Israeli Festival Begins : The 14th annual event in Beverly Hills features a series celebrating 50 years of nation’s cinema.

More ambitious than ever, the 14th annual Israel Film Festival will screen today through Nov. 20 at Beverly Hills’ Music Hall, 9036 Wilshire Blvd. and around the corner at the Writers Guild, 135 S. Doheny Drive. More than 50 features, documentaries, TV movies and miniseries, plus a student film program sponsored by AT&T; and Amblin Entertainment, will be shown. The festival, which features a series celebrating 50 years of Israeli cinema, got underway Wednesday at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with the American premiere of Yossi Somer’s “The Dybbuk of the Holy Apple Field,” a mystical take on a Romeo and Juliet-like love story.

The festival begins with a number of strong entries, most of which will be repeated several times over the next two weeks. Screening tonight at 7 is “Minotaur,” an elegant, somber adaptation of the Benjamin Tamuz novel directed by Jonathan Tammuz from a script by Irving S. White and Dan Turgeman, who is also the film’s producer and star. Filmed primarily in New York and, except for one scene, entirely in English, it casts the virile Turgeman as a Mossad agent on a secret, deadly mission in Manhattan who becomes transfixed by a beautiful, charming young woman (Mili Avital) studying to become a concert pianist. Memories of his ill-fated mother, also a beauty and a pianist, flood over him, as he commences expressing his love to Avital’s student in a series of anonymous poetic letters. “Minotaur”--the agent sees himself as half-human, half-beast--becomes a drenchingly romantic thriller, crafted with much care.

Screening tonight at 9:15 is a stunner, Ali Nassar’s “The Milky Way,” set in a Palestinian village in Galilee in 1964 during the last year of Israeli military rule. Nasser conveys with quiet power the devastating effects of external oppression on the internal lives of the citizens. The key figure is the village blacksmith (Muhammed Bakri), a craggily handsome intellectual and protector of a childlike middle-aged man (Suheil Haddad), traumatized when his hometown was wiped out in the 1948 war. When this man arrived, he truly was following “the Milky Way,” a path to a secure environment now riddled with fear and paranoia. The village leader, the Mukhtar (Makram Khoury), is a man in the unenviable position of trying to protect his people and to serve the Israeli military governor. Superbly acted and directed, “The Milky Way” builds powerfully.

Nadav Levitan’s tender, moving “No Names on the Doors” (Saturday at 5 p.m.) interweaves stories of several lives in a modern-day kibbutz. The focal point is an elderly man (Avi Pnini, a wonderful actor), recently widowed, attempting to care for his strapping 45-year-old retarded and physically disabled son (Mosko Alkalay), when he is really not strong or healthy enough to do so. Through this loving, seriously imperiled relationship and other situations, Levitan quietly suggests that the kibbutz way of life is in danger of losing its values in the name of economic concerns.

On a lighter note, Isaac Zepel Yeshurun’s “A Brief History of Love” (Saturday at 7:30 p.m.) is a witty and wise comedy involving two best friends approaching 40, their wives and the monotony of monogamy. The result is a ruefully funny film, made with an easy, confident sophistication. Tickets: (310) 274-6869; program schedule and further information: (213) 966-4166.

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The Sundance Channel and Buzz Magazine’s “A Beat Weekend” at LACMA Friday and Saturday will present seven film programs and at 5 p.m. Saturday a live performance by Ray Manzarek, keyboardist and founding member of the Doors, and Beat poet and playwright Michael McClure. At 7:30 will be the world premieres of two one-hour documentary films commissioned by the Sundance Channel following a 6 p.m. reception.

Screening first is Renee Tajima-Pen~a’s “The Last Beat Movie,” a jaunty, unpretentious introduction to surviving figures of the Beat era. As in her “My America . . . Or Honk If You Love Buddha,” Tajima-Pen~a hits the road to talk to people all over the country. But there’s a considerable difference between the two films. You can feel deeply her concern with the question of Asian American identity in our society and culture in the earlier film, but here you don’t feel that she’s particularly connected to what the Beat Generation represents. The result is a sense of the superficial atypical for Tajima-Pen~a’s work.

“The Last Beat Movie” will be followed by William Tyler Smith’s “The Third Mind,” an incisive and engaging exploration of McClure and Manzarek’s collaboration. Smith has struck a deft balance between the concert film and the documentary in which we can both enjoy McClure and Manzarek in performance and get to know how they feel about their collaboration. There are plenty of insights from other Beat era figures, including the late Allen Ginsberg, who sees their working together a “ripening of good karma.”

Diane Di Prima, quoting William Burroughs, remarks that a good collaboration results in “a third mind.” Lawrence Ferlinghetti describes McClure’s poetry as “a beautiful cry of the beast,” and McClure’s soaring poems celebrate the human spirit and express a fervent concern for the preservation of the environment. Of his widely varied accompaniment, Manzarek says that he combines “a little collision”--i.e., occasional counterpoint--with “making love to the words.” “The Third Mind” has lots of energy and style, with its many participants sharp in their commentaries, and it is an altogether stimulating work. Ferlinghetti salutes McClure’s sense of commitment, observing that “We can no longer afford art for art’s sake.” For schedule and tickets: (213) 857-6010 or Ticketmaster: (213) 480-3232.

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Jonathan Tolins’ play “The Twilight of the Golds” was adapted by Tolins and Seth Bass for the tube, and now that version will be released Friday at the Sunset 5 and the Town Center 4, South Coast Plaza. Tolins poses the question: If you knew your baby would be gay, would you abort it? The reflexive response of a young wife (Jennifer Beals) and her parents (Faye Dunaway, Garry Marshall) is pretty much yes--Dunaway waffles--which in turn causes Beals’ gay brother (Brendan Fraser) to pose the question to his parents: Had they known he was going to be gay, would they have favored aborting him? Tolins does reveal how deeply ingrained homophobia can be, connected as it is with the primordial fear of that which is different from whatever you happen to be. But “The Twilight of the Golds” is heavy-handed and overly contrived despite game direction by Ross Marks and a notable cast that includes Jon Tenney, Rosie O’Donnell, John Schlesinger and Jack Klugman. Sunset 5: (213) 848-3500; Town Center 5: (714) 751-4184.

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Among the films in the UCLA Film Archive’s “World Without Pity: Tabloids and Film” at Melnitz Hall’s James Bridges Theater is Joseph Blasioli’s compulsively watchable 1992 documentary “Blast ‘Em,” which screens Saturday at 9 p.m. Following young, relentlessly aggressive celebrity photographer Victor Malafronte on his rounds, “Blast ‘Em” makes some key points: A little celebrity cooperation can go a long way; power-tripping security guards and rude publicists only aggravate what is after all a symbiotic relationship between the photographer and celebrity. (310) 206-FILM.

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More than 20 years’ experience in distributing many of the finest foreign and American independent films clearly informs Jeff Lipsky’s debut as a writer-director with “Childhood’s End,” which will screen Saturdays and Sundays at 11 a.m. at the Sunset 5. Although occasionally overwritten and lacking a strong, defining style, this involving, rigorous picture reflects a total commitment to its people and their lives.

The first part of the film focuses on an attractive, forthright Minneapolis widow (Cameron Foord) who decides the next man in her life will be her best friend’s 19-year-old son (Sam Trammell), a photographer with a promising career. She leaves his mother and her teenage daughter (Colleen Werthmann) to cope with this decision the best they can. Lipsky then deftly shifts focus to the daughter and her budding relationship with a shy but determined classmate (Heather Gottlieb). The second couple are by far more likable than the first, but the widow is a commanding character, brutally honest and strong enough not to care about what anyone thinks of her.

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The Silent Film Guild, on Friday at 7:30 p.m. at the Music Hall (9036 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills), presents “Paris” (1926), a romance starring Joan Crawford and Charles Ray, and “On Ze Boulevard” (1927), a farce with Renee Adoree and Lew Cody. Bob Mitchell will provide organ accompaniment. (213) 389-2148.

Experimental filmmaker Deborah Stratman will appear with a program of her work Sunday at 7 p.m. at “Filmforum Presents” at LACE, 6522 Hollywood Blvd. (213) 526-2911.

“Boogie Midnights,” a series of seven adult films from the 1970s, commences Friday and Saturday at midnight at the Sunset 5 with “Johnny Does Paris,” starring John Holmes. (213) 848-3500.