CHICAGO: Beginning January 3 and running through March 2, "In the Realm of Oshima" at the Gene Siskel Film Center provides a twenty-film retrospective of the long career of one of Japan's most provocative directors, Nagisa Oshima. Here, Oshima is probably still best known for the scandalous international success (based on an actual story of violent sexual obsession) known here as In the Realm of the Senses (1976). The schedule includes that film as well as its companion piece, Empire of Passion, which won Oshima the Best Director prize at Cannes, the cult favorites Cruel Story of Youth (1960) and Death by Hanging (1968), and Oshima's sole bid to storm the multiplexes of America, Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence (1983), a partly English-language prisoner-of-war-camp film with a cast that includes David Bowie, Tom Conti, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Takeshi Kitano.

NEW YORK: For one week starting today, Film Forum is running a fresh print of Nicholas Ray's 1956 Bigger Than Life, a hyperbolic film about megalomania that in recent years has begun to develop a cult following as a lonely, crazed voice screaming from the bland landscape of suburban '50s culture. James Mason tears it up as a schoolteacher whose cortisone addiction turns him into a rampaging, speechifying menace. "The sight of such deep-seated demons being liberated," writes Richard Brody in The New Yorker, "makes repression look downright appealing."