(Victor Fleming, US 1925, 75 min.)

A disgraced sailor (Percy Marmont) finds a home amongst the natives in an Indonesian archipelago, until his past comes back to haunt him. The first screen adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s novel is one of director Victor Fleming’s finest silent film accomplishments. Michael Sragow, film critic for The Baltimore Sun and contributor to The New Yorker, will discuss Fleming’s life and career, and sign copies of his new biography, Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master. Live piano by Philip C. Carli.

(DER LETZTE MANN, F.W. Murnau, Germany 1924, 77 min.)

The enduring masterpiece from Murnau (Nosferatu, Sunrise) is an artful fusion of evocative German expressionism and gritty social realism. Emil Jannings stars as the stolid doorman of a posh Berlin hotel whose pride crumbles when he’s shunted into semi-retirement as a washroom attendant. Murnau tells the tragic story entirely without intertitles by using intricate tracking shots, grotesque lens distortions, and dynamic shot angles. Live piano by Philip C. Carli.

(AL-ARD, Youssef Chahine, Egypt 1969, 130 min, Arabic/subtitles)

Adapting a widely read Arab novel by Abderrahmane Cherkaoui, Chahine spins a powerful proletarian musical epic about greedy landowners, the farmhands who till their soil, and the culpability and stubbornness of both in the obstruction of progress in the impoverished Nile Delta of the 1930s. The Land is something like an extravagant color remake of a Dovzhenko film, not an entirely inappropriate ambition given that Chahine’s prior film, the first Egyptian-Soviet co-production, had been banned in both countries. The Land, luckier, recently topped a critics’ poll of the best Egyptian films of all time.

(Mabrouk El Mechri, Belgium 2008, 96 min., French with subtitles)

JCVD stands for Jean-Claude Van Damme, and the muscles from Brussels gives one of the most fascinating and compelling performances of the year (no folks, we’re not kidding) in a meta-exploration of the action star’s private and public personas. Playing himself, a washed-up action star with financial problems stemming from an ugly divorce, Van Damme returns to his Belgian hometown, only to inadvertently find himself at the center of a robbery/hostage situation! Forced to reconcile his heroic big-screen image with his defeated, true self, our anti-hero must find a way to extricate himself from his predicament. The undoubted highlight is JCVD’s confessional, direct-to-camera monologue that may move you in surprising ways.

(Jules Dassin, US 1964, 119 min.)

The director of Rififi brings us a lighthearted caper that transports us to the exotic land of Turkey. An international group of thieves, organized by the suave Maximilian Schell, attempts to steal the sultan’s desirable jeweled dagger from the Topkapi museum. Peter Ustinov gives an Oscar®-winning performance as another bumbling crook caught up in the frenzy. Although slick in style, the film also takes time to dwell on the beautiful and unique aspects of Turkish culture, creating entertaining and visually stunning compositions.