"Like Someone in Love" is the title of the latest movie from Iran's master of cinema, Abbas Kiarostami, a man routinely cited as one of the world's great living filmmakers.

The title is taken from a popular song from 1944 by Jimmy van Heusen and Johnny Burke. We hear Ella Fitzgerald's 1957 version on the soundtrack; the professor who is one of the movie's two lead characters plays the recording in his apartment, while entertaining the other lead character, a college student who moonlights as a high-end call girl.

The meaning of the song in this context is elusive. Even after you see the movie, you may ask yourself: What is like someone in love? Or: Like someone in love with what? The one-word answer that seems to fit best is: cinema.

Fearless and flamboyant, the late William "Bill" Kendall was an outspoken champion of art cinema and gay pride at a time when both concepts were met with suspicion or even hostility by most Memphians.

As manager of the Memphis "art" movie houses of the 1960s and '70s, Kendall was the city's eccentric and proudly contentious patron saint of art, foreign, classic, camp and experimental cinema -- or "smut," as some of his bookings were defined by prosecutors.

Kendall was indicted on obscenity charges by the Shelby County Grand Jury for exhibiting such frank films as "I, A Woman" (1965) and "Without a Stitch" (1968), both from Sweden, and "I Spit on Your Grave" (1959), a forgotten French film -- no relation to the notorious 1978 revenge movie of the same name -- about a light-skinned African-American who heads South to investigate the lynching of his brother.

Sprawling, even meandering, the 146-minute movie version of Salman Rushdie's 1981 Booker Prize-winning novel "Midnight's Children" is faithful to its source to a fault -- probably because Rushdie himself wrote the script, with director Deepa Mehta.

Rushdie also is one of the film's executive producers, and its narrator. The jolly fatwa survivor even plugged the movie during a recent appearance on "The Colbert Report."

Dishonorably discharged male War-on-Terror vets menace attractive female campers in "Black Rock," a photogenic Maine-set shocker that seems to have been motivated by a desire to craft a commercial thriller within the self-imposed restrictions of an indie arthouse esthetic and budget.

Combining the backwoods paranoia of "Deliverance," the hunting-for-humans suspense of "The Most Dangerous Game," the ironic reversion-to-savagery female empowerment of "The Descent" and the woman-avenger catharsis of "I Spit on Your Grave" and Troma's "Mother's Day," "Black Rock" brings nothing new to the themes of its sources. Perhaps debuting director and star Katie Aselton is unfamiliar enough with genre history to think she is blazing a virgin trail through not just the picturesque forest of her island location but the gruesome thickets of her violent narrative.

"Lore" is a coming-of-age story in an extreme context. The title character, Hannelore (Saskia Rosendahl), is a pretty teenager and the daughter of Nazis, forced to become a surrogate mother to the three siblings she leads through the Black Forest after the departure of their parents, in the days following the Allied victory over Germany.

The children face hunger, danger and -- most distressing of all -- disillusionment and enlightenment: the first inklings of the horrors promoted by their officer father and complicit mother. With their puffy sleeves and shorts with suspenders, these siblings -- including twin boys with the über-German names of Jürgen and Günther -- might be refugees from a Katzenjammer comic strip or an Aryan fable of idealized cuteness; the illusion is ruined when they spout opinions about "filthy Jews" or are menaced by Russian troops as willing to shoot a child as a soldier.

To speak in grandiose terms, artists are creators of worlds. They breathe life into people who otherwise wouldn't exist. They resurrect the dead. Their word is made flesh, so to speak; their vision is made manifest. No wonder certain moviemakers -- Erich von Stroheim, Fritz Lang, James Cameron -- have been accused of exhibiting a god complex.

Ray Harryhausen, 92, the beloved and influential special effects innovator and monster-making genius who died May 7 at his home in London, seemed to be a very modest and unassuming man, yet he was the master of what might be the most essentially "godlike" of filmmaking disciplines. As a stop-motion animator, Harryhausen willed inanimate objects to life. He commanded them to move, and -- for the purposes of his art, at least --they did.

Poor Ariel. He's talking to hotties in a late-night dance club in Valparaíso, Chile, when an earthquake hits, crushing a hostess before he even can get her number.

Worse, a falling shelf severs his hand, which flips across the floor. But, hey, a pretty girl retrieves it for him and puts it in her purse.

But then a purse snatcher steals the bag! "Please, my hand!" Ariel cries after the fleeing felon, in despair. And in subtitle: He's speaking Spanish.

"Please, my hand!" That's a subtitle you won't find in many art films, and "Aftershock" -- which opens today (May 10) in Memphis exclusively at Malco's Wolfchase Galleria Cinema 8 -- is no art film, even if much of the dialogue requires translation, as the characters alternate between English and Spanish.

If "The Impossible," inspired by the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, was a disaster film for the arthouse, "Aftershock," inspired by the 2010 earthquake that smacked much of Chile, is strictly grindhouse. What else would you expect from Eli Roth, who has been making the world unsafe for tourists for almost a decade, most notoriously with "Hostel" and "Hostel: Part II"?

"Peeples" is straight-up sitcom, which is not necessarily a bad thing. First of all, it's funny, at least sometimes; second, it contains an interesting stealth message about aspiration and identity, as do many family or relationship sitcoms, from "The Honeymooners" to "The Brady Bunch" to "The Jeffersons" and beyond.

A rare starring vehicle for supporting comic actor Craig Robinson, the movie is a sort of black-cast reworking of "Meet the Parents," but with a modest budget, a less aggressive tone and more subtext. Judging from the uproarious audience response at the preview screening I attended, the movie should be a substantial word-of-mouth hit for Lionsgate and for 34th Street Films, a production arm of Tyler Perry Studios.

"Disconnect" is "Crash" for the age of social media. Unfortunately, the "Crash" I mean is the tiresome 2005 all-star ensemble about racial interconnectedness in Los Angeles that won the Academy Award for Best Picture, not the 1996 David Cronenberg movie about weirdos having sex in wrecked cars.

In "The Wet Parade," a rather amazing and almost forgotten MGM movie released in 1932 but set years earlier, cynical Neil Hamilton scoffs at earnest Robert Young's interest in enlisting in the fight that would become known as World War I.

"You're all hopped up on that patriotic hypodermic," Hamilton sneers, then offers this judgment: "All war does is fertilize the ground and supply the circuses with armless and legless wonders."

Wow. Powerful stuff. Powerful, too, is a speech in the similarly neglected "Massacre," with Richard Barthelmess as a "fullblooded Sioux Indian scout" named Joe Thunder Horse.

A modern Indian, Joe has these words for the white man's courtroom in 1934:

"They used to shoot the Indian down. Now you cheat him and starve him and kill him off by dirt and disease. It's a massacre, any way you take it."