Pool’s ‘Emporte-moi,’ One Girl’s Tender Tale

Opening Friday at the Music Hall (9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills) and the Playhouse (673 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena) will be the satisfying and accomplished “Emporte-moi” (Set Me Free), French-Canadian filmmaker Lea Pool’s tender and perceptive coming-of-age story, set in Montreal in 1963. A remarkable young actress, Karine Vanasse, plays the lovely and intelligent Hanna, daughter of an unmarried Catholic woman and a Jewish emigre. Hanna, who has an older brother, Paul (Alexandre Merineau), is entering puberty in a loving but tense and fragile household. Her mother (Pascale Bussieres), who had dreams of becoming a fashion designer, is instead a sweatshop seamstress who comes home exhausted only to have to spend her evenings typing out the poetry dictated to her by her lover, Hanna’s father (Miki Manoljovic), a Polish-born Holocaust survivor too proud to hold down a steady job. Music Hall (310) 274-6869; Playhouse (626) 844-6500.

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Among the films screening in a program of silents in LACMA’s “Artificial Humans in the Cinema” on Friday at 7:30 p.m. in the Bing Theater (5905 Wilshire Blvd.) is Giulio Antamoro’s “Pinocchio” (1914), a delightful treatment of the venerable tale featuring the comedian Polidor in the title role. Antamoro doesn’t move the camera any more often than Japan’s Yasujiro Ozu would two decades later, but he has a nice sense of composition and knows how to sustain a lot of jaunty action within his frame. Antamoro also has a rhythmic sense of pace, and his “Pinocchio” has been deftly edited to this end. (The 1940 Disney version, by the way, screens Saturday at 1 p.m.) Along with two shorts, there will be a second feature, Ernst Lubitsch’s 1919 “Die Puppe.” With live musical accompaniment by Robert Israel. (323) 857-6010.

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The Laemmle Theaters’ American Independents series continues at the Sunset 5 (8000 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood) Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m. with Louis C.K.’s “Tomorrow Night,” which was described in the 1998 Sundance Festival catalog as “so subtly outlandish . . . that you can’t blink an eye or may not believe what you just saw.” That describes perfectly the quality of the absurdist humor of the inspired minimalist film. A stand-up comedian who was one of the original staff writers for “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” Louis C.K. is a no-fuss filmmaker who introduces us to a surly camera-shop proprietor (Charles Sklar) for whom uptight is way too inadequate a description. At the same time he’s snarling at customers, an elderly woman (Martha Greenhouse) is putting up with a tyrannical, skinflint husband constantly playing the horses, and she’s pining for the son she hasn’t heard from since he joined the army 20 years ago.

Sklar’s 30-something Charles and Greenhouse’s 80-ish Florence will join forces with consequences as unlikely as their connecting with each other in the first place. Throughout, Louis C.K. skewers the obnoxiousness and cruelty of the aggressively normal yet at the same time suggests that individuals as determinedly antisocial as Charles are asking for trouble as well. Human nature to Louis C.K. is stubbornly perverse any way you look at it but can be wonderfully comical. This is a gem that recalls “Where’s Poppa?” but is a lot further out. It will play June 3 and 4 at 11 a.m. at the Monica 4-Plex (1332 2nd St., Santa Monica), (310) 394-9741; Sunset 5: (323) 848-3500.

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The UCLA Film Archive’s “Korean War: The Last 50 Years” commences Tuesday at Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges at 7:30 p.m. with “The Marines Who Will Never Return” (1963), about the harrowing experiences of a Marine platoon. It will be followed with Kang Je-gyu’s “Shiri” (1999), Korea’s biggest box office hit ever. One of the most potent political thrillers of recent times, it tells of a North Korean terrorist group whose most ferocious member, Hee (Kim Yu-jin), is a young woman. The terrorists are intent on getting their hands on South Korea’s new impossible-to-detect, ultra-powerful liquid explosive so they can plant a bomb in a light fixture over a Seoul stadium box seat where the presidents of both Koreas will be watching a North-South soccer match meant to be a symbol of reconciliation. “Shiri,” which takes its name from an ancient fish that swims in all Korean streams, North and South, strikes a terrific balance between form and content, art and entertainment. (310) 206-FILM.

The Laemmle Theaters’ “Cine Cubano,” a series of outstanding films from each decade since Castro’s revolution, commences Saturday and Sunday at 11 a.m. at the Monica 4-Plex with the late Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s “Memories of Underdevelopment” (1968). The series will be repeated the following weekend at the Sunset 5 and the week after that at the Playhouse 7 (673 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena) with Saturday and Sunday 11 a.m. screenings. Alea’s film is a masterpiece of stream-of-consciousness drama, moving back and forth in time, telling of a wealthy 38-year-old Cuban’s attempt to relate to Castro’s revolution. Monica 4-Plex: (310) 394-9741; Sunset 5: (323) 848-3500; Playhouse 7: (626) 844-6500.

The Silent Movie (611 N. Fairfax Ave.) continues “Wild Western Week” with some genuine rarities, including Tom Mix’s “Sky High” (1927) tonight at 8. Appearing with the picture is film historian Robert S. Birchard, author of “King Cowboy: Tom Mix and the Movies.” Another standout: William S. Hart’s 1916 classic “Hell’s Hinges” (Friday at 8 p.m.). (323) 655-2520.