CLASSIC FOREIGN FILMS MEET SUNDANCE CHANNEL CRITERION.

Byline: Rob Lowman Entertainment Editor

The Sundance Channel is joining with the Criterion Collection to present a series of landmark foreign films over 13 weeks beginning at 9 tonight, with a different title airing each Thursday.

The series will include works by such renowned directors as Jean Renoir, Roman Polanski, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa and Federico Fellini. Each film is preceded at 8:30 p.m. by ``Conversations in World Cinema,'' which talks to filmmakers. Past guests have included Liv Ullmann for ``Faithless,'' Ang Lee for ``Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon'' and Ed Harris for ``Pollock.'' Tonight's guest is Milos Foreman, who began as part of the Czech New Wave with his films ``Fireman's Ball'' and ``Loves of a Blonde'' and later directed such American films as the Oscar-winning ``One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,'' ``Amadeus'' and ``Man on the Moon.''

First up in the series is Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni's masterpiece ``L'Avventura.'' The film was reviled when it premiered in Cannes in 1960, but later Antonioni's work was seen as revolutionary. The plot involves two lovers, Sandro (Gabriele Ferzetti) and Anna (Lea Massari), who visit some Mediterranean islands with friends, including Claudia (Monica Vitti). When Anna disappears, Sandro and Claudia spend the rest of the film searching for her and in the process fall in love.

What put people off at first about ``L'Avventura'' was Antonioni's distancing of characters by pulling back his camera: Sandro and Anna are removed from the world, seen in their alienation, ennui and ultimately in their despair as they try to connect. Critic Pauline Kael described them as ``active only in trying to discharge their anxiety: Sex is their sole means of contact.''

Not all the films in the series will be as difficult, but all of them are stellar, movies people calling themselves cinema fans should have seen. Criterion specializes in lovingly restoring classic films on DVD, and all the titles are either available on DVD from Criterion or on VHS on Home Vision, if you miss them on Sundance.

Here's the rest of the lineup; each film starts at 9 p.m.:

JUNE 14: ``High and Low'' (``Tengoku To Jigoku''), directed by Akira Kurosawa (Japan, 1963) - Toshiro Mifune stars as a wealthy industrialist whose family becomes the target of a ruthless kidnapper in Kurosawa's film noir, adapted from Ed McBain's detective novel ``King's Ransom.'' (Available on VHS and DVD)

JUNE 21: ``Mr. Hulot's Holiday'' (``Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot''), directed by Jacques Tati (France, 1953) - Director, co-writer and star Tati created one of film's most beloved characters in this comedy about a hapless bachelor's seaside vacation. (VHS)

JUNE 28: ``Andrei Rublev,'' directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (Russia, 1966) - Tarkovsky's epic masterpiece is a sweeping medieval tale about Russia's greatest icon painter. (VHS and DVD)

JULY 5: ``Wages of Fear'' (``Le Salaire de la Peur''), directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot (France, 1953) - An American oil company enlists four tough drifters for a high-paying suicide mission: transporting explosives across the rough terrain of Central America. The film was remade as ``Sorcerer'' by William Freidkin. (VHS and DVD)

JULY 12: ``Wild Strawberries'' (``Smultronstallet'') directed by Ingmar Bergman (Sweden, 1957) - An elderly physician, about to receive an honorary degree, is prompted by a dream and by circumstance to revisit key moments in his life. (VHS and DVD)

JULY 19: ``Knife in the Water'' (``Noz w Wodzie''), directed by Roman Polanski (Poland, 1962) - Polanski's black comic first feature follows a couple whose boating weekend becomes an exercise in tension after they pick up an enigmatic young hitchhiker. (VHS)

JULY 26: ``Blood of a Poet'' (``Le Sang d'un Poete''), directed by Jean Cocteau (France, 1930) - Cocteau's dreamlike first film stretches the medium to its limits in an effort to evoke the creative process. (VHS and DVD)

AUG. 2: ``The Seventh Seal'' (``Det Sjunde Inseglet'') directed by Ingmar Bergman (Sweden, 1957) - A knight returning from the Crusades tries to outwit Death in Bergman's allegory of man's search for meaning. (VHS and DVD)

AUG. 9: ``Cleo From 5 to 7'' (``Cleo de 5 a 7''), directed by Agnes Varda (France, 1961) - French New Wave director Varda captures the atmosphere of Paris in the '60s with this portrait of a singer searching for answers as she awaits the results of a biopsy for cancer. (VHS and DVD)

AUG. 16: ``Nights of Cabiria'' (``Le Notti de Cabiria''), directed by Federico Fellini (Italy, 1957) - Oscar winner for Best Foreign Language Film, this haunting masterpiece stars the great Giulietta Masina as a naive prostitute searching for true love in the seediest sections of Rome. (VHS and DVD)

AUG. 23: ``Grand Illusion'' (``La Grande Illusion''), directed by Jean Renoir (France, 1938) - A moving drama about a group of World War I POWs trying to escape from a German prison camp, it is considered by many to be the greatest antiwar film ever made. (VHS and DVD)

Aug. 30: ``Seven Samurai'' (``Shichi-Nin No Samurai''), directed by Akira Kurosawa (Japan, 1954) - A desperate village hires a group of mercenary samurai to protect it from marauders in this crown jewel of Japanese cinema. (VHS and DVD)

CAPTION(S):

photo

Photo:

Akira Kurosawa's 1954 masterpiece ``Seven Samurai,'' part of a series of landmark movies from the Criterion Collection, airs Aug. 30 on the Sundance Channel.