You can fool the movie audience, but not me, says Anna Karina in Jean-Luc Godards 1967 political noir Made in U.S.A. The film is self-reflexive as well as self-conscious: When charactersmore than a few named for Godards pet movie personalitiesspeak, its often to speculate on the nature of language or note the time passing. The movies also a portrait of the Godards soon-to-be ex-wifehere cast as a private investigator, wrapped in a trench coat and packing a gat. Forget plot. Key sequences are regularly pulverized just at the point of resolution, and crucial passages of dialogue are purposefully obscured by street noise as, alternately seductive and indifferent, Karinas detective goes in search of a lover who is apparently lost, perhaps to assassination, in a labyrinthine, never-fully-explained, international political intrigue. Made in U.S.A. is anti-capitalist and anti-consumerist, decrying miniskirts and rock n roll as mind control, but its also more devoted to the vulgar modernism of mid-20th-century pop culture than any movie Godard made before or would make after. (NR) J. HOBERMAN
July 3-9, 7 & 9 p.m., 2009