My husband is an asshole: Gainsbourg with Attal in My Wife Is an Actress. photo: Natalie ENO My Wife Is an Actress Written and directed by Yvan Attal Sony Pictures Classics Opens July 12 New French Connection Through July 14 at BAMcinématek more film most popular most commented Kabluey Tracking Shots by Jim Ridley Thoda Pyaar Thoda Magic by McCann, Ruth Diminished Capacity Tracking Shots by Nick Pinkerton Holding Trevor Tracking Shots by Julia Wallace We Are Together Tracking Shots by Ella Taylor Trash Talking With Harvey Weinstein by Tony Ortega Coming and Then Licking It Up. Is This a Gay Thing? Savage Love by Dan Savage At Home With Competitive Swallowers Crazy Legs and Eater X by Andy Kropa Gene Simmons and the Whores He Admires La Dolce Musto by Michael Musto Columbia's Knotty Noose Problem by Graham Rayman The 'W.' Stands for 'War Criminal' (17) Nat Hentoff Scientology's Crushing Defeat (14) Tony Ortega Runnin' Scared: From Brooklyn, a Rap Campaign Against Tight Clothes (9) Runnin' Scared: Arcynta Ali Childs Runnin' Scared: The City Pitted Kids Against Artists in the East Village (6) Runnin' Scared: Chloé A. Hilliard Savage Love: My Boyfriend Almost Fathered a Lesbian Couple's Baby?!? (5) Savage Love: Dan Savage

My Wife Is an Actress is allegedly a comedy, the evidence including a grossly belabored set piece unveiling a butt-naked film crew and an utterly pointless circumcision subplot (the latter facilitating more Allen-ish angst with paranoid-Jew jokes). Attal's idea of soundtrack wit is to blast "London Calling" when Yvan boards the Chunnel to see Charlotte on set, and then do it again for visit No. 2. Covering all his bases, Attal doses his movie with fatuous reassurances about Yvan's misplaced insecurities: cue a circling close-up of Charlotte's face in the throes of marital sexual ecstasy, or the fawning attentions of Yvan's nubile classmates when he takes an acting class on a lark (he's talented!). For all Yvan's hand-wringing and eye-rolling, his wife seems down-to-earth and exceedingly patient. If she had foibles or flaws, one supposes, it might reflect badly on our Everyman, and anyway there's only room for one face in this mirror.

Comediennes and the poor saps who love them also figure prominently in BAMcinématek's brief series of new French film. In Philippe Garrel's irony-soaked Wild Innocence, a fledgling director (Mehdi Belhaj Kacem), still pining for his dead lover, finances his "anti-heroin movie" via a heroin deal and casts his present girlfriend (Julia Faure) as his smack-casualty ex; the Method muse one-ups his incipient Vertigo by acquiring a nasty habit of her own. Shot in glittering black-and-white by frequent Godard cinematographer Raoul Coutard and in cool command of its Hitchcockian echoes, Wild Innocence collapses (literally) under the weight of its symmetries with a grimly glib punchline.

Another brand of morbid attachment drives the entertainingly ridiculous La Répétition, which tracks the suffocatingly intimate on-and-off friendship between a stage actress (Emmanuelle Béart) and her doormat disciple (Pascale Bussières). Catherine Corsini's psychodrama boasts occasional insight about both the solace and the claustrophobia inherent in platonic symbiosis, but mostly it's a near bloodless Single White Female revamp, with a drunk scene grafted from Opening Night and a little Mulholland-style Hot Lesbian Action.

The titular real-life killer of Roberto Succo is also a professional actor of sorts, haphazardly assuming different identities while romancing an ever credulous schoolgirl (Isild Le Besco) and terrorizing the south of France with apparently motive-free kidnappings and murders. Lead Stefano Cassetti's distracting resemblance to Vincent Gallo notwithstanding, Cédric Kahn's scoreless, reticent film—half psychological inquiry, half policier—is a bracingly cold-blooded meditation on sociopathy.