MOVIE REVIEWS : USC Students Offer a ‘First Look’

USC’s “First Look” student film and video series, which begins tonight, is uneven in quality, but in getting away from the high-concept factory audition pieces that dominated the program just a few years ago, the students have shown commendable diversity and ambition and their work deserves to be judged by slightly higher standards.

Tonight’s opening program may be the best. While the two cartoons shown are simple variations on the usual “funny animal” slapstick--Keith Bell’s droll “Puttin’ on the Dog” and Paul Trandahl’s dry, childlike “Slothful Daze”--the five narrative films are all unusual.

Three are by one writer-director, Bob Newlon, who shows a fully developed cinematic personality.

“Self Serve,” written by M. S. Freeman and directed by Daniel Arthur Simon, about an inept holdup man, could easily be expanded into a feature. Matt Meyer’s “Red Sky at Midnight” is the most ambitious, a Holocaust drama about the relationship between a camp guard and a radical prisoner.

The program begins at 7:30 p.m. at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, program two at the Director’s Guild. Information: (213) 743-3160.