Guillaume Canet’s intricate but adroitly engineered new French thriller Tell No One is something of a throwback to an older way of bringing off this kind of thing, as if the French New Wave had never rolled over European filmmaking. He hasn’t turned his movie self-referentially back on itself to convey social or political implications. He hasn’t indulged in a personal exercise in genre-exploding—to borrow New Wave director Francois Truffaut’s term for the appropriation and recycling of the American crime and suspense melodramas beloved by him and other French cineastes. They turned them into instruments to challenge the dominance of the carefully constructed, literary-flavored films that were prevalent in French cinema. Forty to 50 years ago, filmmakers like Truffaut and Jean Luc Godard refashioned American pulp fiction and mass-market crime movies into vehicles of aesthetic and social challenge.

David Volach was raised in Jerusalem in an ultra-orthodox haredic community, in a household where he was one of 20 children. He left the faith in his 20s and studied film. This, his first feature, is his reflection on issues of extreme faith. But while it can be read as critical it is anything but a strident denunciation. Short (the end credits roll before the 70 minute mark) and often dreamlike, it follows in sometimes miniscule detail the life of a family of three. Rabbi Abraham (played with contextual irony by the noted Israeli actor Assi Dayan, son of the secular hero Moyshe Dayan) is the studious and devout leader of a Haredic sect. He and his wife Ester (Sharon Hacohen Bar) have one young son, Menachem (Ilan Griff), whose youthful curiosities about the world around him provoke questions that aren’t effectively answered by his father’s scholarly Talmudic lessons. We know this story will end tragically, both from the opening scene set at Menachem’s funeral and the less-than-subtle references to the Biblical story of Abraham. Yet that ending would seem to require a reaction of rage from a film that evokes more sadness at lives wasted in obeisance to barely understood laws. The details of the story are often abstruse, at least to a viewer who doesn’t share the filmmaker’s upbringing: Why does Ester write a note to her husband when she wants to tell him something (and why don’t we get to read what it says)? What possible purpose can there be to a commandment that requires a mother bird to be chased away from her nest, leaving her chicks to starve? But if Volach’s metaphors are often too broad to grasp, his attention to detail and mood is nonetheless striking, and My Father My Lord has a sureness that prods you to examine the questions it poses rather than write them off as weaknesses.

Cheech and Chong, the progenitors (or, if you like, instigators) of drug humor, announced last week that they will be embarking on a reunion tour. The timing was brilliant, because this weekend millions of people are going to be watching this new Judd Apatow Inc. comedy about a pair of stoners and thinking how much funnier this kind of stuff was when C&C did it. Scripted by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (with story input by Apatow), Pineapple Express reunites Freaks and Geeks co-stars Rogen and James Franco as a slobby process server and his dope dealer. After Rogen witnesses a murder involving a renegade cop (Rosie Perez) and a drug lord (Gary Cole), the two are forced to go on the run. There are laughs from watching these guys reacting to a bad situation when they’re already suffering from dope paranoia. But as the style morphs into a self-conscious Quentin Tarantino clone (replete with Mr. Majestyk reference and gruesome ear-mangling scene), the film starts to play as if everyone involved was making it up as they went along. Improvisation is fine, but the trick is that you’re only supposed to keep the good stuff. Rogen and Goldberg also wrote Superbad, which this resembles in inverse proportion: The male-bonding comedy is displaced by the action stuff, which is played too straight to be taken as comic. And the rude adolescent dialogue is replaced by a lot of the kind of meandering babbling that sounds funny when you’re high—but only to you and whoever you’re getting high with. The director is indie wunderkind David Gordon Green, whose previous films (George Washington, All the Real Girls) displayed no affinity for comedy; he’s at a loss to pull much humor out of the material here, relying on the willingness of a certain audience to laugh at stoned characters. Enumerating the values of marijuana, one of our heroes notes that “It makes shitty movies better.” Pineapple Express may indeed be better if you go to it baked; still, for the price of a movie ticket you can really load up at Mighty Taco.

Country singer Toby Keith’s second foray onto the movie screens of America has next to nothing to do with his 2003 hit that provides the title (a good ol’ boy salute to vigilantism and lynching). Nor does it expand on that song’s video, which cast Keith as an FBI agent and Willie Nelson as a profiler who helps him track down a serial killer. (You can tell it was designed as a promo for a potential movie.) What you will find onscreen is less than 90 minutes of a script that Burt Reynolds in his drive-in heyday wouldn’t have bothered to spit tobacco juice on. Keith stars as a New Mexico deputy sheriff named Rack (whether that’s a first or last name I couldn’t figure out). His girlfriend (Gina Gershon) walks out on him for forgetting her birthday, but he doesn’t spend much time bemoaning the loss when he hears his old flame Annie (Claire Forlani), who was “hotter than donut grease in high school,” returns from Chicago. “The big city’s too fast for me—I miss the people here,” she purrs at him, clearly not referring to the Mexican drug lord who kidnaps her while she’s still warm from Rack’s bed and holds her in exchange for the release of his brother. This requires Rack to launch a mini-invasion of Mexico accompanied by his deputies Lonnie (breast-fixated comedian Rodney Carrington, who co-wrote this with Keith) and Skunk (Ted Nugent, who is not trusted with the delivery of any dialogue). Did I mention the flatulent hound dog? Did I need to? The plot is so minimal that the film is padded out with cameo appearances from such old-school country stars as Mel Tillis, Mac Davis, and David Allen Coe, as well as a bizarre stop at a circus freak show run by Willie Nelson. Keith is no great shakes as an actor, and a bit on the beefy side for an action hero. His detractors may enjoy picking the movie apart for hits of racism, sexism, and anti-Semitism, but it hardly matters—the whole thing is so slight and lazily assembled that even Keith’s fans are likely to ignore it until it pops up on TV some Sunday afternoon, at which point they may or may not sit all the way through it.