Olivier Assayas’s wildly inventive valentine to movies and moviemaking casts an aging Jean-Pierre Léaud as the unstable, hypersensitive New Wave director René Vidal, whose behavior wavers between that of a tormented old man and a capricious child as he struggles to make sense of his update of Louis Feuillade’s silent classic Les Vampires. Maggie Cheung plays the eponymous, latex-clad cat burglar at the center of the artistic maelstrom overseen by Vidal. A latter-day Day for Night that emphasizes the chaotic realities and strange, circus-like atmosphere of filmmaking over its romantic allure, Irma Vep is one of the great movies about what happens before “action” and after “cut.”