It’s a midwinter week of unusual film choices about Beantown. This Friday, January 31, at 7 p.m., the Harvard Film Archive is offering a sneak preview of El Tiante: A Red Sox Story, which will be televised this Tuesday, February 4, on WGBH’s La Plaza. At 27 minutes, Patricia Alvarado’s documentary appreciation of former Sox pitcher Luis Tiant is too short to be more than a swift sketch of his life as an exile from Castro’s Cuba and a quick perusal of his baseball career. Tiant starred for the Cleveland Indians, and after he threw out his shoulder, his career seemed to be over, but upon being claimed by the Sox he reinvented himself, developing one of the most idiosyncratic deliveries imaginable. He would twist his face and body toward second base ( " I looked at the sky . . . I looked at centerfield " ), hold his corkscrew position for a beat or two, then turn and send the ball home. Doing things his off-speed way, Tiant became the Sox’s ace starter in the early 1970s, and he won two games in the 1975 World Series.

The competing headlines from Boston were frightening stories of the organized white resistance to busing. According to this video, Tiant said nothing publicly at the time on the racial controversy. He was known about Fenway Park as a fun-loving, cigar-chomping Latino. So why, in the film, isn’t he asked to comment on what it felt like to be a black pitcher in 1970s Boston? It’s a glaring omission, and one you might want to bring up when Tiant and Alvarado introduce the HFA screening.

Meanwhile, the Brattle Theatre’s late-night weekend movie is Dog Soldiers. This 2002 British-made war-and-werewolf combo entry takes place in a creepy forest in the Scottish Highlands where hairy, snarling, yellow-eyed things stand on their hind legs and rip out throats and guts. Their opponents: a less-than-sterling squadron of British soldiers who even before the first flying-fang attack long to be home watching England’s footballers take on Germany. If lycanthropy is your bag, you can’t go wrong with this cult-movie-in-the-making, which features a capable thespian ensemble, a sexy actress (Emma Cleasby) among the army men, and snappy dialogue along with the requisite blood.

Each year, Boston’s wonderful Alloy Orchestra — Ken Winokur, Terry Donahue, Roger Miller — composes original modern music for a silent-film classic and then goes on tour with the film. This year’s goodie is the 1926 Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckler The Black Pirate, which will screen this Saturday, February 1, in all its two-strip Technicolor glory at the Somerville Theatre. It’s the Boston premiere of the Alloy’s dazzling, fun-filled score (I heard it played at the Northampton Film Festival) for this Albert Parker–directed film, which was the Indiana Jones of its day, with its energetic, virile, occasionally bare-chested hero doing somersaults about the ship’s masts and single-handedly challenging a bevy of buccaneers to swordfight.

Back at the Harvard Film Archive, " Les Années Noires: French Film During the Occupation " heats up with Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1943 Le corbeau/The Raven, which screens this Tuesday, February 4. Clouzot studied M and other exemplars of German Expressionism to make this cold, troubling, paranoiac work about how a poison-pen-letter campaign wreaks havoc in a small French town. Most of the letters are aimed at a gloomy, mysterious doctor (Pierre Fresnay), who’s accused of adultery, medical misconduct, and being an abortionist. But other citizens are also brought down by these pernicious epistles, until the town feels like Sphinx-plagued Thebes.

Le corbeau works as a satisfying intellectual thriller in which the spotlight switches from person to person as we try to guess who the letter writer is. But what is Clouzot really saying? Is this movie a sly attack on Vichy France (even though it was made with Vichy money during the German occupation)? Or as the French Communists alleged after the war, is it a Nazi sympathizer’s unpatriotic diatribe against the French people? In my opinion, both views are awry: this is a work of metaphysical pessimism, misanthropic and Catholic at the same time, anticipating the despairing religious cinema of Robert Bresson.

Finally, there’s Robert Clouse’s 1974 Black Belt Jones, which screens next Thursday, February 6, as part of the Coolidge Corner’s " Video Balagan " series. Jim Kelly is O.J. lite as an Afro-sporting karate maven in Watts fighting off the LA mafia. It is, I’m sorry to say, a lame effort; even the presence of some gratuitous trampoline-bouncing babes can’t make it much fun.

Gerald Peary can be reached at gpeary@world.std.com