In theaters

MAN ON THE TRAIN, directed by Patrice Leconte, written by Claude Klotz, 90 minutes, rated R. In French, with English subtitles. Now playing, Movie City 8, Bangor.

The new Patrice Leconte film, “Man on the Train,” is an American Western set in a French village. It’s a collision of cultures, a movie in love with movies, literature, poetry and music, but not to the point of worship or distraction.

Brought to Bangor by the River City Cinema Society and written by Claude Klotz, the film rides its own rhythms, wavering only at the end. Leconte, who directed “The Widow of St. Pierre,” “The Hairdresser’s Husband” and “Girl on the Bridge,” takes risks without cutting off his own limbs.

His final scene is problematic – an overtly stylized, self-conscious letdown – but until then, “Man on the Train” is worthwhile, an often funny, character-driven excursion that gets the small details right while exploring them within the bigger picture.

In the movie, two aging men from opposite sides of the tracks find themselves in each other’s company over the course of three pivotal days, during which they wonder how their lives would have been different had they taken different paths. You know – such as each other’s.

There’s the crook, Milan (French pop star Johnny Hallyday), a tough scruff in black leather whose life has been an often violent affair lived on the edge. He arrives by train in this small provincial town with the intent of robbing a bank, but since it’s nearing winter and most of the inns are closed, he has no luck finding a place to stay.

Enter Manesquier (Jean Rochefort), a lonely literature teacher living out his retirement in the sprawling estate left to him by his mother, dead now 15 years. Drawn to the restless danger he senses in Milan, he suggests that the man stay with him, which Milan reluctantly agrees to do, leaving Leconte to nudge each toward a personal crossroads, a reawakening and a final crisis, not to be revealed here.

On the surface, it seems as if Milan and Manesquier have nothing in common. But as the film unfolds, Leconte finds ingenious and often humorous ways to reveal how they’re actually soul mates.

In one scene, Manesquier secretly dons Milan’s outrageous leather jacket and pretends he’s Wyatt Earp, crooking his finger into the shape of a gun and firing off rounds of imaginary bullets. He looks ridiculous, but the new light in his eyes suggests he’s onto something, the verge of a second chance. In another scene, Milan finds himself teaching poetry to one of Manesquier’s students. Surprisingly, he enjoys it, and soon he’s wearing Manesquier’s slippers, literally walking in the man’s shoes.

Regret is an undercurrent that tugs at the periphery here, with Leconte too shrewd and too knowing a director to allow either man to literally metamorphose into the other. His ending allows him a clever way around that, but it’s just that cleverness – and the coincidence that accompanies it – that undermines what otherwise has been such a smart, grounded movie.

Still, the ending is a minor flaw. Rochefort and Hallyday are terrific, and their movie shouldn’t be missed.

Grade: A-

On video and DVD

A MAN APART, directed by F. Gary Gray, written by Christian Gudegast and Paul Scheuring, 114 minutes, rated R.

If your last film sounded as if it were promoting porn and if it featured you parading about in a sheepskin pimp coat, where would you go from there? Out of the country? Perhaps to a bar?

Not Vin Diesel.

The actor followed the success of “XXX” with “A Man Apart,” a violent revenge drama directed by F. Gary Gray that features Diesel as Sean Vetter, a former L.A. thug turned DEA agent who is psychologically torn apart after the brutal murder of his wife, Stacy (Jacqueline Obradors), who died in a bloody shootout at their beachside home.

Who stuck it to Stacy? For Vetter, it comes down to two feared drug kingpins: Memo Lucero (Geno Silva), a conniving Colombian drug lord, and the elusive El Diablo, a mysterious man determined to keep pushing cocaine from Mexico to California.

Convinced El Diablo is his man, Vetter enlists his partner, Demetrius (Larenz Tate), and his old gang-banging buddy, Big Sexy (George Sharperson), to help find the creep and avenge Stacy’s death.

In spite of what its characters’ names suggest, what ensues isn’t the cartoon action fantasy of “XXX,” but a movie that has energy, rage and heart to spare, so much so that it codes midway through and collapses onscreen.

The problem isn’t Diesel, who took the role knowing he’d have to act and does a fair job of it here. Instead, what sinks the movie is its lapses in logic.

For instance, how can Vetter, a DEA agent earning a modest salary, afford a multimillion-dollar beach-side retreat? How does he have the power to release Memo to another prison when he’s no longer with the force? When El Diablo’s identity is revealed in the awful, out-of-left-field ending, it’s immediately clear that he could have killed Vetter any number of times. So why didn’t he?

You tell me.

Grade: C-

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays and Fridays in Style, Thursdays on WLBZ 2 and WCSH 6, and are archived on RottenTomatoes.com. He can be reached at BDNFilm1@aol.com.