As the fine yellow dust covering your car and your late night study group in the ZSR can attest, summer is on the way.

For Hollywood, summer means blockbusters. Theaters will soon be inundated with gross-out teen sex comedies, sci-fi action thrillers like Spider Man and Star Wars Episode 2 and undoubtedly a sassy Julia Roberts falling in love with somebody.

So thanks be to North Point 5 and its inexplicable commitment to showing foreign and independent films.

If watching Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise hook up (in the creative sense, at least) in Minority Report is your idea of six bucks well spent, then you probably won't be that excited about the new Danish import, Italian for Beginners.

A collaboration between Lone Scherfig and Peter Gantzler, Italian for Beginners is such a sophisticated movie that it features subtitles that translate dialogue from two foreign languages.

Note to guys: women like it when you take them to movies with subtitles. It makes you seem sophisticated, kind of like when you order the International Omelette at IHOP.

While subtle, this film about Danish thirty-somethings who take an Italian course at a dingy community center is refreshingly simple. It's a love story. Not a sickeningly contrived and heartwarming love story where beautiful sex objects pine for each other accompanied by weepy cello music, but rather a love story with characters who look and seem like real people.

There's an impotent hotel clerk, a sarcastic Adidas-clad restaurateur, a hairdresser and her long-lost sister and a neophyte priest with a cool tattoo. Set against the dull gray of the Danish cityscape, the principals have interpersonal skills to match the Scandinavian cold.

The Italian class brings the shy residents of the small village together, adding a Mediterranean vitality to their working-class lives.

These individuals remind you of people you know, seeking compassion and fumbling with life's complexities along the way.