It’s 1975. Brian Leary (Nick Thurston), our 18-year-old hero, has never known anything but the poor, insulated, and sometimes violent reality of his home in Brooklyn. His father is an abusive alcoholic, most of his friends have no ambition, and his brother has run afoul of the law. But Brian has a hidden talent: he can paint. He spends hours in his basement, working on watercolors that no one sees. No one, that is, until he meets Shauna (Leslie Murphy), who gives Brian the recognition he needs to believe in himself.

[To expiate the guilt I might feel about inflicting the following possibly hurtful critical excoriation upon as humble and well-intentioned a film as Peep World, I am going to pepper it with statements that might be taken out of context by publicists and used as positive write-ups.]

The absurd opening scene of Potiche, a new confection from director François Ozon, foreshadows the camp sensibility that will deflate the film’s subsequent hints of seriousness. After a morning jog, chipper housewife Suzanne Pujols (Catherine Deneuve), clad in a goofy red tracksuit, observes with wonder the woodland creatures scampering about her home. The irony is good natured, but it generates neither humor nor sympathy. And while the remainder of the film is more subdued, it unfortunately suffers from the same failing.

The problem with marketing a French film to American audiences as having “won Best Animated Feature at the 2009 European Film Awards,” but first pitching it to American distributors as “the film that won a European ‘Oscar’ with all-new voice performances by hacky American actors and the guy who does Bender on Futurama” is that the latter sort of cancels out the former.

As with any adaptation of a classic, this is the truncation of a masterpiece: an iffy endeavor that, given the inextricable bond between books and movies, was worth the attempt, but, in this case, not the product. Director Cary Fukunaga’s Jane Eyre won’t please any more than the most cursory of the book’s readers, the people who’ve read the novel for its love story and its dark, romantic plot but missed the powerful, conflicted character that novelist Charlotte Brontë made of Jane.

In My Perestroika, filmmaker Robin Hessman follows five friends as their personal transformations ebb and flow with the political currents of the former USSR. The word perestroika literally means reconstruction, a term used by Mikhail Gorbachev as part of the planned reform that indirectly led to the failed 1991 coup and fall of the Iron Curtain. The word is reappropriated here and gets to the core of what the film wants to show us: what happens after the revolution?

Miral may draw some attention as a film by a Jewish American, Julian Schnabel, which depicts, from the point of view of Palestinian characters, events surrounding the First Intifada: a failed Palestinian uprising in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, which lasted from the late 80s until the early 90s and claimed over 2000 lives.

In adapting Sheila Kohler’s slim novel about escalating obsessions at a girls’ boarding school, the makers of Cracks have transported the basic story from South Africa in the late 1950s or early 60s (the period isn’t quite pinned down) to rural England in 1934. The tone and texture of the film are as lush and brooding as the brambly forest and overcast sky that envelop the campus where nearly all the action takes place. The style is more akin to that of a less searching D.H.

Nick Frost and Simon Pegg, who have risen to fame for writing and starring in a number of successful “self-aware genre films,” try their hands at the ‘alien encounter’ picture with Paul. Fresh off of a life-changing trip to Comic Con, British mondo nerd Graeme (Pegg) and aspiring science fiction author Clive (Frost) encounter a fugitive weed-smoking slacker alien named Paul (voice of Seth Rogen) fleeing from Area 51 and set out to help him return to his native planet.