One of my very favorite French films was made in 1962 by a now relatively obscure director named Serge Bourguinon. It's called Sundays and Cybele and it's playing at the Brattle. Cybele is a little girl in a home for abandoned and orphaned children and Sunday is the day she's visited by a young man who has just recovered from the bodily, but not the mental, wounds he suffered in the French Indochina wars. The friendship between the two might easily be merely touching or sentimental, but Bourguinon presents it with such range of feeling that Sundays and Cybele is one of the most genuinely moving films of the past decade. Stylistically, the film is a fascinating amalgam of the techniques of the French New Wave, but it adds a rare human element to its style and so achieves a quality matched by only a few of the early New Wave films.

Bourguinon made three films after Sundays and Cybele, but none has been shown recently in Cambridge. His first film is so fine that we really should get a look at his others.

Un Chien Andalou (1928), at the Old Cambridge Baptist Church, was the first film made by Luis Bunuel. A silent short partly planned by Salvador Dali, it was the first surrealist film and is probably the most powerful short film ever made. Bunuel's surrealism was abstract in the 20s, became a savage vehicle for social criticism in the 40s and 50s, and mellowed into a means for joking about the upper class in last year's Discreet Charm of the Bourgeousie. Un Chien Andalou was its first expression.

The Friends of Eddie Coyle gives Bostonians a chance to see their town on film. But more important, it is a detailed portrait of organized crime that avoids the mythification of The Godfather. Based on the novel by George V. Higgins, a former Assistant U.S. Attorney who worked mainly on organized crime, the film is notable for the same clear, crisp dialogue found in the book--it led Norman Mailer to write, "What I can't get over is that so good a first novel was written by the fuzz." Robert Mitchum plays aging small-time gangster Eddie "Fingers" Coyle.