‘Hasidism’ Blessing and Its Price : ‘Jewish Cinema Series’ opens with a look at faith and life out of mainstream.

The Music Hall’s “Jewish Cinema Series” begins Friday with a one-week run of Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky’s “A Life Apart: Hasidism in America,” which takes us into the world of Jews whose lives are lived in worship of God and are guided by the dictates of the Torah. What the film conveys so effectively is that in return for such strict observance of religion, the Hasidim are rewarded by a warm, strong sense of community and family life that most of us can only regard with longing and envy. The price, however, is of a conformity so severe that the Hasidim cannot attend mainstream colleges and universities and therefore enter the classic professions, such as medicine and law, so traditionally pursued by other Jews.

Daum and Rudavsky give us a good, if incomplete, overview of Hasidism, which flowered in Eastern Europe in the 18th century as a response to the joylessness of Orthodox Judaism. The Hasidim, we learn, decided that God exists in all things and that love of him can be expressed in every act of daily life. There emerged rebbes, beloved, charismatic leaders who flourished in Eastern European countries until the advent of Hitler.

We are told that one rebbe, as late as 1939, believed that American materialism was more a threat to Hasidic souls than the Third Reich. Yet it was to the U.S., primarily New York, that the surviving Hasidim fled to re-create and replenish their world apart, which they have done with considerable success, although not without friction in some communities from their African American and Puerto Rican neighbors--and non-Hasidic Jews.

The key strength of “A Life Apart” is its keen sense of the trade-offs that all of us make in our lives, and it leaves us feeling that the Hasidim, while their way of life may not be for everyone, have made some wise, brave choices for themselves. (310) 274-6869.

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The scenes are sickeningly familiar. A high police official likens “dangerous” ideologies to diseases that need fumigation. Angry crowds threaten to break through decidedly indifferent police cordons to attack well-behaved peace marchers. It is obvious that bloodshed as brutal as any at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago is moments away.

Thus opens “Z” (Nuart, Friday through Nov. 25), Costa-Gavras’ 1969 classic. As exciting as a detective thriller, as authentic-looking as a documentary, this desperately urgent, emphatic film plunges us into chaos.

The setting is Greece, but it could be anywhere in the late ‘60s. “Z,” in short, is a chillingly convincing depiction of the way in which the quaffing out of dissent inevitably gives birth to the police state and how a hard-won seeming victory for truth and freedom can be a cruelly deceptive precursor to total repression.

Costa-Gavras, best known for “The Sleeping Car Murders,” makes it clear that any resemblance to actual persons or events is not coincidental but purely intentional. What he has done is to take Greece’s notorious Lambrakis Affair and make of it an excruciatingly suspenseful parable for our times. Its plot of Byzantine convolutions develop around the death of a noted pacifist (Yves Montand), supposedly struck down by a motor scooter in the midst of a mob after having given a speech pleading for disarmament.

“Z,” which takes its title from a Greek slogan meaning “He is alive,” is a remarkable achievement, a film that rings out a message loud and clear yet is too much a profound human document wrought with too much bravura style and bitter irony ever to be classified as a mere message movie. (310) 478-6379.

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Seattle filmmaker Gregg Lachow’s “The Wright Brothers,” which the American Cinematheque screens tonight at 7:30 at Raleigh Studios, is not like any film biography you’ve ever seen. Blithely--and successfully--oblivious to anachronism, Lachow stunningly conveys what it might have been like to have been Orville and Wilbur Wright, those Dayton, Ohio, bicycle repairmen who became the fathers of aviation.

The vision, the peculiarly American expansiveness of it, the venturing into uncharted territory and its consequences--all this and more, Lachow evokes with wit and inspiration. But he suffers from the curse of facetiousness, exemplified in his having Orville be played by a woman. We’re asked to accept pretty and gifted Megan Murphy, dressed in men’s clothes but not otherwise disguising her gender, as a man. Such casting is merely distracting, turning the film into a stunt, and by extension, the Wrights’ attempt at flight a stunt.

Lachow has sold both his very real talent and originality short and the contributions of the Wrights as well. Lachow has too much going for him to relegate himself to the ranks of whimsical regional filmmakers. (213) 466-FILM.

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Filmforum presents Saturday and Sunday at noon at the Nuart Nicolas Philibert’s “Every Little Thing,” an exquisitely sensitive account of a group of patients at a psychiatric clinic, housed in a fairy-tale chateau in the French countryside, who are staging a pageant. While Philibert allows us to connect with these people, most of whom have come to feel a part of a mutually supportive community, he also generates just enough tedium to allow us to speculate on how costly the treatment must be for these patients and how few troubled people have the opportunity to receive such loving care.

No “disease-of-the-week” TV movie could hope to approach the impact of Karen Goodman and Kirk Simon’s documentary “Heart of a Child” (Monica 4-Plex, Saturdays and Sundays at 11 a.m.), a harrowing, agonizingly suspenseful real-life account of Ingrid and Lenny LaBarbiera’s struggle to save the life of their daughter Amy, whom we meet at her gala fourth birthday party. Ingrid, who is the film’s remarkably detached narrator, explains that she’s made it such a big deal for the simple reason that Amy may not live to see another birthday. Amy, stricken with heart disease, faces an estimated six-to-18-month wait for a heart and lung transplant. The suspense builds: Will spunky Amy live long enough for a donor to turn up? And if she does, will the transplants work?

In their impeccably judicious documentary, wrenchingly illuminating without being invasive, Goodman and Simon raise consciousness in regard to the need for more organ donors in the most dramatic way possible. At the same time they and Ingrid LaBarbiera, a woman of awesome resolve and clear-thinking even in the darkest hours, suggest that choices are not so clear cut, just as are the results of transplant operations. In its thoughtfulness and urgency, “Heart of a Child” honors its subjects and the LaBarbieras. (310) 394-9741.