Repo men and mutants gather at a freaky festival

A 20th anniversary screening of the legendary “Repo Man” -- featuring a new 35-millimeter print -- tonight kicks off the fifth edition of American Cinematheque’s Festival of Fantasy, Horror and Science Fiction.

In this fresh, virulently funny and gloriously grungy picture, writer-director Alex Cox sets his comic portrait of the way we are -- but might be happier forgetting -- against the scabrous background of the automobile repossession business in Los Angeles.

In this faintly surreal satire, Cox unleashes his Liverpudlian wit on cults, punks, UFO followers, the CIA, televised religion, the nuclear bomb business, credit buying and generic can labeling -- among other of life’s ills. That icon of lowlife, Harry Dean Stanton, plays an ace repossessor who becomes mentor to young Emilio Estevez. The result is a film that’s a real collector’s item. A discussion with some members of the supporting cast follows.

The people at the Cinematheque call Hiroyuki Imaishi’s “Dead Leaves” (Saturday) “the most wildly demented Japanese anime we’ve ever seen.” Moving with the speed of an old Road Runner cartoon, it brims with boldly stylized images of nonstop action, as discarded mutants, enslaved in a satellite prison in space, plot a violent, hectic escape.

Eric Valette’s bleakly ironic and provocative “Malefique” (Sunday) is a stylish stunner set in a prison cell containing four inmates. A new arrival (Gerard Laroche), head of his own company and apparent white-collar criminal, finds himself incarcerated with an elderly wife-killer (Philippe Laudenbach), a transsexual (Clovis Cornillac) and a babbling hysteric (Dimitri Rataud).

When the inmates come upon a mysterious journal secreted in a cell wall, “Malefique” takes off in an eerie and confounding supernatural direction.

Not yet silenced

A screening of D.W. Griffith’s controversial “The Birth of a Nation” (1915) at the Silent Movie Theatre launches a new Monday evening series of silents, many of them rarities.

Griffith’s film, which evokes the Civil War and its aftermath in all its tragic scope from an unabashedly and deplorably racist point of view, remains undeniably a landmark in innovative storytelling. Film historian David Shepard will be on hand to present his tinted print plus rare outtakes, and to place the film in its social perspective.

‘1900’ in English

The English-language director’s cut of Bernardo Bertolucci’s “1900” -- all 318 minutes of it, plus intermission -- will be presented Saturday at LACMA.

By far the best way to see the 1976 film is in its intended length but with English subtitles, yet even in that form “1900” is too emotionally extravagant ever to be considered a masterpiece. As impassioned as it is, the English version further flaws the film with a jarring mix of accents.

In Bertolucci’s “Partner” (1968), screening Friday, it becomes all but impossible to tell where reality leaves off and fantasy begins. A loose adaptation of Dostoevsky’s “The Double,” “Partner” asks us to consider the power of the imagination to transform and to deceive. It will be followed by “Besieged” (1998), which combines a stunning sensuality with a rigorous economy and stars Thandie Newton and David Thewlis.

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Screenings

5th annual Festival of Fantasy, Horror & Science Fiction selections

* “Repo Man,” 8 tonight

* “Dead Leaves,” 3 p.m. Saturday

* “Malefique,” 4 p.m. Sunday

When: Festival runs through Aug. 29.

Where: Lloyd E. Rigler Theatre at the Egyptian, 6712 Hollywood Blvd, Hollywood

Info: (323) 466-FILM or www.americancinematheque.com

Silent movie series

* “Birth of a Nation,” 8 p.m. Monday

Where: Silent Movie Theatre, 611 N. Fairfax Ave., Hollywood

Info: (323) 655-2520

Dreaming Cinema: The Films of Bernardo Bertolucci

* “Partner” and “Besieged,” 7:30 p.m. Friday

* “1900,” 7 p.m. Saturday

Where: Leo S. Bing Theater at LACMA, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A.

Info: (323) 857-6010 or www.lacma.org