Nuart

Judging by the hype, the hustle and the weekly box-office charts, one would think that moviegoers are in the midst of Nirvana Summer, the season when everything came together and the theaters brimmed over with irresistibly fine features. Right! Like "Jaws 4," "Nerds 2," "Superman 4" and "James Bond 14." Seems like the same old summer to me.

Jean-Luc Godard, in one of his countless musings on the love of his life, once said: "The cinema is halfway. We go halfway and the audience meets us halfway. But we have to agree that we need a meeting point. … The image is a meeting point. " The words are from 1981, and since then the two sides have been meeting less and less frequently. Like the late periods of John Coltrane and Miles Davis in jazz, late Godard will never enjoy the appeal of his early classic era. Many devotees of classic Godard view the subsequent films as artistic solipsism.

Bae Yong-Kwun's awesomely beautiful "Why Has the Bodhi-Dharma Left for the East?" is at the Nuart for one week. Its title is a riddle, referring to the unanswerable question as to why the Indian monk who founded Zen Buddhism left home. It tells of an elderly monk guiding his disciple and an orphan boy on the path toward enlightenment.

Cinema Mexico continues Tuesday at the Nuart with two more classic folk fables--Roberto Gavaldon's "Macario" (1960), which the mysterious B. Traven, author of "Treasure of the Sierra Madre," adapted from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale, and Servando Gonzalez's "Yanco" (1960), which is virtually without dialogue.

Even though big-screen re-releases of selected vintage films are quite the regular feature of the current theatrical market, the revival of John Huston's 1975 "The Man Who Would Be King" is especially welcome both because of what it isn't and what it is.

There is not a single reference to R. W. Fassbinder, the enfant terrible of the New German Cinema, in "A Man Like Eva" (at the Nuart through Wednesday). But anyone who knows his work or legend will instantly recognize that it is a dazzling film a clef in honor of the late director, who burned himself out in 1982 at the age of 36.

In the late '40s, Peter Lorre, harassed by the House Un-American Activities Committee and suffering a decline in his career, returned to Germany where a journalist friend told him a true story that became the basis for the one film he directed, "The Lost One" ("Der Verlorene"). Unfortunately, its title was all too apt: German audiences weren't ready to confront the implications of World War II on the screen, and it promptly disappeared.

The innovative vision of the American Cinematheque's Dennis Bartok, like Landmark's Nuart Theater, is the salvation of the few remaining cineastes left here in "movieland." Dennis does himself a gross disservice by comparing the Nuart's programming (or his own) to that of the Sunset 5's. The Laemmle theaters only continue the Miramaxification (i.e., commercialization) of both American "indie" and foreign cinemas. JESSE ENGDAHL Santa Monica

"People come to our film expecting some kind of true crime story but that's not what we were attempting to do," said 30-year-old filmmaker Joe Berlinger of the award-winning documentary "Brother's Keeper."