A ‘Tango’ With Familiarity

The Grande 4-Plex’s “Cine Latino” series continues its downbeat mood with Marcelo Pin~eyro’s “Tango Feroz,” which opens Friday for a one-week run. Less heavy-handed than “Knocks at My Door,” a drama of the political martyrdom of a nun in an unnamed Latin American country, “Tango Feroz” is nonetheless a turn-off because it takes such a relentlessly traditional, painfully obvious approach to increasingly depressing material.

Based on the short life of popular late-’60s rock singer Jose Alberto Cruz, nicknamed Tango, this film is quite clear where it’s heading right at the start. A singer of songs of explicit sexual pleasure and political protest at a time of mounting oppression in Argentina, Tango (Fernan Miras), seen in performance as the credits unroll, proclaims, “If they don’t sew up my mouth, they’ll never shut me up.” Even if you weren’t familiar with Tango and his fate, you know right off that that’s precisely what the military regime is going to do to him. (213) 617-0268.

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Filmforum will present Jem Cohen’s 37-minute “Lost Book Found” and Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi’s 62-minute “Prisoners of War,” an outstanding pair of experimental works that heighten our awareness of the world around us, Sunday at 7 p.m. at LACE, 6522 Hollywood Blvd.

Cohen’s film is a knockout, in which the musings of a young man, never seen, reveal that 10 years earlier he took a job as a Manhattan peanut vendor and discovered that the more he became “invisible” to passersby, the more visible his surroundings became to him.

When a man who fished for objects beneath subway gratings lends him a journal filled with endless lists--”perpetual motion, atomic numbers, burial at sea” is a typical fragment of one list--the narrator is inspired to wonder at their meaning and to read signs, notices and graffiti all over the city.

While the narrator puzzles over what these messages add up to, if anything at all, Cohen’s rush of images composes an answer: a lyrical ode celebrating the visual richness of Manhattan street life--the sense that on a mystical level the more aware of the world around you and its transcendent beauty you are, the more meaning it has for you.

“Prisoners of War,” less ambitious yet potent and provocative, slows down World War I archival footage taken by Russian and Austro-Hungarian cameramen to give a sense of timelessness in its depictions of mass deportations, imprisonment and battlefield burials. Eschewing the usual battle scenes, “Prisoners of War,” which has a splendid, elegiac score, evokes a sense of eternal loss and sadness. (310) 478-6379.

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Note: The Sunset 5 is screening tonight at 7 and Saturday and Sunday at 10:30 a.m. “The Bet,” an amateurish feature film inspired by the Anton Chekhov story of the same name. (310) 848-3500.