English Subtitles

'The Green Wave' No MPAA rating; in English and Farsi with English subtitles Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes Playing: At Laemmle's Music Hall 3, Beverly Hills; Laemmle's Town Center 5, Encino

Alma, the 15-year-old heroine of the Nordic import "Turn Me On, Dammit!," is introduced pleasuring herself on the floor of her kitchen to the chatter of a phone sex operator. Instead of setting up a single-minded comedy about teenage desire, however, this gently amusing film from writer-director Jannicke Systad Jacobsen delicately renders more than a few shades of a turbulent female adolescence. Soft-eyed, hangdog Alma (a wonderful Helene Bergsholm) is racked with horny/romantic fantasies and hates the backwater mountain village where she lives.

The new documentary from Jonathan Gruber and Ari Daniel Pinchot, "Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story," pays tribute to one ofIsrael'snational heroes. The biography of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's older brother bears a broad resemblance to that of Joseph Kennedy Jr.: firstborn, handsome and charismatic, a military hero and presumed political leader who died young. Yonatan Netanyahu was killed at Entebbe Airport, in Uganda, after leading the successful hostage-rescue mission there in July 1976.

Too many questions and not enough answers haunt the slow-going mystery "The Woman in the Fifth,"a thankless lead vehicle for Ethan Hawke who's left largely stranded by writer-director Pawel Pawlikowski's opaque adaptation of Douglas Kennedy's novel. Hawke stars as American writer Tom Ricks, a one-book wonder who arrives in Paris to reunite with his ex-wife, Nathalie (Delphine Chuillot), and their small daughter, Chloé (Julie Papillon). But complications instantly pile up: Nathalie blocks Tom from seeing Chloé, his money and belongings are stolen, Tom's dumpy hotel room comes complete with sinister proprietor (Samir Guesmi)

Sexy rebel Emilia (Natalia Galgani) wears a Ramones T-shirt when she and Julio (Diego Noguera) first make love, while he's got a square of pale skin on his otherwise tanned chest from accidentally sunbathing with an open Proust novel. In Chilean writer-director Cristián Jiménez's odd, wistful "Bonsái" this youthful romance steeped in clingy passion and literature read aloud is offset - in alternating segments - by events eight years later: Julio is now in a convenient fling with a neighbor, convincing her the handwritten novel he's secretly been working on about that lost love is the new book by a great author who's hired him to type it out. The stunted, artfully designed show-plant of the title enters the story a little too conveniently as a metaphor for Julio's struggle to bring narrative shape to his own life (the film is based on a novel by Alejandro Zambra)

It's startling to consider that the state of Israel as we know it might not exist without the more than century-old kibbutz movement. That assertion, along with the historical highlights of both modern Israel and its kibbutzim, are efficiently examined in the absorbing documentary "Inventing Our Life: The Kibbutz Experiment. " The film lays out how the movement began in 1909 as an attempt by Eastern European émigrés to establish a utopian community - one based on sharing and equality - in what was then Palestine.

'Children of Paradise' No MPAA rating; In French with English subtitles Running time: 190 minutes Playing: Laemmle's Royal Theatre, West Los Angeles; Laemmle's Playhouse 7, Pasadena

'Oslo, August 31st' No MPAA rating; in Norwegian with English subtitles Running time: 1 hour, 36 minutes Playing: At Laemmle's Monica 4-Plex, Santa Monica; Laemmle's Playhouse 7, Pasadena; Laemmle's Town Center 5, Encino

Russian director Andrey Zvyagintsev, whose 2003 feature debut, "The Return," was a masterpiece of cinematic allegory, turns to noirish territory, by way of Dostoevsky, in his third film, the spellbinding and impeccably crafted"Elena. " Set in contemporary, well-to-do Moscow and its seedy, Soviet-leftover suburbs, the drama lays bare the moral dilemma - and class divide - between a 60ish couple. Elena (Nadezhda Markina) and Vladimir (Andrey Smirnov) share an orderly life in the ocean-blue expanse of their apartment, but their relationship feels more like an arrangement than a marriage.

'I Wish' MPAA rating: PG for mild thematic elements, language and smoking; in Japanese with English subtitles Running time: 2 hours, 8 minutes Playing: At egent Theatre, Westwood; Laemmle's Playhouse 7, Pasadena