In the Moodysson

Critics blew hot and cold on the latest movie from Swedish bad-boy auteur Lucas Moodysson, the 2009 Babel imitation Mammoth, with indie queen Michelle Williams and Gael García Bernal (new at Scarecrow). But this guy needs to be on your screen.

Try his hilarious, heartwarming 2001 satire of a 1975 Stockholm commune, Together, which deserves its 96 percent Rottentomatoes score. A battered wife flees her drunken hubby to her brother's anarchosyndicalist experimental microcosm of the future, but nothing is Hollywood formulaic. Sure, the drunk stalks her, but he's not all bad — we see things from everybody's point of view. The communards are painfully sincere. One washes dishes without pants for ideologically pragmatic reasons. Another progressively asks her boyfriend's pro forma permission to have wild, loud sex with a cuter guy at the commune — but the cute guy doesn't want sex, he just wants someone, anyone to listen to his boring Trotskyite rants.

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Often, Moodysson's main point of view is a child's; in Together, it's two kids who urgently wish their parents hadn't dragged them into the glorious egalitarian future. A vivid, funny, knowing slice of history, a feminist fable, an excellent coming of age story among grownups who won't grow up — this movie wins on several levels.

Another winner: Moodysson's 1998 Show Me Love. Its original title was Fucking Åmål, which is what teenager Elin (played with blonde abandon by Alexandra Dahlstrom) exclaims in despair at her life in boring Åmål, Sweden, pop. 9,380. She's a thrill junkie in a burg where her improvident personality is about the only thrilling thing in sight. Which is why the main heroine (brooding Swede-Finn Rebecka Liljeberg) is ass over teakettle in love with her. I never saw a more convincing movie about lesbian romance, though I wouldn't put money on Elin's long-term fidelity.

Moodysson's Lilya 4Ever shows his weakness for thumping didacticism. Unless you favor importing desperately poor Russian teen orphans to Sweden for the sex trade, there will be no lessons or surprises here. But Oksana Akinshina is a find, the gritty sense of place is marvelous, and the film has a pure soul that can't be sullied.

I wish I were tough enough to recommend A Hole in My Heart, a movie about an amateur porn shoot less goodhearted than Seattle's Humpday. If you can handle grisly surgery scenes and lurid if not emetic concupiscence, you can admire Moodysson's startling artistry.

But I prefer the innocence of Fucking Åmål.