Capsule reviews of films playing the week of May 11 

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POTICHE A Continental cousin to those plucky British comedies in which working-class peons struggle against their bourgeois employers (latest example: Made in Dagenham), the French romp Potiche is primarily an excuse for audiences to once again spend quality time with those two titans of Gallic cinema, Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu. Set in 1977, this finds Deneuve cast as Suzanne Pujol, the trophy housewife of a right-wing chauvinist (Fabrice Luchini's Robert Pujol) tyrannically running her late father's umbrella factory into the ground. With the prodding of the town's Communist mayor, Maurice Babin (Depardieu), the workers go on strike to demand better hours and better wages, a protest that eventually leads to the agitated Robert being confined to bed rest for a lengthy period of time. As someone is required to take over running the factory, Suzanne ends up assuming the position. Yet unlike her dictatorial husband, the increasingly assertive Suzanne is willing to talk, listen and make compromises, and before long, the factory is far more successful in her progressive hands than it ever was under Robert's fascistic fist. Adapting a play originally penned during that era, writer-director Francois Ozon has made a film that is only lightly interested in tackling any major sociopolitical issues. True, the story charts Suzanne's rise from submissive housewife to freethinking feminist, but Ozon's top priority is making sure everyone is having a breezy time both up on the screen and in the audience. Luchini's sputtering provides some comedic madcap elements, Judith Godreche and Jeremie Renier offer an easygoing contrast as the Pujols' grown children (she's conservative, he's artistic), and Ozon himself serves up some nice visual touches (dig that fuzzy phone!). As for Deneuve and Depardieu, their willingness to just show up on the set and allow themselves to be filmed is reward enough, methinks. ***

RED RIDING HOOD The idea of combining a werewolf tale with a whodunit is an interesting one, and the notion of adding layers of Freud and feminism onto the wolfman saga is positively genius. These angles have been tackled before (The Beast Must Die and The Company of Wolves, respectively), but Red Riding Hood ambitiously tries to conquer the lycanthrope tale on both fronts. A well-cast Amanda Seyfried plays Valerie, a young medieval maiden whose village has long been plagued by a werewolf. A visiting moral crusader (Gary Oldman, in camp mode) reveals that the wolfman is actually someone from the village, and this causes everyone to view their neighbors with suspicion and — shades of The Crucible — hurl accusations of witchcraft. Had director Catherine Hardwicke and scripter David Johnson buried themselves in the lore and atmosphere of their setting while accentuating the legend's leaps into sensuality, violence and the allure of latent desires, it could have worked beautifully. Instead, the focus is on the love triangle between Valerie and the village's two cutest boys (Shiloh Fernandez and Max Irons), and while the teen angst that Hardwicke brought to the original Twilight was appropriate, here it creates a modernity that's at odds with the rest of the film. After all, it's hard to bury oneself in the moody period setting when the central thrust remains that Valerie basically has to choose between Justin Bieber and a Jonas Brother. **

RIO As straight-ticket children's fare, Rio is better than many toon flicks aimed squarely at this undiscriminating audience (Gnomeo & Juliet, for example), with its visual splendor and Jesse Eisenberg's patented nerd shtick helping overcome deficiencies in the narrative and a slew of humdrum ancillary characters. Eisenberg provides the voice for Blu, a macaw raised from infancy by a Minnesota bookworm named Linda (Leslie Mann). A bumbling scientist (Rodrigo Santoro) convinces Linda to bring Blu to Rio de Janeiro so he can mate with Jewel (Anne Hathaway) in an attempt to prevent the extinction of the species, but the feathered pair hardly prove to be "lovebirds." A smuggler (Carlos Ponce) steals the rare birds with the assistance of his two imbecilic minions and a Scar-like cockatoo named Nigel (Jemaine Clement), and it's up to the timid Blu and the feisty Jewel to extract themselves from this dire predicament. Except for its use in one stunning aerial sequence set in the skies around the Christ the Redeemer statue, the 3-D is (as is often the case) negligible and only in place to justify elevated ticket prices. Visually, the film commands attention on its own, not only in the flight sequences but also during the musical numbers. But the story is drab and uninvolving, and the big-name cast (Hathaway, Jamie Foxx, will.i.am, George Lopez) is ill-equipped to bring the dull characters to life. The exception is Eisenberg, who is accorded the script's few decent lines and draws some mild laughs from them. Of course, coming so soon after The Social Network, it's hard not to recall Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg; as continuing proof that Rio misses its mark at connecting with adults, there are no references to Blu as the creator of FaceBeak. **1/2