Beyond the Multiplex

"Chronicle of an Escape" This riveting thriller from Argentine filmmaker Israel Adrián Caetano was among the most celebrated pictures in competition at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival, where it was acquired by Harvey Weinstein and talked up as a potential award-winner (under the proposed title "Buenos Aires 1977"). Here we are a year and a half later, with the film reunited with its original title and basically dumped as a theatrical quickie and on-demand cable offering. Does Weinstein think that American viewers might not be super-interested in a movie about a quasi-fascist regime that sweeps people up on imaginary charges and has them tortured in secret locations? I'm only asking.

Anyway, Caetano's film fictionalizes the well-known story of Claudio Tamburrini, a soccer goalkeeper who was kidnapped by military-regime thugs and held for almost a year in a jury-rigged prison constructed in a mansion outside Buenos Aires. After enduring erratic bouts of torture and interrogation (and his torturers' equally loathsome bouts of sentimentality and religiosity), Tamburrini and several fellow prisoners engineered a complicated escape, stark naked, through a driving rainstorm. The film is taut and ruthlessly constructed, with odd flashes of humor and a white-knuckle pace. Rodrigo de la Serna ("The Motorcycle Diaries") gives a committed performance as Tamburrini, today a philosophy professor in Sweden. (Opens Nov. 30 at the IFC Center in New York, with other cities to follow. Also available via IFC In Theaters on many cable systems.)

Africa's greatest filmmaker, Poland's overlooked genius and Italy's controversial hero New York moviegoers face an overload of underappreciated-great-director retrospectives this week, which might well lead to couch-bound paralysis. So the important thing to say is that any of these three tributes -- to Senegalese director Ousmane Sembène, Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski and Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini -- is totally worth your time, money and attention. All of these retrospectives may well reappear in other cities; I'll try to keep you posted.

Just in terms of world-historical importance, I'll point you at Film Forum's tribute to Sembène, who died earlier this year and was, in a completely literal sense, the father of African cinema. His 1966 "Black Girl," about a Senegalese maid who travels to France with her white employers, is believed to be the first African-made feature film of any note, and Sembène's succeeding eight films run the gamut from populist epic to strident anti-establishment satire, from modernist and indeed feminist outrage to Kafkaesque despair. All of Sembène's films have a characteristic bite and a politically informed anger, coupled with a refusal to surrender to cant or stereotype. My favorites include the 1968 "Mandabi," in which a money order sent home from Europe becomes more a curse than a blessing, and the ruthlessly funny 1974 "Xala," in which a 50ish Mercedes-driving fat cat is stricken with an ancient and humiliating curse. (Runs Nov. 30-Dec. 13 at Film Forum in New York; several of Sembène's films are available on DVD from New Yorker Films.)

Almost around the corner, at Anthology Film Archives, you can catch a tribute to Jerzy Skolimowski, a leading figure in the Eastern European new wave of the '60s and '70s who never found fame in the West. Skolimowski is best known, if at all, for his 1982 English-language drama "Moonlighting," with Jeremy Irons, but he also wrote screenplays for Andrzej Wajda and Roman Polanski, and directed several celebrated early films that have scarcely been seen outside Europe. His acknowledged classic is the 1970 "Deep End," and Anthology will also screen Skolimowski's Polish films "Identification Marks: None," "Le Départ" and "Walkover." Incidentally, David Cronenberg is a fan, and Skolimowski plays a supporting role in "Eastern Promises." (Retrospective runs through Dec. 5, with "Deep End" playing Dec. 6-12.)

Uptown at Lincoln Center, the Marxist-homoerotic-atheist-religious visions of poet, filmmaker and all-around heretic Pier Paolo Pasolini are on display. If Pasolini strove to reinvent film from the ground up in search of genuine and even shocking emotion, as is sometimes said, he may have succeeded. How watchable the results are is up to you, especially in the case of grueling pictures like the street-pimp saga "Accattone" or the notorious Marquis de Sade adaptation "Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom," which has fairly been described as a work of total negativity and hatred for the world. If Pasolini was widely regarded as a great cinema artist in the '60s, he's all but forgotten outside Italy today. In an aesthetic universe virtually strangling on faux authenticity, Pasolini's singular passion is badly needed. (Through Dec. 4 at the Walter Reade Theater in New York.)

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