THE REEL LESS TRAVELED

With a dozen or more films opening every weekend in L.A., you might assume we get the best of the best, yet a surprising amount of top-flight world cinema never gets a full theatrical run here.

Even the films of well-known directors such as Tsai Ming-liang (“What Time Is It There?”) are increasingly limited to festival stopovers. The filmmaker’s dreamlike “I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone” debuted at Venice in 2006 and played the Los Angeles Film Festival in June this year, but that was it. Finally, it’s being made available to a wider audience via its DVD release on Tuesday from Strand.

Noted for long takes and inventive use of camera angles, Tsai’s films transport you into languorous, often erotically charged worlds. His use of light transforms desultory environs into places of hypnotic buoyancy.

For “I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone,” he returns to his native Malaysia after a career in Taiwan, placing his characters in an abandoned factory in post-boom Kuala Lumpur. With little dialogue, immigrant worker Rawang (Norman Atun) and waitress Chyi (Chen Shiang-Chyi) administer to the broken body of Lee Kang-sheng (in a dual role credited as Homeless Guy and Paralyzed Guy). As a result, a menage of fundamental needs develops beneath an allegorical shroud of economic reality and deadpan humanism. With an outsider’s perspective, Tsai evokes an aching transience.

-- Kevin.Crust@latimes.com