In some American cities (though not Boston), the test for hipness among film critics is an intimate knowledge of contemporary Asian cinema that goes beyond Wong Kar-Wai, Ang Lee, John Woo, and Zhang Yimou (all Western favorites) to embrace a host of emerging esoteric directors in Thailand, Taiwan, the Philippines, and South Korea. Although there’s a degree of one-upmanship in this touting of filmmakers whom nobody in American knows, these snobby critics have a point. Whereas many European countries seem to have lost their energy, Asia is on the move, as the MFA’s three-picture " New Korean Cinema " series attests.

The cream of the trio, a film deserving a Boston theatrical run (all will be distributed by Kino International), is Take Care of My Cat (2001; April 5 at 3:15 p.m., April 11 at 5:45 p.m., and April 17 at 5:45 p.m.), which follows the interlocking lives of five post-high-school girls. It’s made by the talented Jeong Jae-eun, one of South Korea’s few women directors. The girls, none of whom goes to college, reside in the port city of Incheon, a commuter ride away from Seoul. Their search for meaning in their dead-end existence in a boring town becomes part of a fertile cinema tradition that extends from Fellini’s I vitelloni through The Last Picture Show and American Graffiti. Instead of Chekhov’s three sisters, we have five chicks expressing their longings by cell phone.

The brash leader, who gets her way through obstinate selfishness, is Hye-ju (Lee Yu-won), who works in Seoul and has her own mini-apartment there. She’s the willfully modern one, choosing a life dedicated to new clothes and being coldly cool. She’s also got a real entry job in a brokerage firm. As the movie goes on, however, it becomes clear that she’ll never get ahead at work. A high-school education is a glass ceiling, and she’s bumping her head.

Good-natured identical twins Bi-ryu (Lee Eung-sil) and Ohn-jo (Lee Eun-joo) sport matching bangs and 1970s Cher hair. They’re satisfied with their lot. Not so Tae-hie (South Korea’s most expressive young actress, Bae Du-na), who lives unhappily with her bland middle-class parents and toils for free — it’s all family! — in their spa. In her spare time, she hangs out with a fringe poet who suffers from cerebral palsy. The other smothered artistic soul is Ji-young (Ok Ji-young), who lives in sunken poverty with her decrepit grandparents and dreams of a career in textile design, something she’ll never be able to afford.

Nearly plotless, the film moves among the five girls as they cope with a daily life that, though almost without melodramatic incident, is bringing the most sensitive of them down, down. Meanwhile, the title cat, actually a sweet, skinny kitten, is passed from girl to girl for safekeeping. The great feline hope.

Painted Fire (2002; April 4 at 7:45 p.m.) is the newest opus from South Korea’s most honored veteran filmmaker, Im Kwon-taek. It’s a fictionalized biography of Korea’s superstar 19th-century painter, Jang Seung-up, who emerged from the lowest caste and claimed he could do his art only when drunk and satiated by women. The film is episodic, and steeped in history that’s apt to be obscure to Westerners. The best moments are bold brush-stroke paintings created on the big screen, startling minimalist action works that anticipate Franz Kline.

Kim Ki-duk’s The Isle (2000; April 4 at 6 p.m. and April 5 at 5:30 p.m.) is the kinky, unpleasant saga of Hee-jin (Suh Jung), a mute young woman on a remote lake who makes her money by rowing hookers out to fishermen-inhabited houseboats and sometimes by offering herself. A suicidal young man, Hyun-shik (Kim Yoo-suk), appears there as a renter, and he’s almost as non-talky mysterious as the barefooted succubus. He has a bloody dream that foreshadows a series of horrific incidents on the water, violence with a moody, art-film patina. Kim’s film is well shot but morally empty, a Woman in the Dunes–like allegory that means next to nothing.

ALSO AT THE MFA, The Tramp and the Dictator (2001; April 5 at 7:30 p.m., as part of " Words on Fire " ) offers the engrossing story behind the shooting of Charles Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. For his daring 1940 film about a Jewish barber mistaken for the Führer, the Little Fellow went " indie, " using his own money to finance this anti-fascist didactic comedy. Filmmakers Kevin Brownlow and Michael Kloft make a persuasive case for Chaplin’s courage in producing The Great Dictator at a time, before Pearl Harbor, when Hollywood was reluctant to take on Nazism. Although MGM appeased Hitler by cutting out scenes in its movies that the Nazis found unsavory, Chaplin built a ghetto shtetl in LA so that he could show, in The Great Dictator, European Jewry being destroyed by Nazi thuggery.

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