New international features and classic comedies share the slate today.
Writer-director Annemarie Jacir (“Wajib”) presents a momentous event in the Palestinian struggle for freedom in “Palestine 36,” opening Friday at the Roxie. The exhilarating historical drama, an inspiring portrait of dignity and resistance, mixes fiction with archival footage, taking viewers through year one of the 1936-1939 revolt in Mandatory Palestine by Arab farmers opposed to British colonial rule and land acquisition by Jewish settlers from Nazi-era Europe. Nearly 20 main characters (fictionalized and invented) with different intentions and interests dominate the picture. Yusuf (Karim Daoud Anaya), a young Arab villager who works in Jerusalem, joins the rebellion after his father is killed and his brother is unjustifiably arrested. Khalid (Saleh Bakri), a laborer, becomes a rebel leader after being brutalized for demanding overtime wages. Amir (Dhafer L’Abidine) is an important newspaper editor. Amir’s wife Khuloud (Yasmine Al Massri), a journalist, enjoys wearing her husband’s fez and writes her columns under a male pseudonym. On the British side are Captain Wingate (Robert Aramayo), a sadistic military officer; and Arthur Wauchope (Jeremy Irons), a high commissioner and bureaucratic windbag. At times, the abundance of characters and complicated history are too much to grasp. Worthy actors, including Irons and Hiam Abbass, the latter portraying a proudly Palestinian grandmother, receive little screen time. But any notion that Jacir should have taken the miniseries route is debunked by this two-hour movie. Featuring combat scenes, intimate moments, period costumes, and charismatic actors, and presenting 90-year-old conflicts with a resonance that moves viewers to consider their reverberations today, “Palestine 36” consistently satisfies as an old-fashioned big-screen epic with something current to say.
(Janus Films via Bay City News)
Also opening at the Roxie on Friday, a screening at the Smith Rafael Film Center on Thursday, is “Two Prosecutors.” Set during the Great Purge of Joseph Stalin, the film follows an idealistic state attorney who lands in hot water when attempting to expose a dissident’s torture. Building suspense while revisiting a grim stretch of history, Ukrainian writer-director Sergei Loznitsa (“My Joy”) keeps viewers rapt throughout this claustrophobic thriller tinged with Kafka and Orwell. Adapted from the novella by Georgy Demidov, the 1937-set story begins when Kornyev (Aleksandr Kuznetsov), a young Soviet prosecutor and loyal Bolshevik from Bryansk, Russia, meets with an imprisoned writer named Stepniak (Aleksandr Filippenko), whose work the regime has branded dangerous despite an absence of evidence. Kornyev’s visit is in response to a blood-written note that was smuggled out of the prison. Stepniak informs Kornyev that he has endured violent beatings by the Soviet secret police and says he believes — as does the naive Kornyev — that the perpetrators are simply bad apples. Seeking justice for Stepniak, Kornyev realizes that experiences like Stepniak’s may be common. Before long, he also is deemed an enemy of the state and trapped in a bureaucratic labyrinth and fascist nightmare. Intelligently talky rather than heavily dramatic, the movie initially seems cold and dry. But Loznitsa’s unhurried storytelling is conducive to slow-burning suspense. Confined settings such as prison cells, waiting rooms and train compartments, along with stark lighting, dark humor, and the restrained lead performance by Kuznetsov, a prominent Russian Ukrainian actor, help make the film a modest spellbinder.
“A Body to Live In,” a 2025 documentary about Bay Area pioneering performance artist Fakir Musafar and the body-modification movement, screens at the Roxie Theater at 6 p.m. Saturday. Angelo Madsen, the director, will appear in a Q&A moderated by LGBTQ+ activist Race Bannon after the screening, which is presented by Frameline.
The Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum in Fremont presents “Lady Windermere’s Fan” at 7:30 p.m. Saturday. The 1925 movie directed by Ernst Lubitsch based on Oscar Wilde’s 1892 stage play is a marital comedy about a society woman who suspects her husband is having an affair. Ronald Colman, May McAvoy, Bert Lytell and Irene Rich star. Greg Pane provides piano accompaniment. Two short silents — Al St. John’s “The Iron Mule” (1925) and Charlie Chaplin’s “The Property Man” (1914) — lead off the program. Visit nilesfilmmuseum.org for more information.
“The Rules of the Game” (1939), Jean Renoir’s blistering depiction of moral indifference among French society on the eve of World War II, screens at the Vogue Theater in San Francisco at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday. Widely regarded as one of the best films ever made, it’s a deceptively lively comedy of manners that transpires over a weekend at a country chateau, where ugly truths emerge and romantic desires collide among a group of haute bourgeois guests and their servants. Visit voguemovies.com.
As part of its free monthly series of jazz documentary screenings, the Jazzschool in Berkeley presents “Hazel Scott: The Disappearance of Miss Scott,” from the PBS “American Masters” series, at 7 p.m. Thursday. The film profiles the jazz pianist, screen star and early civil-rights pioneer, chronicling her rise as a jazz artist and Hollywood star and blacklisting during the Red Scare period. Visit jazzschool.org.