LA Weekly

CYRANO FERNANDEZ (Spain/Venezuela) Cyrano de Bergerac with a Latin flavor, writer-director Alberto Arvelo’s amalgam of Third World crime drama and tragic romance moves the play’s action from 17th-century Paris to the slums of modern-day Caracas. Cursed with facial scars but blessed with a poet’s voice, Cyrano (Edgar Ramirez) promises his unrequited love, Roxana (Jessika Grau), that he will protect her boyfriend, Cristian (Pastor Oviedo), from a burgeoning neighborhood gang war. Though his reimagining gives the classic play vitality, Arvelo can’t keep the love story from tipping into sappiness, while his stabs at gritty urban authenticity consist of shaking his hand-held cameras frantically during the film’s violent confrontations. (Fri., Nov. 9, 7 p.m.; Sun., Nov. 11, 12 noon) (Tim Grierson)

 LIGHT WORK MOOD DISORDER and HE WALKED AWAY: AN EVENING WITH JENNIFER REEVES (USA) The New York–based experimental filmmaker Jennifer Reeves, whose haunting 2004 feature film The Time We Killedmade its belated local premiere last year at Filmforum, returns to L.A. with two recent works both designed to be “performed” live, using two 16mm film projectors, with Reeves herself at the controls. In the 26-minute Light Work Mood Disorder, the dueling images — projected side-by-side — are re-purposed bits of old scientific classroom films to which Reeves applied various solutions of dissolved pharmaceuticals, resulting in a kaleidoscope of colored scratches, blotchesand other distortions.In the 17-minute, single-screen companion film He Walked Away, Reeves uses the superimposition of one projector upon another to break down images from her earlier films and create new ones from their component parts. The defining image here may be that of a mortar and pestle glimpsed mid-way through Light Work Mood Disorder, for Reeves too is a kind of alchemist for whom the physical and aesthetic properties of film seem especially malleable. (Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Linwood Dunn Theater; Fri., Nov. 9, 9:30 p.m.)(Scott Foundas)

 THE LIVING WAKE (USA) If the members of Monty Python scripted an adaptation of Don Quixote and Guy Maddin directed it, it might look something like first-time director Sol Tryon’s willfully absurd tragicomedy about the last day in the life of the bellboy/longshoreman/mathematician/self-proclaimed genius K. Roth Binew. Stricken with a “yet to be named grave and vague disease,” Binew (played with euphoric abandon by stand-up comic Mike O’Connell, who also co-wrote the film) spends his final hours on earth foisting his collection of unpublished manuscripts upon an uncooperative librarian, revisiting the now-elderly nanny for whose comforting bosom he still pines, and trying to make amends with his highly dysfunctional family. The movie’s pièce de resistence is the titular going-away party, by which point you will either have been driven up the wall by The Living Wake or unexpectedly moved to tears.(Fri., Nov. 9, 9:15 p.m.; Sat., Nov. 10, 1 p.m.) (SF)

PRINCE OF THE HIMALAYAS (China) Director Sherwood Hu’s transplanting of Hamlet to ancient Tibet yields an adaptation that’s equal parts ravishing imagery and overheated dramatics, yet the concoction is so striking it’s impossible not to be impressed. As in the original text, a boyish prince (Purba Rgyal) vows to avenge his father’s murder, but later on, the film springs a few surprising but satisfying revisions upon Shakespeare’s storyline. Set against a wide-screen canvas that seems to encompass the entire Himalayan range, Prince weaves enough genuine emotion that the film’s slightly gonzo manner becomes as refreshingly unpredictable as the new plot twists. (Fri., Nov. 9, 7 p.m.; Sat., Nov. 10, 10 p.m.) (TG)

TORN FROM THE FLAG (Hungary) For 13 days in the fall of 1956, the people of Hungary poured into the streets of Soviet-ruled Budapest, demanding democracy. With the assistance of master cinematographers Vilmos Zsigmond and the late László Kovács, native Hungarians both, co-directors Klaudia Kovacs (no relation) and Endre Hules have assembled a kind of documentary thriller driven by a propulsive Chris Horvath score, exciting archival footage (some of it shot by then-students Zsigmond and Kovács) and the surviving Budapest rebels themselves, who look as if they still have the fire it takes to stare down an empire. Superb. (Sat., Nov. 10, 9:30 p.m.) (Chuck Wilson)