You would have to know Chytilová's earlier work to appreciate how dismally depressing this latest film of hers truly is. It's unbelievable that the same director who created 1966's Sedmikrásky (Daisies) could be responsible for this aggressively dull feature. Daises remains a profoundly radical film, and is a benchmark in Czech cinema. Its brilliant structuring and editing blazed a trail for the next generation of Czech directors. But its revolutionary creator has grown toothless, and, if Pleasant Moments offers anything for budding filmmakers, it is a cautionary tale.

What's sad is that Chytilová's feminism has also gone the way of her adventurousness and style, becoming just as hopelessly retrograde. Every woman in this film is a fishwife screeching over a grocery list of grievances. As for the sexual politics, they seem to date from somewhere just after the Bronze Age.

This miasmic two hours is made worse by spasmodic hand-held cinematography, which works for Dogme practitioners, as they have a working philosophy to ballast their choice. Here it is a mere gimmick from a director past her prime desperately wanting to appear relevant.

But fans of Czech cinema needn't despair too much, for at least Kino Atlas will be showing some real national classics over the next few weeks with English subtitles. Sadly, some of the films on offer will not have subtitles and will be offered with simultaneous English translation, a quaint Czech custom that drives this viewer up the proverbial wall. The following is a brief list of films that will be left aurally unmolested.

This week sees two excellent films from the '60s: Vojtďch Jasný's The Cassandra Cat, with the great Jan Werich, and Miloš Forman's delightful Loves of a Blonde, with the vivacious Hana Brejchová (Oct. 3 and 5:30 and 8 p.m., respectively). Following these two marvelous comedies are two more serious works, Jiří Menzel's 1969 Larks on a String (which the Communist Party immediately banned, and was only screened publicly in 1990), and Karel Kachyňa's The Ear, which also brought political trouble to everyone involved in the project (Oct. 4 at 5:30 and 8 p.m., respectively).

Coming up on the bill the following week are the grimly hilarious musical Kouř, filled with many of the old Sklep theater luminaries from the early '90s, and another interesting musical from 1978, Ballad for a Bandit, based on Miroslav Uhde's play.

There will also be a chance to see one of the most controversial films from the 1930s, Ecstasy, by Gustav Machatý. Best known as the film that introduced a nude Hedy Lamarr to the world, Ecstasy, like Machatý's earlier (and superior) Erotikon, is a frank and mature handling of human sexuality and passion. It was so mature, in fact, that it took Americans another 30 years to decide that it wasn't pornographic.