Banned Broken Sky

First, a proviso: what you are going to see in this series is categorically loco. With five rarities slated, this Anthology series celebrates three of Italy's most influential independent filmmakers of the '60s and '70s. Friends who often collaborated, Carmelo Bene, Franco Brocani, and Mario Schifano dreamt up films that were fiercely original in style and omnivorous in scope. Take Bene's dazzling pop art Salomè (after Wilde's text), which sears itself into consciousness after a man nails himself onto a blinking neon cross. Other titles include Brocani's ragtag Necropolis and Schifano's experimental pièce de résistance Umano Non Umano, which features Bene, Brocani, novelist Alberto Moravia, and, yes, Mick Jagger.

Meredith Monk

Meredith Monk has a voice that simply embeds itself in the consciousness. Tonight, the ever-experimental composer/singer goes psychoanalytic to interpret a folio from Jung's notorious Red Book. Analyst Morgan Stebbins lends his Jungian expertise to a back-and-forth conversation that's likely to touch upon her creative process, the pull of myths, and the unconscious. With Monk in the room, this looks to be an unpredictable and proper adieu to the Rubin's inspired Red Book Dialogues.

It Happened One Night

At first, newspaperman Clark Gable doesn't give a damn about affluent runaway Claudette Colbert, going as far as to erect a "Wall of Jericho" between their beds during their cross-country meet cute. But since this is Frank Capra and his brand of all's-well-that-ends-well comedy, that macho dam can't hold back the amour for long. Indeed, this screwball caper is thoroughly pleasant and charming in its depiction of a classic opposites-attract romance. Valentines can do the film before dinner, after dinner, or sans dinner, though tonight's menu advises otherwise, with first courses like lobster risotto, duck confit crepes, and a melted leek and gruyere tart.

Think Global, Cut Local: Chinese Paper Cutting for the New Year

In the nonstop hustle of Columbus Circle, MAD offers a place of calm, hosting a paper-cutting workshop as part of its dedicated series to the international craft. Traditional Chinese techniques are on the lesson plan this afternoon and there's an open door policy in effect: everyone is welcome, from the artistic or curious to the superstitious. Although most creations will be of the 2D breed, those more learned can unfold a decorative 3D lantern or perhaps even a tiger in honor of its yearlong run on calendars from here to Hong Kong.

Red Riding: Special Roadshow Edition

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"Dickens on bad acid" is a description that captures the unsparing, paranoiac nature of the Red Riding Quartet, David Peace's cult novels about the far-reaching tentacles of the corrupt West Yorkshire police force in the '70s and '80s. Recently, Tony Grisoni adapted three into feature-length telefilms for Channel 4 and, in brief, British TV giveth again: this inky triptych nears Bacon-like nightmarishness and ravishment even though each is helmed by a different talent shooting in a different format. Julian Jarrold (gritty 16mm), James Marsh (elegant 35mm), and Anand Tucker (digital widescreen) magnificently exhume a past mired in dark and grit, one where the cutthroat police toast "to the North, where we do what we want."

Winter Jam NYC

If you feel like you've been hemmed inside city limits this season, this winter sports festival provides a convenient, Metro-friendly adventure. Just loop by Central Park this afternoon to revel in a week's build-up of snow (courtesy of ORDA) or a trip on the snowboard rail. There's plenty to get pepped for besides the cross country skiing; for one, local producers serve free samples and sell their garden-fresh products as part of the Pride of New York Winter Market.

Miroslav Tichý

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"If you want to be famous, you have to do whatever you're doing worse than anyone else in the whole world." That's a Hippocratic-like oath according to Czech recluse Miroslav Tichý, whose art brut photographs come to light for this museum exhibition— the very first on these shores. The weathered, low-grade images date back to the communist '50s and are focused, obsessively so, on women; at that, many were shot clandestinely using pieced-together cardboard cameras (a tattered handful are featured in this showcase). Precisely for this highly personal quality, each composition retains an undeniable if peculiar allure.

Daily Dose Pick: Paris, Texas

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Harry Dean Stanton and the blue-skied expanses of the Southwest can be seen in all their splendor in Criterion’s restoration of Wim Wenders’ open-hearted look at ’80s America.

Four years after abandoning his family, a haunted, laconic Stanton mysteriously appears in the desert. Reconnecting with his precocious seven-year-old son, he sets out to find his long-gone wife in Texas. The film’s sublime effect lies in how Wenders lets the journey unfurl, unhurriedly and moodily, with his outsider’s camera taking in everything from California suburbia to middle-of-nowhere highways.

Ry Cooder’s bluesy slide guitar only adds to the melancholic and rarefied air of this 1984 masterpiece. The extras menu is also typically rich, with Super 8 home movies, one-on-one clips with Wenders, and excerpts from a 1990 documentary about the German auteur that features names as varied as Sam Fuller and Patricia Highsmith.

Oscar's Docs 1953–75: Nature and Humanityi

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In terms of pure wonder, the Planet-Earth documentaries of yesteryear can definitely compete with today's HD beauties. See Cousteau's 1964 World Without Sun, the captain's rhapsodic follow-up to the famed Silent World. It's just one of the Oscar-lauded documentaries being lassoed into this adventurous series. To name but a few musts, there's Sentinels of Silence, an Orson Welles-narrated short about the Mayans; The Sky Above, The Mud Below, a write-home-about trip to New Guinea; and the self-explanatory Man Who Skied Down Everest. The phenomenal ecology of the Serengeti, redwoods, and monarch butterflies also receive arresting portraits.

Andy Warhol's Kiss and Blow Job

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During its 35-minute runtime, Blow Job's camera loiters on the contorting expressions of a fellow receiving the titular act. Kiss is less salacious, training itself on various couples macking for three minutes — a nod to the old Hayes Code no-no of touching lips for more than three seconds. These Andy Warhol experiments in duration and observation receive live electronic scores tonight as part of the Unsound Festival's series dedicated to the pop icon. Detroit's Carl Craig synthesizes a new accompaniment for Blow Job while German duo nsi. redo Kiss.

SNØHETTA: architecture – landscape – interior

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There's currently much ado about the innovative, eco-friendly architecture firm Snøhetta. Based in Oslo, the two-decade-old outfit counts the harmonious, ohh-inducing beauty of the Norwegian National Opera and Ballet and the mega-slanted Bibliotheca Alexandrina as past accomplishments. Yet it's the up-next list that truly demands attention, leading off with the National September 11 Memorial Museum Pavilion. This exhibition opens the Midas-touched doors of Snøhetta to publicize the many ins and outs of 11 important projects through computer visualizations, films, photographs, drawings, models, and an interactive table.

Valentine's Day 101: Why Humans Have Sex

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Some will let out a pshaw to a such-titled conversation — isn't the x, why, and z for it totally, palpably obvious? But tonight's discussion with evolutionary psychologist David M. Buss offers a deeper understanding of our primal impulse to get some. With pleasure and mating strategies among the talking points, this edition of the AMNH's new SciCafe series (and its lure of cocktails and an after-hour museum) should make for an enlightening listen.

Karen Cooper Carte Blanche: 40 Years of Documentary Premieres at Film Forum

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Springing up in 1970 UWS as a weekends-only screening room, Film Forum is now the Houston Street mecca for tri-state cinephiles. Its sustained pull and prominence can be traced to Karen Cooper — the institution's director since 1972 — and her rarely erring eye for new essentials. As part of MoMA's hat-tip to the Forum's 40th, Cooper curates this 22-program run of nonfiction films that she helped premiere. With complementary short films like Herzog's Guadeloupe-set La Soufrière, the compelling slate features the well-known and the what's-that; among them are Terry Zwigoff's Crumb, Heddy Honigmann's profile of Parisian buskers The Underground Orchestra, and Bruce Weber's mesmeric look at the talented/tainted Chet Baker, Let's Get Lost.

Ajami

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Ajami is a dicey, multi-culti district in Jaffa where Christians, Jews, and Muslims rub elbows and beliefs each day. In Yaron Shani (Israel) and Scandar Copti's (Palestine) excellent debut of the same name, the pair's opposite-fence POVs lend a credibility to this tale about the many strands in the area's continued tangle. The film scissors back and forth in time to lens the ethnic, full-time concerns of a select (but altogether telling) lot including a Jewish policeman on patrol for his vanished brother, a Palestinian refugee toiling for his mother's life, and brothers who fear reprisal after their uncle attacks a clan notable.

Rififi

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After he was blacklisted, American crime master Jules Dassin booked a one-way trip across the Atlantic. He stopped first in London to direct the stellar Night and the City in 1950 and next in Paris, the glorious setting of this brute classic in which four thieves (including the alias-using director) lend their genre-given talents to rob a bling shop in the Rue de Rivoli. With a possible remake in the near-future featuring Al "Shout Out Loud" Pacino, this noir touchstone deserves a return, especially for the half-hour of monastic silence that paces the elaborate heist.

Bigger, Better, More: The Art of Viola Frey

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Although she produced art in many mediums, from painting to photography, Viola Frey's lasting imprint can be found in ceramics. As with many a sculptor, the human body was of the utmost interest to Frey. Throughout the years, she handcrafted truly unique figures, whether bricolage sculptures made from flea-market tchotchkes or larger-than-life men and women that came standing or seating for a critical purpose (read: gender politics at the mid-century). These tremendous ceramic figures are eyefuls and part of this retrospective at MAD, one that offers a full-on look at one of the Bay Area's (and America's) major sculptors of the last 50-plus years.

A Failed Entertainment: Selections from the Filmography of James O. Incandenza

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Only a footnote by David Foster Wallace could inspire a constellation of artists and filmmakers to make real what was dreamt. The complete filmography of James O. Incandenza appears in in the author's Rube Goldberg of a novel, Infinite Jest, and details 70-plus works (conceptual, technical, non-commercial, etc.) by the novel's avant-gardist — it's his eponymous film that causes those who see it to lose interest in all else. The videos are on display throughout gallery hours, and should be complex, parodic, prosaic, poetic — in other words, that catalog of adjectives used to describe its rich source.

Twilight Visions: Surrealism, Photography, and Paris

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Paris of the '20s and '30s — with its serrated rooftops, Haussmann streamlines, and bustling arrondissements — was a wellspring for the surrealists, particularly its photography-happy associates. Artists like Man Ray, Brassaï, André Kertész, Jacques-André Boiffard, Dora Maar, and others tried to capture the beauty and breathlessness of the city's gallop-paced life (and its all-out facelift) using canted angles, montages, fractured perspectives, and the latest technological tricks. This look back features 150-plus such manipulations, with photographs, films, printed materials, and dope surrealist ephemera.

My Heart, My Serpent: Thus Spoke Zarathustra

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The patron saint for so many causes, Nietzsche receives a liederabend about his own search for self. To parse the uberphilosopher's psyche, this evening brings together period-appropriate music (Brahms' Four Serious Songs, Wolf's Prometheus, Liszt's The Sad Monk) and his literature, with rhetoric from both personal letters and philosophical works, especially the celebrated Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Penned by James Melo and set in the asylum where Friedrich was brought post- mental collapse, tonight's program also spotlights the Young People's Chorus of New York City.

Word Is Out

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Made in 1977 by the ad hoc Mariposa Film Group, this seminal record of LGBT life in America plaits together 26 compelling interviews with artists, activists, and politicos, each sharing tell-tale experiences and other intimacies. This week-long run at Anthology features a newly minted 35mm print, all the better to relish the forthright talking heads that include inventor John Burnside, avant-gardist Nathaniel Dorsky, civil rights leader Harry Hay, and other folks from San Fran to Boston. The stories are through-and-through illuminating, whether it's the momentous act of coming out, a doctor-approved diet to cure the "sickness," or a dicey night out in the bars of mid-century Broadway.

Double Dirty Dancing 2010

Before it goes Swayze, Monkey Town serves up a doozy for its last screening and penultimate night: the original Dirty Dancing alongside its Bollywood redo/ripoff Holiday. With two screens dedicated to each, the glee lies in comparing and contrasting— the first has the inimitable PS of course while the latter can claim a shake-ya-rupeemaker R&B number against a freaking Che Guevara backdrop. Set tonight to the Bollywood soundtrack, these crowd pleasers are eerily the same length, which only leads to hilarious, gasp-inspiring overlap.

A Room and a Half

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There's a beautiful plasticity to Andrey Khrzhanovsky's A Room and a Half, an ode to the exiled poet Joseph Brodsky and his search for lost time. The Russian animator offers a resplendent visual outing as he freewheels through the post-WWII Leningrad/St. Petersburg that shaped and haunted the Russian-American Nobel Laureate (class of '87). The film's framing device is an imagined voyage by an elderly Brodsky (Grigoriy Dityatkovskiy) back to the Motherland and past; while at sea, he warns us that the "linear" is better left to math books, that his "memory is simply a developing film."

E.L. Doctorow

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The Collyer brothers, to jog your memory, amassed a ton of odds and ends inside their Harlem manse back in the early 20th century — newspapers, chandeliers, even a Model T Ford. In a city-wide headline, blind and dependent Homer perished soon after Langley died in a storage accident. E.L. Doctorow continues his mastery of historical fiction with his latest novel, Homer and Langley, which comes nearly a half-century after his arrival on the lit scene. Tonight, the Bronx-born author of such classics as Ragtime heads out to Brooklyn to discuss his famously offbeat subjects.

Collecting Biennials

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Take the Whitney lift to floor five if a) you missed the past 80-or-so years of Biennials or b) your inner artiste is responsive to canonical last names like Pollock, Rauschenberg, de Kooning, Twombly, Rothko, Warhol, and Johns. All things considered, it's quite an impressive lead-in to this year's prestigious, 55-person survey, which arrives in just six weeks. George Condo and Charles Ray are among those featured in the 2010 overview in addition to this look back, which also displays past works by Cindy Sherman, Vija Celmins, Milton Avery, Cady Noland, Ruscha, Schnabel, Oldenburg... and the roll call goes on and on.

An Evening with Jonathan Demme and Neil Young Trunk Show

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With his Marley doc sure to set theaters ablaze in less than a month, Jonathan Demme drops by the Walter Reade with his second ode (of a planned trio) to Neil Young. Before the 82-minute documentary roars on screen, Demme muses on the experience of making this film and those past or to come. Shot in HD, Neil Young Trunk Show captures the electric songwriter as he cycles through a dozen-plus tracks at a Pennsylvania theater for Chrome Dreams II. There's much to absorb during these "scenes from a concert" (as it's subtitled), from Eric Johnson's improvised, song-specific paintings to Young ripping off a 20-minute "No Hidden Path."

Segregated Spaces — On Progress w/ Hasan Elahi

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In Hasan Elahi's lauded art, there is a recurring focus on surveillance and its associated boundaries and breaches. His latest project came out of a six-month ordeal with the FBI — they were mistakenly tipped to look out for him. After nine consecutive lie-detector tests and countless other interrogations, he was cleared to be "free" again. But lest he receive another government-issued j'accuse, the artist took the liberty of documenting his daily life — from meals to his moment-to-moment whereabouts — for all to see. For tonight's ArteEast and Cabinet Magazine-hosted gathering, he chats about and presents the appropriately named Tracking Transience: The Orwell Project.

SCRYING

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This free-form ballet by Jen DeNike takes its inspiration from last-century eminence George Balanchine and its name from that favorite phenomenon of seers: visions that materialize on reflective surfaces (i.e. water, mirrors, and crystal balls). The danseuses cast a hush with supple, on-point contortions and movements done over and over, all choreographed by the gifted Melissa Barak. This premiere is preceded by the trance-inducing sounds of Soft Circle, with Ben Vida and former Black Dice drummer Hisham Bharoocha conjuring up a new, many-textured piece especially for this evening.

Mission to Moscow

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Holy Tolstoy: Mission to Moscow, a dandy, FDR-approved piece of 1943 propaganda from Michael Curtiz, relates how "We the Open-Minded" and our Ural comrades were meant to be Allies. Walter Huston (he who sired then up-and-coming director John) plays Joseph E. Davies, the US ambassador who sees Hitler-run Germany en route to the Soviet Union. In the proud USSR, he sees the full panorama: a tractor/tank factory, co-op farms, Kneiper Dam, the Caspian Sea, and even a reasonable Stalin. Tonight, this unique, jingo-jingo entry in our film annals is supplemented with a panel that includes Glenn Kenny and Post critic Lou Lumenick.

Dave Eggers Signing

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Dave Eggers' wrist doesn't get much rest, not with his do-it-all mentality of late: he's been composing prose, handshaking at sundry appearances, and signing copy upon copy. Eggers heads to Broadway today for a trio currently found on the just-released shelf: Zeitoun, his incredible nonfiction chronicle about the eponymous Syrian-American family and the patriarch who disappears in Katrina's roily aftermath; The Wild Things, a novelization of Spike Jonze's crackerjack translation of the Maurice Sendak picture book; and McSweeney's, No. 33: The San Francisco Panorama, a branded newspaper that features noteworthy contributions from Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, Art Spiegelman, George Saunders, and nearly 150 others.

Time of Your Life

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Forget the too-few days left on Monkey Town's lease; in fact, forget the whole mess for un momento and get ready to get down. Tonight, our Williamsburg fave kindly asks patrons to "dress to impress" for a party that can't go on long enough — truly, a bash to end all bashes. This isn't the last opportunity to appreciate the uber-modern space per se, but it's a fine enough (see: free) reason to make it over if you've been one of those saying "next time."