God Is Great and I'm Not (Pascale Bailly, France) Gamine-of-the-moment Audrey "Amelie" Tautou is a suicidal fashion model searching for a spiritual outlet. Once she hooks up with a Jewish veterinarian (Edouard Baer), she adopts Judaism as her latest religious fad. As she starts observing Shabbat and keeping kosher, her heritage-denying boyfriend deals with his own cultural identity crisis by withdrawing further and further away. Part cut-up psychoanalytic portraiture à la Oliver Assayas, part pat romantic comedy, the film coasts on Tautou's charm a tad too much. Enough appealingly jagged edges and odd ends remain, however, to convince one that God's glory lies mostly in its details. Thurs/25, 7 p.m., Castro; Sun/4, 8 p.m., Park; Thurs/8, 8:45 p.m., Wheeler; Sat/10, 8:30 p.m., Rafael.

Unfair Competition (Ettore Scola, Italy) Two clothing retailers share a professional rivalry and personal family connections circa '30s fascist Italy. An anti-Semitic slur made on the eve of a visit by Hitler sets a series of tragedies in irreversible motion. Underrated filmmaker Ettore Scola has traveled this terrain before (see his masterpiece A Special Day), and the stock Miramax-ized moments (horny young boys, poignant working-class pathos, innocence-on-the-verge narration ... even Gérard Depardieu!) might seem all too familiar by now. But thanks to Scola's gentle touch and his knack for crafting memorable scenes out of nothing, even the overly sentimental story material manages to come off like spun gold in his hands. Wed/31, 9:30 p.m., Castro; Tues/6, 8:30 p.m., Park; Thurs/8, 3:30 p.m., Wheeler; Sun/11, 5:30 p.m., Rafael.

Mamadrama: The Jewish Mother in Cinema (Monique Schwarz, Australia) Mamadrama is a fascinating look into the rise and fall of one of film's more colorful Oedipal stereotypes: the guilt-issuing, son-smothering, wildly gesticulating Jewish mother. Director Monique Schwartz intersperses interviews with directors, critics, and historians, clips dating back to the silent era, and re-created footage of her childhood, and later her parenthood, in Australia to examine her own ideology of Jewish matriarchy. It's both a personal essay and a cinema history class, as well as an insightful look into how the "Jewish empire" of early Hollywood reflected and refracted its own immigrant upbringing into a curdled cultural nightmare onscreen. A must-see for film fans and put-upon firstborns alike. Mon/29, 9:30 p.m., Castro; Sun/4, 3 p.m., Wheeler.

Sobibor, October 14, 1943, 4pm (Claude Lanzmann, France) Claude Lanzmann chronicles another chapter in the back story of the Jewish struggle for survival, detailing the only successful uprising of concentration camp prisoners against their captors. The French director briefly touched on the incident in his exhaustive documentary Shoah, but here he devotes his lens solely to one moment in Holocaust history. The film is similar in style and tone to his earlier work: Lanzmann intercuts talking-head interview footage and haunting travelogue asides that mimic the exact train route the camp victims would have taken to go to their deaths. Coldly remembered details of the camp's efficient killing methods (one survivor talks of the herd of geese bred to drown out the gas chamber screams with their cries) are recounted, but it's the film's last third, an oral history of the uprising told by one of its participants, that grounds the film in its humanity. Not even the final shot, an endless scrolling timetable of the trains read in a flat, precise monotone by the filmmaker, extinguishes the feeling that, for a second, the oppressed could fight back and win. Mon/29, 5:15 p.m., Castro; Tues/6, 2:30 p.m., Wheeler.