As earlier noted, the 2009 Berlin Film Festival opened with a Hollywood movie (The International), directed by Germany's own Tom Tykwer and filmed in a half-dozen countries around the world, then continued with a French movie (In the Electric Mist) made in the U.S.A. with dialogue spoken in regional Louisiana dialects that begged the need for subtitles. In addition, this year's official Berlinale competition has included Storm, German director Hans-Christian Schmidt's docudrama about the United Nations war crimes tribunal in The Netherlands, featuring a cast of Brits, Romanians and New Zealanders speaking a mix of English, Bosnian and Serbian; and Mammoth, Swedish director Lukas Moodysson's stab at a Babel-style cross-cultural jigsaw, set between New York, Thailand and the Philippines. Still to come is The Dust of Time, the latest from master Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos, here reportedly working in English, Russian, German and Greek, with Willem Dafoe in the lead.

Meanwhile, for the last two weeks, the North American box office has been dominated by Taken, a French movie made in France with an English-speaking, Irish-born star (Liam Neeson) that had already been released in most of the rest of the world before it ever crossed the Atlantic. Qu'est-ce qui se passe?

Films made by actors and directors working outside of their national borders and mother tongues are, of course, as old as the cinema itself, with Hollywood having first been colonized by emigré filmmakers (Capra, Griffith, Wilder) who went on to make some of the most iconic American films. Likewise, there is the equally longstanding tradition of American and British movies set in foreign cultures, but starring predominately Yank and Anglo actors speaking anachronistically in English (for recent examples, see Valkyrie, with its cast of British-accented Germans, and The Reader, with its cast of faintly German-accented Brits). And whether now or then, American moviegoers have paid such nuances little mind -- in large measure because most Americans, whether at home or traveling abroad, assume that everything from restaurant menus to movie dialogue ought to be in English. I mean, if we're going to complain about the lack of German accents in Valkyrie, why not mention that, by rights, everyone in Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner ought to be speaking Hungarian?

What's different about the crop of English-language international productions at this year's Berlinale is that they largely take matters of language and nationality as their very subjects. They could, one British colleague has joked, be rated "G" for globalization. Or, better yet, "P" for pedantic. That's certainly the case with Storm, which much like The International seems hellbent on finding a multinational bogeyman to finger for all of the world's injustices. In Tykwer's film, it's the global banking industry; in Schmidt's, it's the UN, which pays predictable lip service to the idea of bringing justice to bear on fugitive war criminals from the Bosnian conflict, provided it doesn't take too long or -- God forbid -- impede the breakaway Balkans' efforts towards EU membership. "Do you watch those kind of movies, where the good always wins in the end?" asks the potential star witness (4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days star Anamaria Marinca) to the idealistic Hague prosecutor (Kerry Fox) who's urging her to testify against a former Yugoslav Army commander. From there, Storm becomes exactly one of those movies, complete with a grandstanding finale in which our two crusading heroines create massive disorder in the court and, by doing so, tip the scales of justice back into balance.

Still, far better Schmidt's Erin Brockovich of the Balkans than Moodysson's Mammoth, whose two-ton pretension is heralded by its own title, a reference to a $3000 pen whose clear barrel contains pieces of mammoth ivory -- this, in the movie's view, being the ultimate symbol of imperialist decadence. That pen is used by an arrested-adolescent video game designer (Gael Garcia Bernal) to sign the lucrative contract that will allow him to keep up the mortgage on the chic SoHo loft occupied by him, his ER doctor wife (Michelle Williams) and their young daughter. Williams, fresh from Wendy and Lucy -- one of the only recent films with something meaningful to say about America's haves and have-nots --  here has little wiggle room as a contemptible bourgeois who berates her live-in Filipina nanny for teaching the young'un Tagalog, unaware that, half a world away, the nanny's own son is about to stick his toe in the water of Manilla's underage sex trade. Let it be said that Moodysson, best known in the States for his 2002 human trafficking drama Lilya 4-Ever, has not yet run out of ways to humiliate his leading ladies.

Relievedly, given its own confluence of First World and Third, black skin and white, Islam and Christianity, London River (which could be rated "T" for terrorism) almost always places its characters ahead of its polemics, making for a small but heartfelt drama about an African man (the excellent Malian actor Sotigui Kouyate) and a British woman (Brenda Blethyn) who meet while searching for their missing children in the aftermath of the 2005 London subway and bus bombings. Directed by the French-Algerian filmmaker Rachid Bouchareb, who previously made the Oscar-nominated Indigènes, London River sometimes plays things a bit too broadly in the culture-clash and racial-profiling departments, but still manages to render a nicely understated snapshot of multi-ethnic life in the global city, without a non-linear narrative or top-heavy title metaphor in sight.

Ironically, London River, which is mostly in French, seems a lot likelier to make its way to international art-house audiences than either Storm or Mammoth, which are mostly in English. The instructive difference is that, where Bouchareb's film feels personal and human-scale, the others seem anonymous and monolithic -- movies more concerned with saving the world than telling stories, hammered into existence by international sales companies and co-production boards rather than by artists with singular visions.

Not many films in the 60 years since Robert Flaherty's immortal Louisiana Story have evoked the atmosphere of the Bayou State as strongly as Bertrand Tavernier's In the Electric Mist, a movie that doesn't seem to have been filmed so much as distilled, on a creaking porch beset by mosquitos and summer heat, with the rumble of a gathering storm in the distance. Adapted from the novel by James Lee Burke, the film stars Tommy Lee Jones as Burke's popular detective character, Dave Robichaux, here investigating the murder of one Cherry LeBlanc, a "fatally beautiful" 19-year-old prostitute whose mutilated corpse washes up on shore in the film's opening scene. Not long after that, another body -- this one belonging to a lynched black man dead and gone some 40 years -- surfaces deep in the swamp, loosed by Hurricane Katrina's churning tide.

Since it was first announced, In the Electric Mist has sounded like an ideal project for Tavernier, combining two of the veteran French filmmaker's great passions: the American South (previously explored in his 1985 documentary, Mississippi Blues) and American pulp fiction (the basis for 1981's Oscar-nominated Coup de torchon, which transposed Jim Thompson's Pop. 1280 to French colonial Africa). But it's been a long road to Berlin for In the Electric Mist, which was shot on location in 2007 only to become entangled in post-production disagreements between Tavernier and the film's American producer, Michael Fitzgerald (The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada).

When the dust finally settled, two different versions of the movie emerged -- an "international" cut prepared by Tavernier, which screened here in Berlin and will be released in most countries around the world, and an "American" cut supervised by Fitzgerald that runs 15 minutes shorter and will go directly to DVD in the U.S. next month. In comparing the two edits, Variety critic Leslie Felperin deemed the American version "brisker but less-coherent" with "tacky summing up and [an] oo!-spooky last shot mini twist that makes [it] play like a made-for-TV movie."

Having seen only Tavernier's version, I can say that it's unfortunate American audiences may never get a chance to experience this superior detective yarn on the big screen, in the form its director intended. Unfortunate, but by no means surprising. Indeed, where the default Hollywood position would have been to strip-mine Burke's source material for its narrative chassis while junking all its atmospheric touches, tertiary supporting characters and curlicue digressions, Tavernier (working from a script credited to the husband-and-wife team of Jerzy Kromolowski and Mary Olson-Kromolowski) does exactly the opposite. Much like Burke himself on the page, he plays up the bass line at the expense of the melody, showing markedly less interest in the identity of the killer(s) than in a long and winding history of Southern injustice that stretches from Jim Crow to George W. Bush. Long ago, Robichaux says in the lyrical voice-over that opens the film, people placed heavy stones on the graves of the dead so as to weigh down the souls of the departed. But in Burke and Tavernier's world, every time a storm blows through, those stones become displaced, and restless spirits take to wandering the bayou.

This is the Burke adaptation fans of the author deserved, but were sorely denied by the 1996 film version of another Robichaux novel, Heaven's Prisoners, with an altogether unconvincing Alec Baldwin in the lead. Jones, by contrast, slips effortlessly into the character's skin -- a bit too effortlessly, some might argue, given the actor's history of playing no-nonsense lawmen. But pay close attention to the jittery impatience in Dave Robichaux's voice, his clumsiness of gesture, the faint uncertainty in his recovering alcoholic's eyes, and you will see a character many jurisdictions removed from The Fugitive's cocksure Marshal Samuel Gerard and No Country For Old Men's wizened and weary Sheriff Ed Tom Bell.

If In the Electric Mist is finally less than completely satisfying as a murder mystery, as a piece of cultural anthropology it is never less than deeply absorbing. History and myth freely intermingle with the present, particularly in the case of what may be the movie's cleverest conceit -- a Civil War-era film within the film, starring a hell-raising Hollywood actor (a highly amusing Peter Sarsgaard) and a cast of hundreds, although the Confederate General (Levon Helm) Robichaux keeps encountering in the nighttime fog seems more than a mere costumed extra.

Elsewhere, Tavernier's movie runs thick with gut-bucket jazz and blues, regional accents so foreign that the film's Berlin press screenings carried English subtitles, and local fat cats with names like "Babyfeet" Balboni (wonderfully oily John Goodman) and "Twinky" Lemoyne (Ned Beatty) who add to the Chinatown-like air of pervasive corruption. One murder blends into another, and the only meaningful punishment is meted out not by the hands of the law, but by those of father time. Ultimately, "whodunit?" seems a question as unanswerable as a Zen koan -- except, perhaps, in the producer's cut.

For the next 10 days, I'll be posting regularly from the Berlin International Film Festival (a.k.a. the Berlinale), generally considered to be the second largest festival in Europe (after Cannes) and, at 59, one of the oldest. This year, the Berlinale's international competition will feature the world premieres of new films by Stephen Frears (Cheri), Chen Kaige (Forever Enthralled), Sally Potter (Rage) whose 2004 film, Yes, sparked a memorable dialogue in these pages, and French director Bertrand Tavernier, whose 1995 teen crime drama, L'Appat, won Berlin's top prize, the Golden Bear, and who returns this year with an English-language adaptation of detective novelist James Lee Burke's In the Electric Mist, filmed on location in Louisiana with Tommy Lee Jones in the lead. Those films and 13 others will be judged by a jury headed by Tilda Swinton that also includes Spanish filmmaker Isabel Coixet, Swedish author Henning Mankell and American "slow food" doyen Alice Waters.

At 82, the Polish master Andrzej Wajda (Sweet Rush) may be the oldest director in competition, but he's young enough to be the son of Portugal's unstoppable Manoel De Oliveira, whose latest feature, Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl, screens in the non-competitive Berlinale Speical sidebar, which also includes Bellamy, the latest from French suspense maestro Claude Chabrol (a mere 78, and with nearly that many films under his belt). Meanwhile, in the Forum -- a home for more independent and experimental works roughly equivalent to Cannes' breakaway Directors Fortnight section -- one can find everything from Beeswax, the third feature by Funny Ha Ha director Andrew Bujalski, the latest architectural essay film by Heinz Emigholz and Love Exposure, a four-hour Japanese film about an adolescent sexual voyeur who falls in love with the man-hating step-daughter of his priest father's lover. (The Forum program intriguingly states that the film "composes the extremes of human behavior into an ecstatic passion choreographed to religious music, the Bolero, the funeral march and the Japanese band Yura Yura Teikoku's J-Pop music.") As a fan of long-form films, I welcome that challenge, but take due pause at the prospect of German director Ludwig Schönherr's New York. Ein visuelles Arbeitstagebuch, a Super 8 "visual diary" of New York City that reportedly takes more than four days to view in its entirety.

Like last month's Sundance Film Festival, which saw even its biggest buzz usurped by the U.S. Presidential Inauguration, the 2009 Berlinale coincides with its own bit of national history: the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, which, although it will not be officially marked until November, is the subject of various year-long commemorations throughout Germany, including a special Berlinale sidebar, "After Winter Comes Spring - Films Presaging the Fall of the Wall," comprised of 13 features and several shorts produced in the GDR and other countries of the former Communist East.

Meanwhile, the curtain rose on the Berlinale Thursday evening with an opening-night film inspired by more recent current events. Loosely based on the 1990s scandals surrounding the Pakistani-run Bank of Credit and Commerce International, The International is, true to its title, a globe-hopping conspiracy thriller directed by a German (Run Lola Run's Tom Tykwer), produced with American studio money, and starring two foreign-born actors (Clive Owen and Naomi Watts) who are now as Hollywood as they come. So, for that matter, is the movie.

Since I'll be writing about The International at length for next week's editions of the Weekly and The Village Voice, when the film opens in worldwide commercial release, I won't belabor the matter now, except to say that this poor man's Parallax View, about a sinister Luxembourg bank that runs a brisk sideline in third-world revolutions and black-market arms sales, can't hold a candle to the geopolitical nail-biters presently unfolding in the pages of your morning newspaper. Oh, and I'd be remiss not to mention the elaborate shootout that occurs in, of all places, Manhattan's Guggenheim Museum, which should appease anyone who has ever wondered what a Michael Bay gallery installation might look like and provides The International with a working metaphor for its own shotgun wedding of grindhouse inclinations and art-house ambitions.