The diva, the nurse, & the bears: there's at least something to love in each of these iffy new fall films.

Callas Forever * Written by Martin Sherman and Franco Zeffirelli * Directed by Zeffirelli * Starring Fanny Ardant, Jeremy Irons, and Joan Plowright * Here! Films

There are two compelling reasons to see director Franco Zeffirelli's what-if? fantasia about the autumn years of opera diva Maria Callas. The first is Fanny Ardant as Callas. The austerely handsome Ardant, best known from Confidentially Yours and 8 Women, has a field day playing the phenomenal singer. The film shows Callas in her early 50s in 1977, when her titanic voice had been ravaged by throat problems and her ferocious spirit broken by Aristotle Onassis's leaving her for Jacqueline Kennedy, all of which leads her to wallow in Norma Desmond-worthy despair in her palatial Paris home. What Ardant may lack in the larger-than-life star charisma Callas oozed from every pore, she makes up for in an eerie ability to channel something of the great singer's volcanic emotionality, seductiveness, and combination of worldliness and provinciality, not to mention her ineffable high style.

The central idea of the clumsily contrived script by Martin Sherman (Bent) and Zeffirelli is that pill-popping, self-pitying recluse Callas gets coaxed by her gay long-time manager-booking agent (Jeremy Irons, chain-smoking, ponytailed, and livelier than usual) into making a film of Carmen in which she will lipsynch to recordings made during her vocal prime. Silly, right? And, considering that Zeffirelli was Callas's friend and collaborator, mean-spirited.

Which brings us to the other reason to slog through the film--the Carmen sequences, which Zeffirelli directs so lushly, so sexily, and so superbly, you wish he and his star would chuck the misshapen mess of a film around them and give over entirely to a full movie of Bizet's opera. Callas deserves, at the very least, a film the equal of Amadeus. This isn't it.

Yes Nurse! No Nurse! * Written by Frank Houtappels * Directed by Pieter Kramer * Starring Loes Luca, Paul R. Kooij, and Paul de Leeuw * Here! Films

Based on a popular Dutch TV series from the '60s, Yes Nurse! No Nurse! is an amiable, gumdrop-colored, frenetically campy--if ultimately exhausting--musical fantasy. It's set in and around a rest home run by no-nonsense Nurse Klivia (Loes Luca), a sort of benevolent Mary Poppins-Florence Nightingale to a houseful of such misfit eccentrics as her ingenue daughter (Tjitske Reidinga), apparently fresh from the Audrey Tautou school of wide-eyed innocence; a hunky, pigeon-tending professional thief who struts around memorably in tighty whiteys (Waldemar Torenstra); and a merrily rotund engineer (Beppe Costa) who concocts pills that promote "niceness."

Nurse Klivia and her amiably wayward brood don't do much anyone could object to, except for regularly bursting into musical numbers on such subjects as pigeons, grandpas, and celebrating a little dance sensation called the Twip. Also on the block lives their nasty, sexually repressed landlord (Paul R. Kooij), who once had quite the chummy relationship with the local hairdresser in the Elvis do (the hilarious Paul de Leeuw) and who is determined to send Nurse Klivia and company packing. I don't blame him.

Director Pieter Kramer's push for arch, cartoony caricature and eye-searing '60s visuals wears thin fast, and even the catchy musical numbers--the first few of which charm with their oddball lyrics and endearing high school-level ineptness--fray the nerves. Look, it's a kick to retreat occasionally to the entertaining idiocy of kids' TV laced with grown-up knowingness. (Remember Pee-wee's Playhouse?) But after almost two hours of flash--and songs that don't advance the action--Yes Nurse! No Nurse! is enough to make you want to go out and stomp on a strudel.

Bear Cub * Written by Miguel Albaladejo and Salvador Garcia * Directed by Albaladejo * Starring Jose Luis Garcia-Perez and David Castillo * TLA Releasing

Imagine a new sitcom: A charming, New Agey, middle-aged screwup (think, say, Aida Turturro) takes off for a two-week trip to India, dumping her worldly-wise 9-year old son on her charming, middle-aged gay bear of a brother (Kevin James, maybe?). When mom gets jailed indefinitely for drugs, the uncle and kid, forced to be roomies, adjust uneasily to each other's lifestyle, come to understand one another, and finally become inseparable. On hand to contribute all sorts of "B" stories are kooky neighbors, beary friends, beary ex-boyfriends, even a rich, boozy grandma (paging Cloris Leachman), who villainously snatches the boy away from his "unfit" surrogate dad. Get out your handkerchiefs.

It would be great to report that Bear Cub (Cachorro), a Spanish comedy-drama directed by Miguel Albaladejo, upends sitcom convention to generate its own quirky, revelatory crackle and rhythm. Sure, the chemistry rings true between actors Jose Luis Garcia-Perez and David Castillo as uncle and nephew. And it's refreshingly radical to see regular-looking guys playing gays for a change. And yes, such nonsitcom plot complications as HIV/AIDS and hard-core cruising rear their heads.

But whenever anything truly smart or sexy intervenes--like sex scenes in club back rooms and under bridges--it feels like an interruption in the bland predictability of something on NBC Thursday nights. Hey, if someone actually decides to turn Bear Cub into a regular sitcom, I'll even kick in the title: Bearly Tolerable. Just don't ask me to watch it.

Rebello also writes for Spin, Playboy, and Hollywood Life.