(Adrián Biniez, Uruguay 2009, 84 min., Spanish/subtitles)

Overweight supermarket security guard Jara (the oddly compelling Horacio Camandule) falls in love with Julia (Leonor Svarcas), the late-shift janitor he watches over a closed-circuit monitor. Too shy to actually approach the object of his affections, Jara anonymously begins a courtship and becomes Julia’s protector. Eventually confronted by reality, the gentle, voyeuristic giant must decide if he wants to live this romance or remain a spectator. Offbeat, funny, and sweet, Gigante has been a crowd-pleasing favorite at film festivals all over the world.

(Norman Foster, US 1948, 80 min.)

then at 8:30 p.m. BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT

(Fritz Lang, US 1956, 80 min.)

Legendary leading lady Joan Fontaine stars in a pair of films noir opposite two of the genre’s great male stars. In Kiss the Blood, Fontaine is a lonely nurse and war widow who shelters murderer-on-the-lam Burt Lancaster in fog-enshrouded London. Noir fixture Miklos Rosza provides the lovely music. In Beyond, Fontaine’s co-star Dana Andrews plays a man who masquerades as a murderer in order to get a first-hand view of the justice system, with disastrous results. Master thriller craftsman Lang’s last American film, like many of his best, entwines apparently opposing themes like criminality and morality, license and restraint, and culpability and innocence in such a way as to render them virtually indistinguishable from one another. Two films for one admission price. Members admitted free.

(Martin Scorsese, US 1990, 146 min.)

Scorsese’s mob epic and masterpiece is a tour de force of brutality, dark comedy, and great Italian cooking that charts the rise and fall of small-time mobster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) and his cohorts Jimmy the Gent (Robert DeNiro) and Shoeshine Tommy (Joe Pesci in an Oscar®-winning performance). Deftly gliding, propulsive camerawork and an evocative period pop soundtrack (Rolling Stones, Cream, Aretha Franklin) capture the allure, decadence, and the stress of day-to-day life as a Mafia hood.

(Buster Keaton & Jack Blystone, US 1923, 74 min.)

In one of his undisputed comic masterpieces, Buster Keaton is Willie McKay, the last survivor of his wealthy family, returning home to claim his inheritance. But the woman of his dreams, Virginia Canfield (Natalie Talmadge, the real-life Mrs. Keaton), comes from the family the MacKays are feuding with. The hair-raising, stunt-filled finale alone is worth the price of admission. Preceded by THE PLAY HOUSE (Buster Keaton, US 1921, 20 min.).

(Ernst Lubitsch, US 1924, 85 min.)

This silent and enormously rare masterwork by Ernst Lubitsch, one of the screen’s architects of sophisticated comedy, details the romantic affairs of one man and his three paramours—two of whom are mother and daughter. Live piano by Philip C. Carli.