Best for Last? : The Pan-Asian Film Festival will conclude with a showing of Tsai Ming-liang’s compelling masterpiece ‘The River.’

The UCLA Film and Television Archive and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s “Electric Shadows ‘97: A Pan-Asian Film Festival,” one of the summer’s richest film offerings, continues at UCLA’s James Bridges Theater in Melnitz Hall and LACMA’S Bing Theater.

Screening tonight at 7:30 at UCLA, Quentin Lee and Justin Lin’s droll, stylish “Shopping for Fangs” is ostensibly a psychological thriller with amusing supernatural overtones. But it is also a commentary on “Generasian X” and its questions of identity, culture and role-playing amid the burgeoning and prosperous suburban Asian community of the San Gabriel Valley. Key are Phil (Radmar Jao), a pleasant-looking shipping clerk yearning for love, and Katherine (Jeanne Chin), a beautiful young woman who is dangerously bored as a traditional wife despite a luxuriously tasteful home and a loving, movie star-handsome husband (Clint Jung).

Shinji Aoyama’s “Two Punks” (LACMA Saturday at 9:30 p.m.) is an effective mood piece in which a youth, Yoichi (Takao Osawa), fresh out of reform school heads for Tokyo and meets Michio (Dankan), a 35-year-old man who offers him a night club job and is seemingly as diffident as Yoichi is ambitious and hot-tempered. Only gradually do these two very different men establish a kind of friendship amid a disintegrating yakuza clan whose leader owns the night club. The yakuza atmosphere has an aura of authenticity, and “Two Punks” is very much a young man’s film, stronger on romanticism and fatalism than humor and irony. Nonetheless, it reveals Aoyama to be a compelling, acutely observant filmmaker.

The festival may well have left the best for the last, for its closing night attraction, Tsai Ming-liang’s “The River,” is a masterpiece, the third film from the director of “Rebels of the Neon God” (1992) and “Vive l’Amour” (1994). Tsai sets all three films in Taipei; in “Rebels,” the Malaysia-born Tsai took us into the bored, restless lives of four young people, allowing us to experience their overwhelming sense of futility and their increasingly reckless behavior in an utterly soulless Taipei; and in “Vive l’Amour,” a bitterly ironic title if ever there was one, Taipei was, if anything, even more soulless--an urban world as antiseptic, brand-new and relentlessly impersonal as the Paris of Jacques Tati’s classic “Playtime.”

In “The River” (UCLA, Sunday, 7 p.m.), Tsai again takes us into this same Taipei to acquaint us, as in “Vive l’Amour,” with a trio of individuals. Here, they are so remote from each other that it takes awhile to realize that they are related--an adult son, mother and father who in fact share the same apartment.

At the beginning of the film, a movie director persuades the son, Xiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng), who is part of a crowd of onlookers, to play a corpse floating in a polluted-looking river. This chance experience leaves the young man with an increasingly aching neck, which eventually causes his retired father (Miao Tien) to break off from cruising saunas for gay sex and to take notice and get help for his son. The young man’s mother (Lu Hsiao-ling), much younger than her husband and an elevator operator at a vast mall restaurant, becomes equally concerned.

Tsai’s ability to record solitary existences caught up in everyday routines in compelling fashion recalls that of Chantal Akerman. As expressive as he is austere, he can hold an image and flood it with meaning and emotion like Michelangelo Antonioni and Nina Menkes can. The father and son’s search for a cure provides “The River” with a stunning finish.

Among other films screening, also worth taking a chance on, is King Hu’s 1978 period martial arts adventure, “Raining in the Mountain,” screening Sunday at 4:30 p.m. (310) 206-FILM.

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The Museum of Tolerance at Simon Wiesenthal Plaza, 9760 Pico Blvd., continues its presentation of the Human Rights Watch Festival tonight at 7:30 p.m. with Laura Angelica Simon’s 53-minute “Fear and Learning at Hoover Elementary,” a fervent and also infuriating protest of Proposition 187 and its profoundly negative impact on the students of illegal aliens at the Pico-Union school where Simon teaches.

It’s not hard to share Simon’s concerns, even though her film gives us the impression that she believes that a non-Latino would be incapable of doing so. It’s easy for her to work up sympathy for the kids, just as it’s also easy for her to present the film’s two non-Latinos in contexts that can only be described as negative. (To her credit she also presents us with a Mexican-American social worker who admits to voting for Proposition 187 after her car has been struck by a hit-and-run driver she concludes must be an illegal alien from a Latin American country other than Mexico).

What’s difficult is to propose solutions to the problems Proposition 187 addresses in draconian fashion, and this is what Simon fails to do. Even those of us who didn’t vote for the measure would like to know her answers. (310) 553-4521.

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The Human Rights Watch Festival continues at the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. with Canadian filmmakers Daniele Lacourse and Yvan Patry’s 164-minute “Chronicle of a Genocide Foretold,” a compelling account of the April 1994 slaughter of an estimated 500,000 people, mostly Tutsi, at the hands of extremist Hutu militias. At first you worry about following the ins-and-outs of this ethnic upheaval, but the filmmakers’ major point becomes swiftly clear: that the international community had plenty of advance notice of this looming catastrophe, with more horrors to follow, and failed to respond adequately. Human Rights Watch historian Alison Desforges reasons that world leaders refused to acknowledge that the first wave of killings, costing some 20,000 lives, was in fact the beginning of genocide, for then they would have had to do something about it. Rwanda, she concludes, was “too little, too remote and probably too black” to matter to the world at large. (310) 553-9036.

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Filmforum presents Andrei Ujica’s amusing and awe-inspiring “Out of the Present” Saturday and Sunday at noon. It is a documentary in which the various members of the crew of the Russian space station Mir shot much of the footage themselves under Vadim Yusov (who shot Andrei Tarkovksy’s first three features, including his magnificent space odyssey “Solaris”).

Views from Mir are dazzling, and glimpses of what life is like inside the space station are fascinating. The film’s central figure is cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, movie-star handsome and personable, a young man whose fate it was to board Mir from what was then the Soviet Union and disembark into Russia 10 months later.

Economics as much as political upheaval kept Krikalev in Mir twice as long as planned. The amiable Krikalev admits that his record-setting experience was as arduous as participating in a long-distance run--twice. Although the film’s English subtitles are fine, “Out of the Present” cries out for an English soundtrack narration which would make this delightful and provocative film far more accessible to audiences. (310) 478-6379.

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Visual Communications, the Asian Pacific Media Arts Center, presents “ChiliVisions XI,” its annual fund-raising event featuring a chili cook-off plus a chili tasting contest. It will be held at 5 p.m. Saturday at the Japanese American Cultural Community Center, 244 S. San Pedro St., and will be followed at 7:30 p.m. at the center’s Japan American Theater with a program of videos plus Chris Tashima’s 30-minute film, “Visas and Virtues.” This film is an extremely moving vignette drawn from the life of Chiune Sugihara (Tashima), a Japanese diplomat posted in Lithuania at the outbreak of World War II who defied orders to save the lives of more than 6,000 Jews by issuing them transit visas. (213) 680-3700.

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Note: the American Cinematheque’s Samuel Fuller retrospective continues this weekend at Raleigh Studios with such well-known Fuller films as “Shock Corridor” (Friday at 7:15 p.m.)--to be shown in a rare 35mm print with color sequences--and “The Naked Kiss” (Saturday at 7:15 p.m.). Angie Dickinson plans to appear at the Saturday 9:30 p.m. screening of “China Gate,” in which she stars with Gene Barry and Nat King Cole. (213) 466-FILM.