“In the search for love, you can find yourself,” reads the poster for Mexican first-time writer-director Julian Hernandez’s A Thousand Clouds of Peace. That sound you hear is my bullshit-o-meter going off.

Seventeen-year-old Gerardo (Juan Carlos Ortuno) may live in Mexico City, but he could just as easily count West Hollywood as his home. Young, attractive and bubbling over with testosterone, he constantly prowls the streets in search of sex, though what he really wants (danger: cliché approaching) is to settle down with the right guy.

A man he meets at the local pool hall could be “the one”, but very early on in their relationship, Bruno, clearly looking for a way out, stands him up. (His brazen kiss-off letter: “I don’t want to hurt you, so therefore I’m a no-show.”) Gerardo is heartsick but not without hope. Perhaps if he waits long enough by the phone, or at the bridge where they used to meet, his future ex-husband will come back into his life. In the meantime, in an effort to deal with his aching loneliness, he spends the night with a guy he clearly has no interest in, is gay-bashed by a stranger who lures him into an abandoned building, and indulges in unsafe sex with a trick in an alley. “You look like a wandering soul,” says Gerardo’s mom when she sees him one day.

Make that a dead wandering soul. A certain amount of mystery can be sexy, but Gerardo is a sullen and uncommunicative walking question mark. Why is he so self-destructive? What’s he really thinking? What’s so great about this guy he’s obsessed with? We haven’t a clue, nor, after a while, do we care; we just want something, anything, of interest to happen. Hernandez, shooting in high-contrast black and white, seems to think it is sufficient to have Ortuno – and just about everyone else in the cast — stare enigmatically at the screen, as if pensive looks will help fill in the numerous blanks. At 82 uneventful minutes, even an impressionistic wet dream can become a bore.

(Ken Cinema, June 11-17; in Spanish subtitles)

There is more than one moment in Roger Michell’s sweepingly bold The Mother that left me squirming with discomfort. That can be a good thing, I’ve come to learn.

In Hanif Kureishi’s courageous original screenplay, Toots (Peter Vaughan) and May (a finely understated Anne Reid) are visiting their materialistic children in London when Toots has a fatal heart attack. Convinced she can’t go back to her empty home, May moves in temporarily with her depressed daughter, Paula (Cathryn Bradshaw), a single mother who’s having an affair with the married Darren (Road to Perdition’s smoldering Daniel Craig), a rough-hewn building contactor. Paula immediately puts her mum to work as a spy: Would she be willing to talk with Darren to find out how he feels about her? Reluctantly, May agrees.

It’s here that The Mother takes a startling turn. May, who finds herself unexpectedly captivated by Darren’s company, impulsively kisses the younger man during a walk — and he responds. Whereas most films with a May-December romantic angle downplay the couple’s physical relationship (if the older of the two is a woman, that is), The Mother celebrates it — in an unapologetic, in-your-face manner that may shock you. (How often in movies do we see a 60ish woman enjoying sex — and with someone 20 years her junior?) Having lived her entire life for her husband and children (who treat her with total indifference, if not disrespect), May surprises even herself with the depth of feelings she uncovers as a result of this long-overdue erotic fling.

Kureishi (My Beautiful Laundrette) and Michell (can this be the same man who directed the fluffy, inconsequential Notting Hill?) could have made a safe, sanitized, Shirley Valentine-ish story about a widow in her twilight years, but they opted for something much more daring and intimate (which is where the squirming comes in — you feel as if you’re a fly on the wall, listening to these characters). The Mother, adroitly lensed by Alwin Kuchler (Morvern Callar), is a mature, superbly acted study of a woman who learns late in life – but not too late, thankfully – that it is okay to honor her long-suppressed yearnings.

(Hillcrest Cinemas)

Imelda, Asian-American filmmaker Ramona S. Diaz’s fascinating portrait of the former Philippines First Lady (1965-1986), Imelda Marcos, opens with a factoid about the deposed political leader’s much-discussed shoe collection: It was estimated at one point that she could change her shoes (between 3,000 and 3,600 pairs) for eight years in a row without putting on the same pair twice.

Narrated on camera by Marcos herself (Diaz met her in 1993 when she was interviewing subjects for her hour-long documentary Spirits Rising), Imelda is less a slice of history detailing the period Imelda and Ferdinand were in power than it is a revealing examination of “the steel butterfly of the Philippines” (one writer’s description of her). To some, she was a savior who built roads, housing and cultural edifices for the people of her country; to others she was a wasteful clothes horse involved in fraudulent elections and flagrant human rights violations. “When they went to my closets [following the Marcos’ ouster in 1986], they found shoes, not skeletons,” she says in one scene. While that may not be exactly true — Marcos has 150 lawsuits against her still pending — it makes for colorful, edge-of-your-seat soap opera.

(Landmark’s La Jolla Village)

Rating System

**** a must-see

*** good

** average

* poor

BOMB (think How to Stuff a Wild Bikini)

Kyle Counts is the film critic for the Gay & Lesbian Times