2 films probe the psyche

The Hollywood Film Festival, which runs through Sunday at the ArcLight, has snagged several prestigious year-end movies, including tonight’s gala premiere of “The Singing Detective” and also “Girl With a Pearl Earring” and “Shattered Glass,” which will also screen as premieres Saturday and Sunday, respectively.

As different as they are, Peter Webber’s exquisite “Girl With a Pearl Earring” and Billy Ray’s harrowing “Shattered Glass,” both from Lions Gate, are similar in their thoroughly realized psychological validity.

The first is a breathtaking feat of imagination, an account of how Vermeer (Colin Firth) came to paint, circa 1665, one of his most famous works, which gives the film its title. A beautiful, demure and hard-working 17-year-old (Scarlet Johansson) comes to work as a servant in the Vermeer household and inadvertently inspires the artist. Vermeer’s unhappy, imperious wife, Catharina (Essie Davis), is jealous, yet Catharina’s shrewd mother (Judy Parfitt) realizes that no inspiration for her far-from-prolific son-in-law can be overlooked if the Vermeers are to maintain their lavish lifestyle. Shot in the lush, somber style of Vermeer’s paintings, “Girl With a Pearl Earring” evolves into a film as tense as it is ravishing.

A contemporary cautionary tale, “Shattered Glass” stars Hayden Christensen as Stephen Glass, a talented, hard-driving 24-year-old New Republic staffer who in 1998 was exposed as having partly or wholly fabricated 27 of 41 articles he had written for the venerable journal. A fast-on-his-feet liar with a glibly winning manner, Christensen’s Glass is unnervingly persuasive, as are the pressures that overwhelm him. The suspense that drives both “Shattered Glass” and “Girl With a Pearl Earring” emerges from increasingly intense interplay between people whose passions and goals are on a collision course.

Jews who resisted

Richard Trank’s “Unlikely Heroes,” another eloquent triumph for the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Moriah Films, focuses on seven individuals whose courage saved thousands of lives and thereby helps rebut the widely held belief that few Jews resisted the Holocaust outside the uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto.

They are Pinchas Rosenbaum, who impersonated high-ranking Hungarian Nazis; Willy Perl, a Viennese attorney who defied then-S.S. 2nd Lt. Adolf Eichmann to persuade his Berlin superiors to let more than 40,000 Jews flee illegally to Palestine; Friedl Dicker Brandeis, an artist who inspired Theresienstadt’s children to express themselves therapeutically in paintings; Leon Kahn, who avenged the slaughter of his family and village neighbors by Lithuanian collaborators by turning partisan; the internationally renowned actor-entertainer Robert Clary, whose singing ability as a 13-year-old cheered fellow prisoners in various concentration camps; Recha Sternbuch, a wealthy, devout Swiss Jew who went to awesome lengths to save Jewish lives; and Anna Heilman, who survived her participation in the bombing of an Auschwitz-Birkenau crematorium.

Composer’s conflict

As enthralling as it is informative, Peter Rosen’s “Khachaturian” celebrates the impassioned music of the great Soviet composer (1903-78) who, drawing from Armenian folk music, was an idealistic supporter of communism following the revolution. However, in the post-World War II era, he ran afoul, as did most of his peers, of Stalin’s decision to respond to the uproar over the descent of the Iron Curtain by condemning artists widely admired in the West.

Khachaturian, a survivor par excellent but at the cost of much anguish, was ordered to get back to his Armenian roots, which inspired his awesome, acclaimed ballet “Spartacus,” whose hero is a slave who led a rebellion against the Roman Empire.

Vladimir Vasiliev, the dancer who created the role of Spartacus, observes that “Spartacus” became Khachaturian’s “self-portrait, his requiem.” Because the ballet did not premiere until 1954, a year after Stalin’s death, Khachaturian always wondered whether the dictator, once his supporter, would extol him once again -- “or order me shot.”

A gene genie

Lynn Hershman Leeson’s “Teknolust” is a jaunty, amusing, romantic sci-fi comedy about a mousy San Francisco biogeneticist cleverly named Rosetta Stone (Tilda Swinton) who has devised a way to replicate herself as three glamour girls, Ruby, Marine and Olive. “Teknolust” is high-intellect, low-budget fare shot in high-definition digital in rich, clear color. Swinton is beguiling, and “Teknolust” deserves a more accessible time slot. Also screening at the Sunset 5 this weekend in the 2003 Documentary Days is Pan Nalin’s “Ayurveda: The Art of Being,” which explores what has been called the world’s oldest holistic health-care system.

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Screenings

“The Singing Detective”: 7 p.m. tonight, ArcLight Cinemas, 6360 Sunset Blvd., Hollywood, (323) 464-4226.

“Girl With a Pearl Earring”: 7 p.m. Saturday, ArcLight Cinemas.

“Shattered Glass”: 7 p.m. Sunday, ArcLight Cinemas.

“Unlikely Heroes”: 9 p.m. Sunday, ArcLight Cinemas.

“Khachaturian”: 9 p.m. Friday, ArcLight Cinemas.

“Teknolust”: Midnight Friday, Saturday, Laemmle’s Sunset 5, Sunset Boulevard at Crescent Heights Ave., (323) 848-3500.

“Ayurveda: The Art of Being”: 11 a.m. Saturday, Sunday, Laemmle’s Sunset 5.