Snyder’s Rapturous Survey of Works of Michelangelo

Robert Snyder’s “Michelagniolo: Self-Portrait,” which screens Thursday at 8 p.m. at the County Museum of Art’s Bing Theater, is as rapturous as it is stately, a splendid survey of the key works of Michelangelo accompanied by his own words, spoken with restraint and feeling by Snyder himself. (The film’s title comes from the Tuscan variant of Michelangelo’s name, which he used as his signature.)

Snyder, a master documentarian, likes to refer to his film as the only possible traveling show of Michelangelo’s work, but his film is much, much more than that. It allows us to view the mighty statue of David, the Sistine Chapel ceiling, the Pieta and other of Michelangelo’s great monuments from a variety of perspectives otherwise unavailable to us.

As the camera caresses both marble and canvas alike, and as we hear Michelangelo’s thoughts about his life and work, Snyder is able to evoke the very spirit of the man who described his work as a sculptor as “freeing the figure encased within the marble.” We are able to see the Sistine Chapel ceiling not only revealed as an unfolding narrative but as a glorious resolution of Michelangelo’s conflict between the spirit and the flesh.

“Michelagniolo: Self-Portrait” is itself a work of art, and a companion piece to Snyder’s earlier Academy Award-winning documentary, “Michelangelo: The Titan.” For further information: (213) 857-6010.

The concluding weekend of “Discovering New French Cinema” at the Bing Theater commences with “Sound and Fury” (Friday at 1 p.m. and again at 8 p.m.), Jean-Claude Brisseau’s jolting, uncompromising study of aimless, trouble-prone youths in a vast, arid suburban housing project in which an intelligent, lonely teen-ager named Bruno (Vincent Gasperitch) is befriended by the dangerously destructive Jean-Roger, a brutal gang leader (and budding pyromaniac). This stark film, with its surprisingly effective moments of fantasy, is similar to but bleaker than Jonathan Kaplan’s “Over the Edge” and Stephen Frears’ “Bloody Kids.” (It won the Prix Perspectives du Cinema and Prix de la Jeunesse at Cannes this year.)

Jean-Pierre Limoisin’s “The Other Night” (Friday at 3 p.m. and 10 p.m.) and Jean-Claude Sussfeld’s “La Passerelle” (Saturday at 8 p.m.) are both works of psychological suspense, but the second is decidedly more effective than the first. That’s because both require air-tight plotting, and in the first instance the film maker is so caught up with the emotional plight of his heroine (played exquisitely by “Beatrice’s” lovely and solemn Julie Delpy), a young woman traumatized by the death of her parents in a car accident, that he allows for some credibility-defying loose ends.

However, “La Passerelle,” like “Sound and Fury,” is a stunner by a heretofore unfamiliar director. Whereas the theme of “The Other Night” is revenge, the theme of “La Passarelle” is guilt--on the part of a young man (Pierre Arditi) whose ordered bourgeois existence is shattered when he inadvertently causes a potentially fatal accident. Because “La Passarelle,” which also stars the seductive Mathilda May, is so taut and perceptive, it stirs up all sorts of unexpected implications.

It’s hard to figure how Serge Leroy’s foolish “Guilty Until Proven Innocent,” a. k. a “Bodily Constrait” (Saturday at 10 p.m.), became included in the largely impressive series. It’s the standard women’s prison exploitation picture done with a very serious “art film” tone, which makes it all the more ludicrous. Marianne Basler stars as a sexy young Frenchwoman vacationing in a never-quite-identified Greece; she attracts a crazed police chief (Vittorio Mezzogiorno), who manages to send her to prison on trumped-up charges. Both she and all the other inmates wear the kind of skimpy beach outfits that Brigitte Bardot used to wear in her movies. This is a real instance of leaving the least to the last.

Information: (213) 857-6010, 274-5450.