A Stirring Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea in ‘Titanica’

Stephen Low’s 40-minute “Titanica” (at the IMAX Theater) offers an eerie, thrilling and poignant voyage to the bottom of the sea for a close-up look, via submersibles, of the ill-fated ocean liner Titanic.

The “unsinkable” ship--11 stories high and two blocks long--was fatally cleaved 80 years ago by an iceberg off Newfoundland, resulting in the loss of more than 1,500 lives. A scientific venture of IMAX, the Canadian-American-Russian expedition first comes upon, on the ocean floor, neat groupings of soup plates and wine bottles, their crates having disintegrated long ago.

The two portions of the liner itself loom upon us like immense stalagmitelike sculptures, dripping with bacteria-sculpted rust. Bringing a crucial human dimension and perspective to the tragedy is doughty Titanic survivor Eva Hart, whose memories as a 7-year-old are as acute as her sense of the blind imperial arrogance that fueled the entire Titanic endeavor in the first place.

Information: (213) 744-2914.

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Tribute: The American Cinematheque’s tribute to the versatile Italian actor-filmmaker Massimo Troisi (1953-94) commences tonight at 8 at the Directors Guild with the premiere of Michael Radford’s “Il Postino,” in which Troisi plays a mail carrier who befriends exiled Chilean poet and diplomat Pablo Neruda (Philippe Noiret); “Il Postino” opens in late June.

Among the films screening is Ettore Scola’s warm and wonderful 1989 “What Time Is It?” (Saturday at 7 p.m.), which stars Marcello Mastroianni, in fine form, as a wealthy, self-absorbed Roman attorney who visits his likable, unpretentious son (Troisi), who’s doing his military service in the port city of Civitavecchia, only to be confronted with the realization that he doesn’t know him at all.

Information: (213) 466-FILM.

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Russian Series: The Monica 4-Plex’s series of films by Russian documentarian Marina Goldovskaya continues this weekend with the 11 a.m. screening of the 48-minute “A Taste of Freedom” (1991) and the 58-minute “The House With Knights” (1993) this Saturday and Sunday only.

With grace, affection and detachment Goldovskaya observes six weeks in the lives of prominent Moscow TV journalist Sasha Politkovsky and his wife Anya. The crux of the film is the toll exacted upon Anya--and by extension, their two small children--by Sasha’s profession, which, as Goldovskaya points out, is both difficult and dangerous, especially at this time, and is of course also tremendously seductive: Sasha has become a major celebrity.

One day he’s off to Baku to cover civil unrest, the next he’s off to Chernobyl to become the first TV reporter allowed inside the nuclear reactor since the disaster; every day brings death threats to him and his family as he tests the limits of the new freedom of expression in a time of exciting, challenging and highly uncertain change.

In the tender, emotional “The House of Knights,” Goldovskaya discovers the turbulent history of 20th-Century Russia in the story of a splendid turn-of-the-century apartment house. A handsome Beaux Arts pile of restrained Gothic design featuring at street level niches containing statues of knights, the 80-unit apartment house originally was home to some 200 people; by 1930 that number, via communal living edicts, had risen to an incredible 3,000. The people we meet are mainly those in their 80s and 90s, survivors of the Russian Revolution and all that came after.

In its loving way, the film is a tribute to the enduring Russian soul.

Information: (310) 394-9741.

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Campy: Bruce La Bruce’s hilarious, campy “Super 8 1/2,” opening Friday for one week (at the Sunset 5) sends up the auteuriste pretensions of a gay porn star-filmmaker experiencing a Fellini-like artistic crisis; be severely warned: “Super 8 1/2” includes glimpses of explicit sex. Information: (213) 848-3500.