The Witty and the Gritty

The American Cinematheque’s Alternative Screen series presents tonight at 7:30 at the Egyptian, 6712 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood, Suki Hawley and Michael Galinsky’s gritty and compelling “Radiation.” In the film, Unai (Unai Fresnedo), a rock music promoter and tour manager based in Madrid, is confronting the inescapable truth that he’s going nowhere, after a hard decade on the road. Constantly being ripped off and chronically in debt, Unai, who survives mainly as a drug dealer, has a capacity for reflection that only heightens his discouragement.

When his latest gig--involving a tour of Spain by an American band--misfires, he hits the road with a flashy American performance artist-poet (Katy Petty), who is likable, plain-spoken and resilient. On a stage, she embodies every dreadful, self-indulgent cliche of her craft, which means she wallows in strident self-pity, although she’s in reality too seasoned and spunky to succumb to such feelings. The film looks and sounds great, as it has been dynamically shot and boasts a corrosive, driving score.

It is preceded by Mollie Jones’ graceful and persuasive 11-minute “Debutante,” in which a pretty, lonely teenager (Selma Blair), neglected by her bickering parents, imagines throwing a lively party while they’re away and that one of her guests (Josh Hartnett) makes love to her. Live performances by bands Lotusland and Spaceheads will follow “Radiation.” (323) 466-FILM.

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“Changing the Guard,” a festival of new British cinema over the next three Fridays and Saturdays at LACMA’s Bing Theater, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., opens strongly on Friday at 7:30 p.m. with “The Tichborne Claimant.” It is a witty and poignant account based on a true 19th century incident, in which an Australian (Robert Pugh), with the help of a black servant (John Kani), tries to pass himself off as the long-missing scion of one of England’s wealthiest families. Rich in social comment, this elegant period piece, written by Joe Fisher and directed by David Yates, offers in supporting roles four generations of consummate British actors: John Gielgud, Charles Gray, James Villiers and Stephen Fry. It will be followed by the ingratiating “The Girl With Brains in Her Feet,” in which lovely Joanna Ward plays the teenage daughter of a black man she never knew and a loving but embittered white woman (Amanda Mealing). This wryly amusing coming-of-age story, set in Leicester in 1972, finds the teenager pursuing her passions for running and art while exploring her budding sexuality. Written by Jo Hodges and directed by Roberto Bangura.

Antonia Bird’s “Face” (Saturday at 7:30 p.m.) has been directed with terrific force and energy and alludes to disenchanted leftists’ politics, but it is fundamentally yet another numbing, blood-soaked, ultra-violent heist-gone-wrong thriller. “The Full Monty’s” Robert Carlyle stars.

For 20 years the Amber Collective has been chronicling northern England working-class life, and “The Scar,” which screens after “Face,” is a most affecting love story between former labor leader May Murton (Charlie Hardwick) and a former miner (Bill Speed). They live in a coal mining community whose pit has long been closed down by the Thatcher government, devastating the citizenry. The ex-miner has cast his lot with a group of developers who plan to use a new method of mining while leveling the pit as a site for a resort. The film’s political commitments don’t always mesh with its romance, but Hardwick and Speed are appealing as mature lovers. (323) 857-6177.

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Lo Duc’s “Bastards,” which opens Friday at the Grande 4-Plex (Figueroa Avenue at 3rd Street), is an earnest but amateurish attempt to dramatize the plight of Amerasians--the offspring of Vietnamese mothers and American soldiers, who were allowed to immigrate to the U.S. by a 1987 act of Congress. The film focuses on two teenage brothers, on their own in Orange County and supporting themselves as dishwashers. While the older brother, Tien (Christopher Lance) makes the best of it, concentrating on the complicated search for their father, younger brother Tony (Tuan Tran), consumed by bitterness, succumbs to Little Saigon gang life. What Lo Duc, in his feature debut, has to say is important, but his film is too awkward. (213) 617-3084.

Junichi Suzuki’s consciousness-raising “Remembering the Cosmos Flower,” which opens a one-week run Friday at the Grande 4-Plex, tells of a teenage girl (Oda Akane) who returns with her widowed mother to their remote hometown in Japan to die from AIDS, contracted through a blood transfusion. She encounters ignorance and prejudice, but her best friend (Megumi Matsushita) from childhood defies her father’s orders and resumes their friendship. Unfortunately, the film gives an urgent contemporary issue an old-fashioned, tear-jerking treatment. (213) 617-3084.

Major Hong Kong director Clara Law, who now lives in Australia, has made a compassionate and occasionally humorous film of the Chinese diaspora in “Floating Life” (Saturday and Sunday at 10 a.m. at the Sunset 5, 8000 Sunset Blvd.; June 19 and 20 at 11 a.m. at the Monica 4-Plex, 1332 2nd St., Santa Monica). We follow the Chans (Cecilia Fong Sing Lee and Edwin Pang) from Hong Kong, leaving before the mainland takeover, to a luxe but sterile Sydney suburb, where they and their two teenage sons will live temporarily with their daughter Bing (Annie Yip). Bing, in her seven years Down Under, has become so determined to become assimilated and self-supporting that she has turned into a hysterical control freak careening toward a breakdown.

Meanwhile, her brother Gar Ming (Anthony Wong) awaits his immigration papers; and her elder sister (Annette Shun Wah) is happily married to a German and living in Munich, but her mother’s phone calls fill her with guilt and concern. As in “Farewell, China,” Law evokes the family’s collective sense of profound dislocation in a film that is at once epic in the distances and cultures it spans and intimate in exploring the awesome challenges confronting the Chans, whose obvious wealth does not insulate them from pain and sorrow. Sunset 5: (323) 848-3500; Monica 4-Plex: (310) 394-9741.

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Director Jeanette L. Buck and writer Kim McNabb’s “Out of Season,” screening Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the Village at Ed Gould Plaza, 1125 N. McCadden Place, as part of its Outfest reprise series, is a strikingly subtle and moody love story set in the picturesque resort of Cape May, N.J. Showing up at a local coffee shop is black-haired, black-leather-jacketed Micki (Carol Monda), an attractive, distinctive young woman with attitude to burn. Behind the counter is Roberta (Joy Kelly), as lovely as she is wary. Micki has come to care for her terminally ill, widowed Uncle Charlie (Dennis Fecteau), who is close friends with Roberta. Since both are upfront, unattached lesbians, you wonder why Micki and Roberta do so much skirmishing, but Roberta recognizes Micki as a restless will-o’-the-wisp and a potential heartbreaker. The way these women sort out their emotions and priorities is at once engaging, credible and satisfying. (323) 960-2394.

Note: The Los Angeles Conservancy’s “Last Remaining Seats” series continues Wednesday with the sci-fi classic “Forbidden Planet” (1956) screening at 8 p.m. at the Los Angeles Theater, 615 S. Broadway, downtown L.A. Starring Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis, Leslie Nielsen, Warren Stevens and Earl Holliman, it is loosely based on Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” George Takei will host. (213) 896-9114.