Tender Affection and Rough Interrogation

Craig Monahan’s “The Interview,” the final entry in the Laemmle Theaters’ “World Cinema 2000” series, is not your typical Halloween terror fare.

It opens like your standard Kafkaesque nightmare: Two tough Melbourne cops break into the one-room apartment of a meek unemployed man (Hugo Weaving, last seen in “The Matrix”) before dawn, rough him up and haul him off to the station for an intense interrogation.

If you can sit through this familiar terrorizing situation you will be rewarded with a series of surprises in which the key observation is, as the interrogating detective (Tony Martin) notes, everybody in the police department has his own agenda.

“The Interview” gives way to a view of a police force where career opportunism has replaced professional solidarity, which only intensifies the dilemma of the cop under the traditional pressure to get his man and the equal, more recent pressure to respect that person’s rights. “The Interview” doesn’t ask us to take sides but to lament a law enforcement system that is breaking down.

“The Interview” screens daily, Friday through next Thursday, at 11 a.m. at the Playhouse 7, 673 E. Colorado Blvd., Pasadena, in addition to the already scheduled 11 a.m. weekend screenings. Information: (626) 844-6500.

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What a waste: In his first feature, “Loving Jezebel,” director Kwyn Bader has brought a beguiling flow and grace to his strenuously inconsequential script about how a personable young man (Hill Harper) is preoccupied with falling in love with other men’s lovers or wives. He has one fling after another only to discover that the woman doesn’t love him in return, until he crosses paths with the married but beautiful Samantha (Laurel Holloman). To run off with her, however, he must risking dying for love on account of her irate, gun-waving husband. Opening in wide release on Friday.

David Blaustein’s “Spoils of War,” which screens at the Sunset 5 Friday through next Thursday, comprehensively chronicles the unending struggle of Argentina’s Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo (a stately square in Buenos Aires) to locate their missing grandchildren, the offspring of the some 30,000 desparecidos, those who vanished after being arrested for opposing the country’s military dictatorship that ruled the country between 1976 and 1983. Only 68 grandmothers have been reunited with their grandchildren in the last 17 years.

Despite the setback of a presidential pardon a decade ago, the grandmothers have succeeded in proving that the abduction of babies and infants of political prisoners (many whom were either thrown from planes or buried, after torture, in unmarked graves) was systematic, and they zeroed in on a clause in the pardon that did not provide amnesty for kidnappers. They’ve taken their cause to the United Nations and have set up a genetic bank for DNA testing.

Some reunions have taken place after nine years--another, after 19 years. Many obviously will never occur, but these women gain strength and meaning in sustaining each other and their cause in the effort to make sure history does not repeat itself in Argentina. Blaustein’s documentary was made for domestic TV and could benefit from added historical context for international release. Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd. Information: (323) 848-3500.

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Ian Merrick’s “The Sculptress,” a standard-issue supernatural thriller that opens wide Friday, stars Katie Wright as an English art student who comes to San Francisco to further her education but has the bum luck to take an apartment next door to a madman (Jeff Fahey) who gradually possesses her via “psychic channeling.”

Not even her urbane art professor (Patrick Bauchau) can stop the evil he senses overtaking her.

UCLA Film Archive’s “Anime A-Go-Go,” a rich sampling of the latest in always-on-the-edge Japanese animation, opens tonight at 7:30 in Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater with Kunihiko Ikuhara’s “Utena: The Movie,” a delirious, fuchsia-hued romantic fantasy adapted from a popular comic book for girls.

Our heroine, a girl who dresses in a military school uniform, arrives in a boarding school in the sky, which seems to be a vast Erector set Metropolis, to engage in nonstop fencing matches. The goal is to win the hand of the Rose Bride, a purple-haired beauty who waters the carpet of roses upon which she floats.

Among those contending for the Rose Bride’s hand: Utena’s former boyfriend. The result is kinky, erotic, amusing and also somewhat elusive, thanks to white-on-white English subtitles often impossible to read.

More accessible is Hiroyuki Kitakubo’s “Blood: The Last Vampire.” Barring a last-minute scheduling snag that may result in a substitution, the film screens Tuesday after the 7:30 p.m. screening of “Vampire Hunter D” as a “Halloween Scare” double feature.

In an evocative film noir atmosphere rendered in a sleek, stunning photorealistic style, an enigmatic, somber and androgynous-looking girl, Saya, is on a mission to destroy vampires on an American military base, already nervous over the imminent Vietnam War. Read what you will into this eerie, compelling work. (Scheduling problems may result in a last-minute substitution for “Blood: The Last Vampire.”) “Anime A-Go-Go” runs through Nov. 4.

Information: (310) 206-FILM.

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Also opening: Disney’s re-release of “Nightmare Before Christmas” (Friday); LACMA’s “California Noir” series, (323) 857-6010 (Friday); the American Cinematheque’s provocative “Mental Hygiene: Classroom Guidance Films 1945-1970,” (323) 466-FILM (Saturday); Res Fest 2000, a survey of digital cinema, also at the American Cinematheque (Wednesday and next Thursday); and “Air Raids,” a citywide, monthlong festival of experimental, documentary and media works, opening Friday at MOCA and running at more than 30 venues through Dec. 2.

Information: (213) 617-3950.