Starting with Red Sorghum (1987), China’s Zhang Yimou made some of the most sterling films in the world, all starring his then-gal, Gong Li: Ju Dou (1990), Raise the Red Lantern (1991), The Story of Qiu Ju (1992), To Live (1994), and Shanghai Triad (1995). After their break-up, Zhang lost some edge. Not One Less (1999) and The Road Home (2001) are pleasant, humanist works lacking a charismatic female presence. That doesn’t figure to be the case with Zhang’s upcoming Hero, since it stars the sizzling Maggie Cheung.

For now, we are left with Happy Times (opening this Friday, September 20, at the Kendall Square and the West Newton), Zhang’s least personal and cinematic but coyest and most sentimental picture. It’s the kind of broad, philistine domestic comedy that probably wouldn’t be shown in the West if he weren’t the filmmaker. Instead, it’s distributed by Sony Classics, and Terrence Malick appears as an executive producer.

This thin movie has a complicated sit-com plot. Zhao (Zhao Benshan) has no success chasing shapely women, so now he’s courting a crude, chunky one (Dong Lihua) with a tiny apartment lorded over by her overweight son (Leng Qibin). (The film is ripe with obesity jokes.) Then there’s her mistreated Cinderella of a stepdaughter, blind teenager Wu Ying (Dong Jie). Because Zhao needs wealth to satisfy his materialistic fiancŽe, he and his friend Li (Li Xuejian) conceive a Honeymooners-type scheme in tune with today’s entrepreneurial China. They refurbish an ancient school bus and paint over the windows so that couples can rent it for lovemaking by the hour: the "Happy Times Hotel."

Zhao’s girlfriend, who hasn’t actually seen the "hotel," makes Zhao drag her blind stepdaughter there for employment as a masseuse. With Wu Ying out of her hair, she can give the girl’s bedroom to her rotten son. A valiant down-and-out man with a heart of gold and a lovely blind girl. Sound familiar? Think Charlie Chaplin: the unseeing young pretty in City Lights, the struggling Claire Bloom plucked from suicide by the older man in Limelight. But Zhao Benshan, a Chinese TV personality, is no Little Tramp, and Happy Times is neutered of the erotic component that’s always simmering in Chaplin. Although Wu Ying has a habit of wandering about in her underpants, Zhao doesn’t notice. He’s too busy scheming to bring joy into her threadbare life.

Here the movie gets yucky. The sightless lass is convinced that she’s toiling in a grand hotel and making lots of money by giving massages. But it’s really a downtrodden factory, and the customers are Zhao’s neighborhood pals, who come back again and again so that she can smile and proclaim, "These are happy times." What wonderful people! What a heartwarming story! What a tumble for Zhang Yimou!

THIS SUNDAY AND MONDAY the Brattle Theatre’s magnificent Akira Kurosawa/Toshiro Mifune series brings us the little-known 1949 film noir masterpiece Stray Dog, which Kurosawa made to reflect his fondness for the French policier novels of Georges Simenon. The familiar swaggering, pumped-up Mifune is almost unrecognizable as Murakami, a thin, callow Tokyo cop whose budding career almost comes to a stop when his gun is stolen as he rides a crowded bus. The self-flagellating Murakami is humiliated; he feels he should be dismissed from the force. There’s worse to come: the stolen Colt is used in robberies and a murder by the crazy man who stole it. This is a prime doppelgänger story: both Murakami and the killer are war veterans who had their knapsacks stolen at a time of grave rationing. One became a cop in reaction, the other a mongrel criminal.

Murakami stumbles often because of his impatience, and he needs to take time for laughing, flirting, and looking at the stars, the way the veteran cops do, especially his samurai-like mentor, the aging section chief. The latter is played by the same wise, wonderful Takashi Shimura who would later shine as the dying bureaucrat in Ikiru (1952) and as the zen-like leader in The Seven Samurai (1954), in which Mifune is the stray-dog samurai: impetuous, hot-headed, out-of-synch.

AMONG THE MANY ANNOYANCES of Full Frontal was the cheat of the title. In a Hollywood Reporter interview, Steven Soderbergh confessed that said title was just "crass commercialism" concocted for Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein, "the result of my sitting down and trying to think of a title that would make Harvey evaporate in a state of ecstasy. . . . He was pretty happy. He didn’t evaporate, but he was oscillating."

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com