Capsule Reviews of AFI Film Festival

Following are capsule reviews of a selection of the screenings today and Sunday at the American Film Institute Los Angeles International Film Festival at the Cineplex Odeon Cenutry Plaza Cinemas.

SATURDAY

‘Tribute to Alain Robbe-Grillet: La Belle Captive’

France, 1983, 90 minutes 6:30 p.m. A paranoid sexual odyssey and nightmare in which images from Rene Magritte’s painting “La Belle Captive” and fragments or re-creations of the painting itself recur while a confused young spy races through a menacing landscape of drowned, ruined chateaux, modish madhouses and dark bars in search of captive women who vanish, pursued by grinning agents of perversion and dissolution. Some may dismiss this film is an inchoate piffle or a cloudy inward-turned mirror, but film maker Alain Robbe Grillet is actually a superb scenarist in search of a director. His conceits are dazzling, but he lacks the visual panache of a Resnais, a Franju or the pragmatic poetics of a Lang or Bunuel, which is just what his scripts require.