécile de France), atrocious English dubbing and a narrative twist I've never seen before.

Aja builds the pressure simply and effectively and keeps the kitsch to a minimum, even if the movie does feature a vintage Dodge Charger with Confederate-flag plates. A couple of hip urban chicks (de France and Maïwenn) are heading out to the distant countryside to visit the latter's parents. They get there and hit the sack, a razor-wielding creep in a filthy jumpsuit with a blood-spattered van rings the doorbell, and that's all she wrote for everybody in the house except, of course, the two girls who must battle the madman.

You can't talk intelligently about "High Tension" without giving away its secrets, but let's just say that while it's always the specter of sex that unleashes the devils in horror movies, this might be the first one where implied lesbian fantasy sex (the girls get nowhere near the real thing) triggers the onslaught. If you think the shadowy killer (Philippe Nahon) isn't all he seems to be, you're on the right track. Horror fans should see this, at least in geeky admiration for what it pulls off, but in the long run it's no more than a crisp footnote to genre history. (Opens June 10 nationwide.)

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