Even though his retrospective at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s BAMcinématek alludes to his “mad obsessions,” Barbet Schroeder seems entirely measured and sensible. The affable and erudite Iranian-born filmmaker acts more like a wily anthropologist, irresistibly drawn into the unruly thicket of human nature, eyes wide open, unsure of exactly what he will find.
“I take reasonable risks,” the 67-year-old Mr. Schroeder said. “I know it looks crazy.”
Film history marks him as a key player in the French New Wave. Mr. Schroeder graduated in his early 20s from a stint at …

Director Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In has been the talk of the film-festival circuit for months—the “Swedish vampire movie” that has transfixed audiences with its keenly attenuated evocation of adolescent loneliness and budding first love in the apartment blocks of suburban Stockholm, framed around a latter-day reinvention of the vampire myth. Its two central characters, Oskar (Kare Hedebrant) and his counterpart Eli (Lina Leandersson), both played by remarkable young actors in their first movie, are a bullied and alienated 12-year-old boy and the mysterious dark-haired girl who only …