The Lost One/The Brave (Thu., March 2, 8 p.m., free, The Rotunda, 4014 Walnut St.) When actors turn director, the result is often a visually rote ensemble piece, but Peter Lorre and Johnny Depp, whose one-off outings are collected in this Video Vault double-bill, both thought big, though not with the same results. Lorre directed The Lost One in 1951, adapting his own novel about a Nazi vivisectionist who murders his unfaithful wife and is subsequently unable to quench his bloodlust. Not surprisingly, the allegory of German war guilt didn't go over too well, and the movie has almost vanished from sight. (The screening source is a passable bootleg DVD.) But Lorre demonstrates a sure hand with Expressionist shadows, and his lead performance is among the best in his career. Rather than use his turn behind the camera to show his breadth as an actor, Lorre opted for depth, playing a more complicated version of his most familiar role. When he faces the camera, we see not the stock villain of Lorre's Hollywood films, but an extension of the sympathetic psychopath he played in M, here hollowed out beyond redemption. In the movie's postwar framing story, Lorre is administering vaccinations under the name Neumeister, but it's clear that no inoculation can erase his taste for death. Toward its past-tense climax, The Lost One's plot gets hopelessly tangled, but its pessimistic conclusion still packs a punch.

The Lost One

The Brave, which Depp famously pulled after a disastrous Cannes screening, unfortunately deserves its obscurity. A misguided fusion of existential bleakness and the sham magic of Depp's mentor Tim Burton, it's literally painful to watch, especially given the tendency to crop close-ups just above the eyebrows. Although you'd never guess if it weren't for the racial slurs directed his way, Depp stars as a Native American named Rafael, whose last-ditch attempt at lifting his family out of poverty involves selling his life to Marlon Brando's sadistic eccentric: The more Depp suffers, the more his family will get.

Brando's is the most uncomfortable performance in a movie full of them. Confined to a wheelchair, lips painted red and hands stained with iodine, he wobbles his way through an ungainly speech and then disappears faster than you can say "stunt casting." If there's one thing the two actors have in common, it's that they're best when their strong wills butt up against equally strong directors; here, Brando lets it all hang out, while Depp is a curiously absent presence, onscreen and off.

Backseat Film Festival (through Sun., March 5, Triangle Theater, 1220 N. Lawrence St.) The scrappy Backseat FF provides plenty of sex and rock 'n' roll, though you'll have to bring your own stimulants. As in past years, the standout entries are underground rock docs, which illuminate the joys and pitfalls of success on your own terms. Cheryl Eagan-Donovan's All Kindsa Girls (Thu., 9 p.m.) is an unabashedly fannish chronicle of Boston's Real Kids and the punk-garage scene that spawned and occasionally nourished them. The music that poured out of the city in the 1970s and '80s has never gotten the national recognition it deserved, and the movie doesn't steer neophytes as well as it could; if you can't tell a Nervous Eater from a Modern Lover, it's tough to keep track of the interviewees. But Eagan-Donovan has a compelling central figure in the Kids' John Felice, whose melancholy exterior belies his songs' manic energy.

Derailroaded

Felice, however, is a barrel of laughs compared with Larry "Wild Man" Fischer, the subject of Jeremy Lubin and Josh Rubin's Derailroaded (Sun., 9 p.m.). Fischer, who got his nickname from Solomon Burke and his start from Frank Zappa, is a wildly unstable character whose compositions take the form of borderline-tuneless outbursts, sung in a frenetic yelp and often made up on the spot. (The producers Barnes and Barnes crafted one Fischer album by trailing him with a tape rig and orchestrating his exclamations after the fact.) Identified as a paranoid schizophrenic and manic depressive, Fischer was the first in the troublesome tradition of outsider musicians that includes Daniel Johnston, Wesley Willis and, on a bad day, Cat Power—performers whose fans think their mental illness makes them more "real" (a phrase Devo's Mark Mothersbaugh invokes here). In the most recent of Derailroaded's performance excerpts, the crowd yells requests at a frazzled Fischer with a violence more evocative of a sideshow than a concert. Derailroaded doesn't always know where to draw the line between exploration and exploitation, taking refuge in vérité remove when Fischer collapses on his aunt's hospital bed or describes how Steven Spielberg is trying to kill him. But there's enough affection in the filmmakers' approach to keep Derailroaded out of the muck, if only by a hair's breadth.

A complete schedule, which runs the gamut from beach-party tributes to mock giallo, is available at www.backseatfilmfestival.com.

Controversial Classics Vol. 2 ($59.98 DVD) Though subtitled "The Power of Media," this six-disc boxed set is united more pertinently by time than theme. Released within 14 months of each other, its three films form a frieze of mid-'70s malaise, from the end-of-the-road rebellion of Dog Day Afternoon through the bottomless revelations of All the President's Men to the softcore nihilism of Network. Oddly, the most recent is also the most dated: Network's smug, facile attack on the corporatization of TV news is enough to make you dread the prospect of George Clooney's announced remake. The movie's fans, like director Sidney Lumet, will run on endlessly about how the movie's predictions have "come true"; never mind that it takes a mind-boggling contempt for the TV audience to equate even the worst of Fox News with an evening broadcast featuring "Sibyl the Soothsayer" and terrorist robberies staged for reality TV. The script, by vaunted windbag Paddy Chayefsky, is rife with castrating bitches like Faye Dunaway's conniving TV exec, whom William Holden's old-guard producer dismisses as "television incarnate." At its worst, which is frequently, Network is no more than an old man's attack on a young medium's feminization, a regressive wish for a white-haired Big Daddy who'll tell it like it is.

Looser-limbed and less sermonizing, Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon pits closeted bank robber Al Pacino against what looks like the entire New York police force. Backed by the even twitchier John Cazale, Pacino's ex-vet Sonny, whose in-and-out heist turns into a sweat-soaked hostage crisis, gets the crowd on his side by invoking the murderous police response to the Attica prison riots (the movie's defining moment). But he's surrounded by a sea of blue every time he steps out the door, and even though his final betrayal happens out of the media's sight, his preceding breakdown is live for the cameras. Even his intimate phone conversation with lover Chris Sarandon, whose sex-change bill is Sonny's inciting incident, is belatedly revealed as a public spectacle.

Surveillance is text as well as subtext in All the President's Men. Godfather cinematographer Gordon Willis relies on split-focus lenses (at last restored in this letterboxed transfer) to create the unnerving sense of never knowing where to look—at least, until the movie's centerpiece, a bravura six-minute shot that tracks from a wide-angle view of the Washington Post newsroom to a tight shot of Robert Redford's Bob Woodward. He's got the story now, and nothing will divide his focus from here on out.

Directed by Alan Pakula from William Goldman's script, President's Men works as drama as well as thriller; fencing with each other like dogs in a pen, Redford and Dustin Hoffman's Carl Bernstein develop an uneasy (and, inevitably, temporary) truce between Democrat and Republican, Jew and Gentile, to bring down the common enemy. The movie that launched a thousand J-school admissions, All the President's Men does journalists the service of making them human.

(sam@citypaper.net)