Comandante (Thu., Feb. 9, 7:30 p.m., $3, Tabernacle Church, 37th and Chestnut sts.) This 2003 documentary is an up-close-and-personal portrait of an ingratiating megalomaniac—not its subject, Fidel Castro, but director, host and interlocutor Oliver Stone, who rarely misses a chance to shift the focus his way. Never one to hide his presence, Stone clearly relishes being in front of the lens, palling around with Castro as if posing for vacation snaps. An opening title notes that Castro never exercised his Stone-given right for retakes ("like an actor," Stone notes), but this has less to do with Castro's openness than Stone's softball questions. ("Have you seen Titanic?" is one.) Making matters worse, the mess is filmed by a passel of roving videographers and cut together with epileptic gracelessness. It's too incoherent to be propaganda.

Stone is too outmatched, or too starstruck, to query even the most ludicrous statements. Surely even a sympathetic interviewer might have noted that "Even our prostitutes have university degrees" is not the best testament to Cuba's education system. It falls to cameraman Carlos Marcovich to point out that in Castro's free Cuba, every block has its own government informant. Castro says he's "mistaken," and Marcovich can only roll his eyes; his boss has no intention of backing him up.

It pains me to run down Comandante, since, like Castro himself, the film has effectively been censored in the U.S. In 2003, voicing concerns about Stone's failure to confront Castro on Cuba's human rights abuses, HBO cancelled its scheduled broadcast, and sent Stone back to Cuba to shoot the follow-up Looking for Fidel. But while Looking, and Persona Non Grata, Stone's similarly credulous potrait of Yassir Arafat, have been released on DVD, Comandante remains unavailable in this country. It's a disgrace that Stone's film has been disappeared; HBO would have done better to release it and let it be justly ignored.

Fellini's Casanova/La Ronde (Thu., Feb. 9, 8 p.m., free, The Rotunda, 4014 Walnut St.) Andrew's Video Vault looks at love in all its glories, and all its pitfalls. It may have seemed impressive in 1976, but Federico Fellini's take on the life and amores of the 18th-century libertine Giacomo Casanova has the look of a spun-sugar trinket, as gaudy as it is cheap. Donald Sutherland, delivering his lines in rapid-fire blocks to make things easier on the dubbers, plays Casanova as a wan, gaunt figure who thrusts his pale, skinny chest right into the lens when he's bolstering his reputaton as the world's greatest cocksman. As in La Dolce Vita, Fellini stages parties you aren't meant to enjoy, but the effect is less that of staring into the abyss than peeping through a pastry shop window. The movie has an almost pathological resistance to leaving the confines of Cinnecita, which produces some spectacular effects in the case of a storm-tossed ocean crossing, but contributes to a general airlessness that becomes suffocating over the movie's shapeless length.

At least Casanova's excesses make the lightness of Max Ophüls' La Ronde that much more a delight. Glaringly underrepresented on DVD, Ophüls was a master of baroque modulation who died at the height of his powers. Drawn from an Arthur Schnitzler play, 1950's La Ronde turns theatrical staging to utterly cinematic effect. Tracing the interconnections between a web of continental lovers, Anton Walbrook's narrator/MC strolls from set piece to set piece, walking effortlessly through time and space like Jim Carrey in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. In effect, he plays the same role as the earrings in Ophüls' Madame de ..., only here what gets passed around is not a prized piece of jewelry but the spark of erotic desire (or the more tangible gift of venereal disease). In his day, Ophüls was celebrated for his sexual sophistication, but La Ronde's whirligig structure reveals him as an avant-gardist in the mode of Méliès, one who never let his desire to play with the medium surpass his duty to keep his audience in ecstasy. Both screenings are video.

Fellini's Casanova

Three Portrait Films (Mon., Feb. 13, 7 p.m., free, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542) In honor of film programmer Michael Chaiken's move to NYC, International House is screening three rare films by his new employer, Albert Maysles: Salesman, Meet Marlon Brando and With Love from Truman. Profiling famed film producer Joseph E. Levin, Brando and Truman Capote, these three short docs (under two hours all told) show Albert and his brother David already in perfect command of their observational craft—and, in the latter two, beginning their long and bountiful collaboration with editor/co-director Charlotte Zwerin. Stop by and pay your respects, or just to appreciate the unique and vital programming I-House has brought to the city for the last five years.

Serenity (Fri.-Sat., Feb. 10-11, midnight, Bryn Mawr Film Institute, 824 W. Lancaster Ave., Bryn Mawr, 610-527-9898) As if it weren't good enough that the Bryn Mawr Film Institute has revived midnight movies—and on film, yet—they've conspired to give viewers a second go-round at Joss Whedon's brilliant Serenity. Manager Ben Hickernell, who plied the theater's staff with Serenity DVDs to secure the booking, says fans have been calling in for weeks, so show up early and be prepared for a stoked-to-the-gills crowd. Check Bryn Mawr's Web site (www.brynmawrfilm.org) for upcoming screenings of Old School, The Breakfast Club, Taxi Driver, Requiem for a Dream and more.

Videoletters (Wed., Feb. 15, 7 p.m., $5-$7, International House) I-House's annual "Selections from the Human Rights Watch International Film Festival" kicks off with this collection of brief documentaries that apply a reality-TV framework to the nations of the former Yugoslavia. Scattered across Europe, these former neighbors, schoolmates and foster children reach out through the medium of video, recording their regrets and hopes without knowing if they'll ever been seen, and whether breaking their silence might make things worse. These video letters (many more can be seen at www.videoletters.net) are unfailingly moving. The problem is the other camera—the one that's watching them while they film themselves. Fitting the story behind each letter into a tidy package, Eric van den Broek and Katarina Rejger have fashioned a nifty idea for a weekly series that grows a bit too familiar over the course of a half-dozen 20-minute episodes. The moment when a former foster mother hears that the boy she raised has been taken by a street gang is terrifying in its bleakness, but you know the filmmakers will keep going until they reach a more satisfying conclusion. The filmmakers' apparent intent is to put individual faces to the region's often perplexing internal conflicts, but by putting each pair of pen pals in the same shape box, they wipe out some of the distinctions they've drawn.