"Walter Mitty meets Franz Kafka...somewhere on the Los Angeles- Belfast border."-Terry Gilliam Terry Gilliam's anti-bureaucratic satire is a kaleidoscopic epic in which architecture and nightmarish indifference conspire to make an ordinary paper shuffler (the priceless Jonathan Pryce) into a victim of everyday apocalypse. The film captures a horror of building materials crowding out inhabitants (Robert DeNiro is memorable as a pipe-and-duct prole), and the vertical power of the Hybrid City (see March 8) is given cinematic shape. ("This movie certainly takes the romance out of high ceilings"-Pauline Kael.) The French, as usual, have a word for it-retrofuture-and architecture to match, for instance in the self-reflexive Pompidou Center with its insides on the outside; or in the unintentionally (nightmarish verticality) of Palais d'Abraxis, an apartment complex in Marne-la-Vallée in suburban Paris which was used extensively in the filming. Alphaville comes of age in Brazil, only it's the middle ages. We show the director's cut in a studio vault print.