Contempt. The reissue of this 1963 Jean-Luc Godard film has proved to be the surprise hit on what used to be called the art-house circuit. And it will remind you why art and movies were once discussed in the same breath. Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli and Jack Palance star in a movie about (among other things) the making of a movie based on ““The Odyssey,’’ the dissolution of a marriage, the clash of classicism and modernism, Hollywood and Europe, the death of love and the beauty of B.B.’s butt. A British critic has called it ““the greatest work of art produced in post-war Europe.’’ Nonsense. It’s not even Godard’s best (I vote for ““Pierrot le Fou’’). It’s merely wonderful: challenging, gorgeous, moving, bitterly funny and graced with a Georges Delerue score ravishing in its melancholy.

Mrs. Brown. That’s the malicious nickname given Queen Victoria (Judi Dench) by the gossips who were scandalized by her close relationship with a brusque Scottish servant named John Brown (Billy Connolly). In 1864, Brown was summoned to the palace in hopes of drawing the queen out of her deep three-year depression after the death of her beloved Prince Albert. Her withdrawal from the public eye had left her nation edgy and the monarchy imperiled. Oblivious to protocol, the whisky-drinking highlander cuts through her grief with his rude (and shrewd) attentions, and the two forge an unlikely friendship so close it outrages the court. As the fiercely protective Brown’s power over the queen grows and rumors of an affair whip from Windsor to Westminster, their relationship threatens the stability of the government, prompting the Machiavellian intervention of Prime Minister Disraeli (Antony Sher). This true story, deftly embellished by writer Jeremy Brock and directed at a bracing English trot by John Madden, is a splendid showcase for its three superb leads. Dench, Connolly and Sher, each with a distinct charisma, offer a fascinating study of the varieties of political and personal power. ““Mrs. Brown’’ doesn’t soar, but it certainly seduces.

Star Maps. It’s the oldest story in the books - the innocent kid who hits Hollywood with dreams of stardom in his eyes and discovers the tarnish beneath the tinsel. But it doesn’t feel old the way first-time writer-director Miguel Arteta tells it here, with healthy swabs of melodrama, frank sexuality, a sprinkle of magic realism, a dark sense of humor and a rock en espanol beat. Carlos (Douglas Spain), a second-generation immigrant, returns from Mexico to his massively dysfunctional family in L.A. with fantasies of becoming the next Antonio Banderas. His father, Pepe (Efrain Figueroa), puts him on the street selling maps to stars’ homes - Dad’s clever cover for his prostitution ring. The sweet, ambitious Carlos doesn’t care if his clients are men or women, as long as he gets to make Hollywood contacts, and he thinks he’s hit pay dirt when he services Jennifer (Kandeyce Jorden), the star of a TV soap, who promises him a bit part. Complications ensue, what with a raging bull of a father, a crazy mom who talks to the spirit of Cantinflas, a hulking, retarded brother, a saintly sister trying to escape the family madness, and the demands of his hustling career - which obligate him to sleep with his father’s mistress for the delectation of an appreciative gringo couple. It may sound sordid, but Arteta manages to bounce from brutality to comedy with only a few missteps - and without the sweaty moralism that usually attends melodrama. The low-budget ““Star Maps’’ may not be fully realized, but it’s fully alive.

Love Serenade. This Australian comedy by writer-director Shirley Barrett won the Camera d’Or for Best First Film at the 1996 Cannes festival. Deservedly: its sense of humor is deliciously different. It concerns the love-starved Hurley sisters, Dimity (Miranda Otto) and Vicki-Ann (Rebecca Frith), denizens of the tiny, forlorn town of Sunray. Their sisterly bond is sorely tested with the arrival next door of the mellifluous-voiced Ken Sherry (George Shevtsov), an over-the-hill deejay from Brisbane setting up shop in this backwater burg, which he floods with the sepulchral tunes of Barry White. Rarely has a less appropriate love object come into movie view. The jaded, fortysomething, thrice-divorced Sherry, with a face as mournful as a basset hound’s, a body as spindly as Ichabod Crane’s and a reptilian style of seduction, is Mr. Wrong incarnate. Just how fishy this character is cannot be revealed, for it would spoil Barrett’s weirdest conceit, which spins the movie into the territory of fable. Suffice it to say that this minimally populated, very funny movie gets odder and darker as it wends its confident way to a very unexpected conclusion.