MOONLIGHT ***

(three stars)

FROM the Netherlands, the English-language “Moonlight” is a disturbing and daring thriller with an exceptional performance by 13-year-old Laurien Van den Broeck.

She’s Claire, who lives with her adoptive parents in a well-appointed round house at the edge of a major airport.

Her first menstural cycle arrives as she practices the piano. Freaked out, she retreats to a shed on her property, where she discovers a boy her age bleeding badly from a bullet wound.

He’s a nameless drug mule (played nicely by Hunter Bussemaker, in a nearly wordless performance) who was shot and left for dead after transporting heroin into the country inside his intestines.

Claire nurses him back to health while hiding his presence from her aloof parents. When the thugs who hired the boy come back, he and Claire take it on the lam.

They hide out at a Catholic school for girls, which requires the lad to don a fancy white dress and pretend he’s a she.

“Moonlight” is directed by Paula van der Oest, whose 2001 family comedy “Zus & Zo” copped an Oscar nomination. Don’t expect this new movie to get any such honor. It’s simply too out there sexually.

We should just be happy that it is getting a run in an increasingly puritanical America.

Running time: 90 minutes. Not rated (violence, teen sex and nudity). At the Village East, Second Avenue and 12th Street.

POSTER BOY *

(one star)

JACK Kray (Michael Lerner) is an arch-conservative, three-term U.S. senator who, one detractor says, “makes Joe McCarthy look like a den mother.” His son, Henry (Matt Newton), is a gay college student who has not come out to his dad or mom (Karen Allen).

You just know the feces is going to hit the fan when the family-values senator forces Henry to introduce him at a political rally at the boy’s college. And it does.

Directed by Zak Tucker, “Poster Boy” is a muddled coming-out movie that, for no good reason, unfolds flashback style as Henry tells his story to a sleazy newspaper reporter. The device slows the little momentum the narrative builds.

Still, Tucker’s message is sometimes on target, even if his film isn’t.

Running time: 98 minutes. Rated R (sex). At the Quad, 13th Street, between Fifth and Sixth avenues.