Off the Wall. Someone named Larry just walked in here with reams of paper and enthusiasm about a new movie place in Cambridge, Off the Wall, where they show free films, children's pictures, video, and a lot of experimental stuff. He says a bunch of friends--filmmakers and artists--began to show movies up in their apartment and it expanded into the present coffeehouse setup they have now, which does "what the Orson Welles intended to do, and would be doing if they could afford it." Off the Wall appears to have some cash, and can get cheaper rates since they're showing on a small scale and mostly short films and some free movies. It looks from the lists as though they screen Eastern European and some radical films (a biography of Mao Tap-Tung by David Wolper ended yesterday), and their principle--especially for the children's movies--is "non-violent and non-sexist." During next week's Washington's Birthday school vacation, Mario Thomas's Emmy award-winning Free to Be...You and Me will be shown daily for $.50. On the regular program beginning tonight is Bunuel's Simon of the Desert, among other things, a film from the director's Mexican period about a Christian mystic who moves to the top of a high pillar in the middle of the desert, hauling up his food by ropes, to commune with The Lord. As vicious about Catholicism as usual, with Bunuel's only attempt I've over seen to make a statement about "beat" culture (which, strangely, he likens to hell). Off the Wall, "Coffeehouse of the Arts," is at 861 Main Street in Cambridge, near Central Square.

Last Tango in Paris. This has suffered in the year and a half since it came out, inevitably, after the fuss Pauline Kael generated, and the erratic nature of her criticism since then. That famous "it has altered the face of an art form" review was almost a watershed in her work. But the problem was that she shifted the emphasis the wrong way--toward sex, and played into the hands of the newsmagazines who turned it into a lurid porno flick at worst and a "shockingly honest" film at best, though they would have done that anyway. In fact it was a brilliant picture for different reasons, many of which, given the sensibility of Bernado Bertolucci, were political. It is a sheltering, can't talk-for-least-fifteen minutes-afterwards film because you can't help but identify with the characters frustration at not being able to transcend their context. On the one hand people in this society learn that they have to find roots and grow out of them; on another level they are taught that abstracts like "love" or "pleasure" are supposed to be free of a setting--divorced from the social environment, a haven. So a romantic mixing with a bourgeols French woman who thinks she's liberated can only end in tragedy. A beautiful movie, worth seeing again Latin American Films. A festival of films sponsored by the Chile Action Group, all of them dealing with revolutionary struggle in Latin America, starts this weekend at Emerson Hall. First film is The Promised Land, made by Chileans in the final days before the September 1973 coup, about a peasant rebellion in the 1930's and the doomed and legendary Jose Duran who led the movement. Proceeds from, the pictures will go to defending the Chilean people from their government.

Ophuls. This week the Harvard-Epworth Church, where you see movies from the pews, will begin a retrospective of films by Max Ophuls (with the exception of his most famous, Lola Montes, which is showing at the Brattle later this spring). This Sunday evening is his Letter From an Unknown Woman, with Joan Fontaine and Louis Jourdan (1948), which will be shown with a rare film clip of Mariene Dietrich singing for the English version of The-Blue Angel, called I'm Falling in Love Again.

Astaire and Rogers. Some BU film group claims to be showing "a rare Astaire/Rogers film made in 1936" at Sherman Auditorium this Saturday at 9 p.m. Now this might be Follow the Fleet, which is never around, is supposed to be terrific, and has "I'm Putting All My Eggs in One Basket" in it. But Swing time, which is not rare (although the best Astaire and Rogers film there is) was also made in 1936. Anyway this mysterious, possibly bogus entity will be screened with Cat People, a low-budget thriller made in 1942. Cat People at 7:30 and 11 p.m.

Hiroshima, Mon Amour Deadly.