Mennan Yapo, the German director of the wooden would-be thriller Premonition, could learn a thing or two from Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, whose Berlin wall period piece The Lives of Others snagged an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film and rackets up tension and romance without resorting to clichés that only Hitchcock seemed able to master. If creaking stairs and steaming showers are your idea of a night of thrilling entertainment, rent, for instance, “Psycho.”

But I recommend winding your way down to the art house, where burgeoning and already-established filmmakers as talented as von Donnersmarck will take you to the paparazzi-lined streets of Paris, France, to the open wild of Jindabyne, Australia, to the cranky back lot of a Hollywood pilot, and to a wealthy mansion in the Danish countryside where, in the Oscar-nominated After the Wedding, former Bond villain Mads Mikkelsen is united with a daughter he didn’t know he had.

After the Wedding starts in India, where Jacob (Mikkelsen) runs an orphanage badly in need of money. When he returns to Denmark to solicit philanthropic millionaire Jørgen (Rolf Lassgård) he gets a wishy-washy offer (“I’ll tell you on Monday”) and an invitation to the wedding of Jørgen’s adopted daughter.

The premise screams melodrama – affairs, betrayals, terminal illness, sweet-faced Indian children – but director Susanne Bier and writer Anders Thomas Jensen handle the tumultuous proceedings with such nimble grace that sentimentality is all but banished from the screen. The team pulled a similar trick with the war drama “Brothers” – one of my favorite films of 2005 – which showcased Connie Nielsen’s acting chops in a way that “Law and Order: SVU” never could.

The actors here are equally terrific – Mikkelson makes you forget his Casino Royale bad guy in two seconds of screen time, and twenty-year-old newcomer Stine Fischer Christensen, as the bride, turns in a performance that could jumpstart her career. But the real standout is Lassgård, who is first seen head-dancing to “It’s Raining Men,” and could have simply served as comic relief. He makes you look at money moguls in a whole new way (A; opens in limited release on March 30th).

With Jindabyne, director Ray Lawrence moves Raymond Carver’s short story “So Much Water, So Close to Home,” to an Australian landscape as expansive as anything in National Geographic. Don’t drive alone on deserted roads, the opening warns, as a young Aboriginal singer is presumably raped and definitely murdered after doing just that. The violence itself is discretely kept off screen, but emotional violence is what really threatens the inhabitants of Jindabyne when Stewart (Gabriel Byrne) waits three days to report the murder after finding the body on a fishing trip.

As his American wife, Claire (Laura Linney) obsessively tries to make amends with the victim’s family, the town turns their wrath on Stewart and his fishing friends. Though the film moves along at a slow pace, it’s never boring, thanks to wonderful acting and carefully built tension Lawrence sustains by shifting between the townsfolk and the killer (Chris Haywood). That no one – not the police, not Stewart, not Claire – tries to look for the real criminal is baffling. But it is as much a statement as the cultural divide between the Aboriginals and the Caucasians, one that the characters try – and almost succeed - to bridge. My one qualm? The closing shot struck me as a horror movie cliché, and too trite for a film so complex. (A-; opens in limited release on April 27th)

It’s been almost a year since The TV Set premiered at Tribeca, and I don’t have a clue why it took so long for this sharp comedy to find distribution. Written and directed by Jake Kasden (Orange County), “Set” stars David Duchovny (funny in a wonderfully subtle, non-Mulder way) as a TV writer watching his pilot mangled by a producer (Sigourney Weaver) who says “artsy” and “smart” like they’re dirty words. Despite the intervention of a fish out of water from the BBC (Ioan Gruffudd, The Fantastic Four) and a nervous manager (Judy Greer) major script changes are made and a baby-faced bad actor is cast as the lead.

The proceedings are often so painful it’s funny, and so funny it’s painful, but there’s an authenticity to the acting and the writing (Kasdan has clearly been through this) that elevates the movie from a clever parody. This is a classic in the making, and Weaver – who will be seen this month in another excellent Tribeca indie, Snow Cake - is every bit as memorable as Meryl Streep’s devil in “Prada.” (A; opens in New York and LA on April 6th, wider April 20th)

Francis Veber’s romantic comedy The Valet is all fluff – think a soufflé, but super sweet. Gad Elmaleh stars as Francois, the valet of the title, who accidentally stumbles into a paparazzi picture of a multi-millionaire (Daniel Auteuil) and his model girlfriend (Alice Taglioni). When the millionaire’s wife (a buttoned-up Kristin Scott Thomas) sniffs out the affair, Francois is hired to pretend the model is his girlfriend. They drive together, they live together, she visits him at work to the tune of “Pretty Woman.”

This wouldn’t be a problem if the valet wasn’t already in love with a pretty book seller (Virginie Ledoyan). The film’s predictability is never too grating because it makes fun of itself, and the cliché characters never seem as pat as they do in American movies of the same ilk. It’s refreshing to see a model as interesting – and neurotic, and sad, and lonely - as the less beautiful characters. (B+; opens in limited release on April 20th)