War Is…: Come and See/The War Game (Thu., Jan. 9 and Fri., Jan. 10, 8 p.m., $6, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542, www.ihousephilly.org) International House's war films series continues with two gripping looks at the horrors of war. Come and See, Elem Klimov's 1985 Russian epic, recalls the German devastation of WWII Byelorussia through the eyes of a 12-year-old child. Watching Aleksei Kravchenko's face go from boyish innocence to an old man's horrified shell (with the help, toward the end, of some awkwardly applied makeup), it's tempting to believe the rumors that he was hypnotized in order to simulate the proper degree of shell-shock, but perhaps the nine-month shoot was enough. In any case, it's impossible to deny the film's impact, even as you might wish for several degrees more clarity. Though several sequences, notably one where an entire village's worth of people are crammed into a tiny barn and eventually slaughtered, provided inspiration for Schindler's List, Klimov shows little interest in anything other than emotional high points; Come and See whirls dizzyingly from trauma to trauma, often with little to connect the scenes. Images float across the screen like unmoored hallucinations -- during the village massacre, a reeling Kravchenko catches sight of an androgynous Nazi sucking the meat from a crustacean's claw in the front seat of a truck -- and characters frequently stare right into the lens, as if confronting our right to be witnessing any of this. It's more than a little hysterical, but Klimov's intensity gets under your skin, and the effect is, finally, searing.

Peter Watkins' The War Game (1966) is similarly unsettling, and even more intentionally so. Only a few years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, Watkins' 47-minute film -- created for the BBC, which declined to show it -- explores the aftermath of a nuclear attack on Great Britain, and points none-too-subtly to its likelihood. Although staged as a documentary, complete with stentorian narrator, the film is both a warning and a parody, a pointed critique of the traditional documentary "authority." The War Game goes far past the immediate effects of a nuclear blast to imagine its short- and long-term consequences, the social, psychological and societal upheaval that would follow as surely as the shockwaves and radiation poisoning. In mixing real interviews with (often unlabeled) re-creations of such interviews, not to mention speculative enactments of post-nuclear society, the film serves its propagandistic purpose, but it also engages the viewer in the critical process of rethinking the televised pronouncements of authority figures. (Even if it wasn't broadcast, The War Game still makes most conceptual sense as a television film.) The connection to government leaders blandly assuring their citizens of their nations' nuclear superiority is so strong it need only be implied -- and felt, even 36 years later. (Watkins also provided the impetus for John Lennon and Yoko Ono's "Bed-In for Peace." Ono's hourlong film of the event will be screened following The War Game.)

As a semi-official adjunct to the series, International House will also host Secret Cinema's screening of Cornel Wilde's 1967 war drama, Beach Red (Tue., Jan. 14, 7:30 p.m.). The story of an American army unit's attempt to take a Japanese-held Pacific island, Beach Red has been cited as a heavy influence on both Saving Private Ryan (its extended opening combat sequence) and The Thin Red Line (the setting, the structure, just about everything else). The screening of an original 35mm print will be accompanied by vintage American propaganda shorts, and introduced by Sparklestreet.com and Philadelphia Weekly critic Dan Buskirk.

The Broad Street Project (Fri., Jan. 10, 7 p.m., free, Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-569-9700, www.scribe.org) Local high school students share their filmic views of Broad Street and its history, with the help of Scribe Video Center's Documentary History Project for Youth.

Rear Window (Tue., Jan. 14, 1 p.m., $1, The Bridge, 40th and Walnut sts., 215-386-3300) The Bridge kicks off its monthly Silver Screen Classics series with this screening of Alfred Hitchcock's housebound 1954 thriller. A buck gets you the movie, soda and popcorn. You'll have to come up with an excuse to miss work on your own.

Band of Outsiders ($29.95 DVD) Jean-Luc Godard's deadpan gangster movie is even better in parts than as a whole. As noted when the film played here last summer, Band of Outsiders is an acknowledged influence on such pop-savvy landmarks as Pulp Fiction and Y Tu Mamá También, with its use of self-conscious, occasionally distracted narration and deliberately aimless banter. In an interview on Criterion's new disc, cinematographer Raoul Coutard, Godard's longtime collaborator, recalls how if they hadn't shot enough footage in a given day, Godard would have the actors read a newspaper for several minutes or chatter aimlessly -- purportedly to fill out the mandatory minimum running time (90 minutes), but also to capture the lax, anything-goes quality of their lives. The movie's charm is shaggy, and it's loaded with so many dead ends and in-jokes that at times it's like leafing through Godard's diary. (Somehow he doesn't seem like the "today I bought some cheese" type.) The DVD's "visual glossary," though, unravels each inside reference, tracking down each Rimbaud paraphrase, each Breton citation. Of course, it doesn't venture to explain exactly why Godard would frost his cake with so many impenetrable cross-references, but you could ask the same question of just about any of his films. Interviews with Coutard and Anna Karina (Godard's ex-wife and the star of many of his '60s movies) don't exactly yank back the veil, but they offer tantalizing glimpses at the inner working of Godard's infinitely tricky mind.

Little Otik ($29.99 DVD) Be forewarned: Your first Jan Svankmajer movie is just the gateway to a lifelong obsession. Little Otik, which adopts a Czech fable about a voracious golem-like baby, is perhaps the Czech surrealist's most accessible movie, which means that it's only likely to fry part of your brain. Where Faust, Svankmajer's masterpiece, blends multiple versions of the Faust story, using a chaotic blend of live action, stop-motion animation and puppetry to tell the tale(s), Little Otik plays it relatively straight, employing animation only as it's needed to depict the movements of the titular eating machine. Appetite, whether for food or power, has always been one of Svankmajer's most potent subjects -- no filmmaker can make the simple act of eating seem so disturbing -- and many hungers do battle as the story plays out: a childless couple's desire for a baby, which leads to the creation of a monstrous tree-stump surrogate; that Frankenbaby's ever-increasing hunger pangs, which can eventually only be satisfied by ingesting anyone who gets too close; even a newly capitalist Czech Republic's increasing lust for material goods. That Svankmajer hasn't received his due as one of today's most important filmmakers isn't a surprise, but it is a crime.