A Long, Luminous Career

“The Late, Great Sylvia Sidney,” honors the veteran actress, who died July 1, shortly before her 89th birthday. Sidney had one of the longest screen careers of any major actress, from 1929 to Tim Burton’s “Mars Attacks!” in 1996. LACMA will screen four of her films from the ‘30s, the decade in which she shined brightest, most notably as a defiant Depression era waif.

Screening Friday at 7:30 p.m. in Bing Theater are Rouben Mamoulian’s stylish “City Streets” (1931), which represented Sidney’s big break, replacing an ailing Clara Bow as a racketeer’s hard-edged daughter who falls for carnival roustabout Gary Cooper. It will be followed by “Dead End” (1937), William Wyler’s film of Sidney Kingsley’s landmark Depression play, adapted for the screen by Lillian Hellman and starring Joel McCrea and Humphrey Bogart in addition to Sidney, cast as an impoverished young woman desperate to get her younger brother and herself out of the slums. Sidney ranged far and wide as an actress, but this film, more than any other, defined her screen image.

Screening Saturday at 7:30 p.m. are Alfred Hitchcock’s “Sabotage” (1936) and Fritz Lang’s “You Only Live Once” (1937), a pair of career high points for Sidney. Although Hitchcock in later years had serious reservations about his adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Agent”--including his choice of his handsome if limited leading man John Loder as a Scotland Yard detective--the film remains startlingly powerful. Sidney plays an American woman who has married an older European emigre (Oscar Homolka) and followed him to London, where he was driven by hard times in the U.S. There he operates an old London cinema, which he, Sidney and her younger brother live above in a comfortable flat. Unknown to Sidney, her husband is a saboteur, serving an unnamed country, who has caused a blackout all over London and now has been ordered to set off a bomb in the bustling heart of the city. The sequence in which Sidney realizes the truth about Homolka is an astonishing piece of cinematic bravura, as only Hitchcock could pull off, a perfect illustration of his principle of creating and sustaining emotion. Sidney in turn expresses the stunning impact of the truth with an understatement that Hitchcock himself admired.

“You Only Live Once” remains one of the finest films of Lang, Sidney and Henry Fonda, who plays an ex-con struggling to go straight. Fiancee Sidney soon finds herself on the run with him. It is very loosely inspired by the saga of Bonnie and Clyde, but Fonda and Sidney are a far classier couple. (323) 857-6010.

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The Laemmle Theaters’ outstanding “World Cinema 2000” series continues at the Sunset 5 on Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m. with “Beshkempir--the Adopted Son.” The ruefully funny and poignant coming-of-age film is told with soaring lyricism by writer-director Aktan Abdikalikov, who hereby has the distinction of making the first film from the former Russian republic of Kyrgyzstan.

Abdikalikov first catches us up in the life of a Kyrgyzstan village, so timeless in its routines that it’s difficult to pinpoint an era, until we learn that the community will be treated to an outdoor screening of a typical Indian movie. Gradually we become acquainted with a handsome youth, Beshkempir (Mirlan Abdikalikov), whose life is turned upside down in an instant. Just entering puberty, Beshkempir is drawn to a pretty neighbor girl among a gathering of youngsters, and in a flash of jealousy, his heretofore best friend declares to one and all that Beshkempir is adopted.

The news devastates Beshkempir and has a wide-ranging impact that will require the boy to question all assumptions about life and people and relationships. In working through the pain and shock that consume him, he emerges with fresh, mature perspectives. Abdikalikov expresses Beshkempir’s rite of passage with subtlety and a poetic beauty; this masterfully composed and structured black-and-white film--Massan Kidirialev is its gifted cinematographer--is punctuated with stunning and imaginative bursts of color. Abdikalikov takes you to a place that seems remote and exotic and makes it as familiar as the neighborhood of your childhood. “Beshkempir--the Adopted Son” screens again, on Feb. 12 and 13, at the Monica 4-Plex, at 11 a.m. Sunset 5: (323) 848-3500; Monica 4-Plex: (310) 394-9741.

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Stann Nakazono and Dom Magwili’s “Much Ado About Much Adobo,” which screens Fridays and Saturdays for an open run at midnight at the Sunset 5, is minimalist filmmaking at its most delightful. Shot mainly in an old L.A. apartment house in four days, its makers call it “the first Filipino American farce.” It can also be described as a contemporary romantic screwball comedy with a talented, multiracial cast.

Its central figure is a likable young man, Gabe (Kennedy Kabasares), whose relationship with his live-in actress girlfriend, Myra (Myra Cris Ocenar), disintegrates in a spat. Needing a roommate to help out with the rent he is already way behind paying, Gabe proves vulnerable to the handsome, ceaselessly glib Mike (Mike Palma), who has “slick operator” and “freeloader” written all over him. Mike is lazy but always on the make with women. He would seem the least suitable roommate for Gabe under the circumstances, but Mike’s decision, made quite independently of Gabe, to throw a big house party that neither can afford yields unexpected results.

Largely improvised from a short story written by Magwili, “Much Ado” features a roster of ingratiating actors from his acting class. The key characters frequently address the camera directly, yet the filmmakers never let this device slow down an admirably rhythmic pace. The result is a film that is good-humored, insightful and always engaging. It’s surely as tasty as adobo, a Filipino sweet-and-sour chicken delicacy. (323) 848-3500.

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Outfest, the gay and lesbian multimedia organization, has launched the second year of what is believed to be the first and only year-round weekly film screenings series anywhere. It is held at the Village at Ed Gould Plaza, 1125 N. McCadden Place, with added venues in the Southern California area.

This week brings on Saturday at 1 p.m. and again at 6 the 4 1/2-hour “Queer as Folk,” the landmark eight-part British TV mini-series, the first to feature gay men as leading, rather than supporting, characters. It was a huge hit at the Outfest film festival last year and is slated for a U.S. remake. It is a remarkable achievement and follows the lives of three gay men living in Manchester’s vital gay community. The scope of “Queer as Folk” is crucial, for the pivotal character is handsome and successful 29-year-old Stuart Jones (Aidan Gillen), who lives for sexual conquest. It takes time for both him and for us to discover any depth of character in Jones and for him to undergo a plausible transformation. For 15 years his best friend, Vince (Craig Kelly), boyishly good looking but shy, has been secretly in love with Stuart, who, as the story begins, has just taken up with Nathan (Charlie Hunnam), a teenager who’s accepted his homosexuality and is hellbent on experiencing it.

The stories of these three, their friends, families, co-workers, acquaintances and pals unfold with considerable complexity, insight, poignancy and humor. It is a substantial portrait of urban gay life as it is lived by younger gay men in cities around the world, especially in metropolitan areas in Europe and America. Written by Russell T. Davies, “Queer as Folk” had two directors, Charles McDougall for the first half and Nicola Shindler for the second; their work is seamless.

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Screening Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the Village as part of the Outfest series are are two notable short documentaries by Charley Lang, “Battle for the Tiara,” an uproarious account of a drag contest held at the Ebell Theater as an AIDS fund-raiser, and “Live to Tell,” a poignant account of the seniors at an alternative high school for gays attending their prom, the first-ever public event of its kind, held at a ballroom in a downtown Los Angeles hotel.(323) 960-9200.

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The UCLA Film Archive launches “Contemporary Latin American Films” with Arturo Ripstein’s “No One Writes to the Colonel,” another of Ripstein’s chronicles about life on the lower rungs of Mexican society, adapted from Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Meanwhile, the Archives’ “Claude Chabrol: Innocents With Dirty Hands” continues Saturday at 7:30 p.m. with two rarities, “Betty” (1993) and “L’Enfer” (1994). Screening Sunday at 7:30 p.m. is one of Chabrol’s best and most popular pictures, “La Femme Infidele” (1969), starring Stephane Audran in the title role as a woman involved in a lethal romantic triangle. It will be followed by “Wedding in Blood” (1973) in which Audran stars with Michel Piccoli. The two carry on a torrid affair, each stuck in loveless marriage, in a town too small for their romance to stay secret. (310) 206-FILM.