ECLECTIC DOCUMENTARY MIX AT UCLA

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences/UCLA Contemporary Documentary series continues Tuesday at 8 p.m. at Melnitz with Jerry Colbert’s “Sister Adrian: The Mother Teresa of Scranton”; Dick Young’s “Never Too Old”; David Thompson and Dr. Paul Kueferle’s “The Fourth Stage,” and Lee Grant’s “What Sex Am I?”

Describing herself as a “short, fat, middle-aged nun,” Sister Adrian Barrett, a Scranton native, is a saintly dynamo who works miracles in one of the country’s most economically depressed areas, having established her five United Neighborhood Centers to serve the Pennsylvania city’s needy. “We beg for everything,” she says bluntly as she hustles food and shelter. Sister Adrian is a hands-on minister, who loves nothing better than bringing together youngsters and the elderly, combatting loneliness and neglect as much as providing nourishment. “There are enough people in the world making judgments,” she says, as she goes to the local jail to comfort a pathetic, wistful young woman awaiting sentencing as an accomplice in the murder of her own mother. Colbert’s straightforward, engaging documentary does justice to its subject.

The equally forthright and ingratiating “Never Too Old” celebrates four very different older people: Father Manoel Texeira, who divides his time between writing a monumental history of Macao and working with its very young; choreographer Agnes de Mille, who has triumphed over the stroke that afflicted her 12 years ago at age 70; Japanese tycoon Ryoichi Sasakawa, who at 86 not only directs an industrial empire but who also gives away $1.5 billion a year to charities and good causes, and Roebuck (Pop) Staples, leader of the Staples Singers, who combines music with a street ministry.

“The Fourth Stage” flubs an extraordinary opportunity in its study of an eminent, sophisticated Indian newspaper editor who at the age of 64 decides to investigate the possibility of entering sanyassa , becoming a Hindu priest who lives by begging. We learn much about the stages one must pass through to attain a state of spiritual grace but little of the reasons why he would consider such a step in the first place. Lee Grant’s “What Sex Am I?” is a sensitive, harrowing yet candid study of transvestites and transsexuals. Phone: (213) 825-2345.

The Jean Renoir offerings at the County Museum of Art’s Bing Theater this weekend are “The Rules of the Game” (1939) and “La Marseillaise” (1937), which screen Friday at 1 and 8 p.m., and “The Diary of a Chambermaid” (1946) and “The Southerner” (1945), screening Saturday, also at 1 and 8 p.m. A subtle evocation of shallow, artificial society of great privilege blindly teetering on the brink of oblivion with the imminence of World War II, “The Rules of the Game” was inspired--according to Renoir--by a remark made of the reign of Charles X: “We dance on a volcano.” Set during an elaborate house party in the country, “The Rules of the Game” is one of the key films in cinema history. “La Marseillaise,” a great canvas of the French Revolution, reveals the characteristic Renoir compassion; he can find gallantry in the doomed aristocrats even as he reveals the hardships they placed upon the poor.

In Hollywood, Renoir had an even harder time than Fritz Lang, yet how very good are both “The Southerner,” adapted from George Sessions Perry’s “Hold Autumn in Your Hand,” and “The Diary of a Chambermaid,” based on the Octave Mirbeau novel. The second is notable for its radiant Paulette Goddard, who is beautiful and spirited as she copes with her new job in a forbidding, unhappy household. (Years later Luis Bunuel and Jeanne Moreau would do a far different version, all slyness and kinkiness, with the same title.)

Generally regarded as Renoir’s best American film, “The Southerner” has that deep reverence for nature that runs through all of his work. It’s a simple saga of a sharecropper (Zachary Scott, in a rare departure from his suave leading-man roles), who struggles with his family to establish his own place instead of toiling for others. Phone: (213) 857-6201.