S.F. International Film Festival

Saturday, April 24, 1:15, Kabuki; Tuesday, April 27, 9 p.m., PFA; Wednesday, April 28, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki; Sunday, May 2, 1:30 p.m., Rafael Film Center; Wednesday, May 5, 7:30 p.m., Kabuki

Last Stop Paradise
(Romania/France, 1998)
The beginning of Lucian Pintilie's anarchic new tragicomedy recalls The Reenactment and The Oak, his previous savage and marvelous portraits of freethinking Romanians confronted with the blockheadedness of the military mind. Amid the cacophony of the city, two directionless misfits initiate a mockery of a love affair. But Mitou takes it seriously, lovingly pursuing Norica past the point of common sense. Devotees of the jaunty fatalism unique to films from Eastern Europe will enjoy the ride -- even as absurdity gives way to insanity and the jauntiness is overtaken by the fatalism. (Michael Fox)

Sunday, April 25, 9:30 p.m., Kabuki; Tuesday, April 27, 6:50 p.m., Kabuki

Lovers of the Arctic Circle (Spain, 1998)
In his glib, glossy, globe-spanning rumination on the sheer dreaminess of romantic love, ambitious Spanish director Julio Medem lives and dies by the sword of coincidence. This swoony flick, now playing in New York and set to open here in two weeks, tracks a boy and a girl from their destined childhood meeting, through adolescent bonding, up to their fateful mid-20s rendezvous. It's a shallow blend of standard-issue coming-of-age angst and romantic melodrama skillfully masked by a thick sheen of cinematic flash, including shifting points of view and time frames. Clever, fast-moving, and unmemorable. (Michael Fox)

Sunday, April 25, 8:30 p.m., Kabuki; Monday, April 26, 7 p.m., Kabuki

Negative Space
(England, 1999)
This is a terrific introduction to the densely layered, enormously witty video essays Chris Petit does for the BBC, often on his favorite subject: the space between the real world and our image of it. In Negative Space, Petit road-trips through the American desert on his way to pay homage to painter and ex-film critic Manny Farber, while musing about such critically ignored aspects of cinema as speed, light, tempo, and space. No fan of Farber should miss it. The accompanying 10-minute short Surveillance is a brilliant meditation on surveillance videos and their mapping of the "spaces we negotiate without seeing" -- like parking garages, airports and, um, the AMC Kabuki lobby. (Tod Booth)

Monday, April 26, 7 p.m., PFA; Wednesday, April 28, 9:50, Kabuki; Saturday, May 1, 4 p.m., Kabuki

Regret to Inform (U.S.A., 1998)
It takes a few minutes to succumb to the unexpected, low-key rhythms of Barbara Sonneborn's sobering Oscar-nominated Vietnam War documentary, and then you're hooked. The East Bay filmmaker's journey by train to the site of her husband's death in combat gives the film a nebulous shape, but its considerable emotional power stems from the willingness of Vietnamese and American war widows to describe their losses. The archival footage, meanwhile, viscerally conveys the destruction to the land as well as to the people, prefiguring The Thin Red Line. Ultimately, it's a film as much about memory's tricky power as war's devastation. (Michael Fox)

Monday, April 26, 12:30 p.m., Kabuki; Tuesday, April 27, 7:10 p.m., Kabuki

Run Lola Run (Germany, 1998)
From its relentless techno-pop score to its blend of animation, live action, and the virtual world, this sleek German export is a trip powered by high-octane fuel. While the stylish opening plays like an invitation to a futuristic existential nightmare, the plot and flashy visuals are popped right out of a video game. A drug deal goes awry, and Lola has 20 minutes to deliver the missing cash to her boyfriend or he'll die. Three versions of the same story, each slightly different, unfold consecutively, but the ingenious structure has one breathless constant: Lola, and her mop of flaming red cartoon hair, running for her lover's life. Think Alice in Wonderland on speed. Tom Tywker wrote, directed, and played in the band. (Sura Wood)

Friday, April 23, 10 p.m., Kabuki
Same Old Song (France, 1997)
Once known for such solemn, schematic films as Hiroshima Mon Amour, Last Year at Marienbad, and the wonderful Muriel, Alain Resnais continues his 1990s run of late-in-life frivolities with this comedy of romantic maneuverings among the French bourgeoisie. The Dennis Potter-inspired bursts of old popular songs placed in the mouths of these anxiety-ridden characters say less about them than the series of Parisian flats they move through, as much in transit toward new apartments as they are toward new lives. The film would be more appealing if the actors had charm -- the lot of them are either off-puttingly prickly or sad-sack depressives. (Gregg Rickman)

Sunday, April 25, 7:30 p.m., PFA; Saturday, May 1, 9:40 p.m., Kabuki; Sunday, May 2, 6:30 p.m., Kabuki

Sans Soleil (France, 1983)
The narrator of Chris Marker's masterpiece is a fictional cinematographer, Sandor Krasna, who wanders through Africa and his favorite country, Japan, seeking out the root beliefs and rituals that might make it possible for people to feel part of a natural historical continuity even in a technological age. Krasna has hatched a plot for a sci-fi movie called "Sunless," or "Sans Soleil," in which a 40th-century man tries to discover the meaning of Mussorgsky's "Sunless" song cycle, which still exists in his time but is no longer comprehensible. Like Krasna, Marker is the opposite of obscure: He's trying to clarify the cascade of crossed signals in our own time. A montage of Japanese rail travelers and the violent, sexy, silly cartoon and movie images that flit through their heads is a thrillingly lucid evocation of fragmented contemporary consciousness. (Michael Sragow)