The Con Film Festival

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A few albums back, Jay-Z flowed, "I'm living proof that crime do pay/Say hooray to the bad guy." Behold Film Forum's old-school ode to the bad guy (and gal), which spotlights a criminal lineup: a pair of nonconforming Pauls on the chain gang (Muni in the remarkable, muckraking I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang and Newman in Cool Hand Luke); moll-of-molls Barbara Stanwyck (women-in-prison progenitor Ladies They Talk About); and psycho killer James Cagney, whose qu'est-ce que c'est happens to be Oedipal (White Heat, mischievously scheduled for Mother's Day). There's also Don Siegel's two-for-one jailbird special, Escape from Alcatraz and Riot in Cell Block 11, the latter shot on location at the famed Folsom Prison.

Youth '68

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Youth '68 sounds as obscure and distant-from-thee as Ttatelolco. But prefix that common title with Jim Henson and the counterculture collage becomes as irresistible as the absurdist puppets that made the AmEx cardholder a for-all-time trivia answer. Unscreened since its original airing (back on April 21, 1968), this hour-long documentary is a time capsule containing the '60s zeitgeist: There's polarized, plain-spoken words from LBJ-led juniors and seniors, experimental-film flourishes, some modern dance, and, above it all, the vogue sounds of the Beatles, the Who, and Simon & Garfunkel. Also look for appearances from Jefferson Airplane, the Mamas and Papas, and the epoch's jumbo-sized keywords — Sex, Religion, War.

Polish Posters 1945-1989

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Bracketed by those historic "falls" in nearby Berlin (of the city itself and, later, its Wall), the Polish Poster School's expressionistic, four-decade heyday — spent hyping opera, concerts, and especially cinema — represents "one of the great secrets of 20th-century pop art." For ingenious designers like Henryk Tomaszewsk, Jan Młodożeniec, and Waldemar Swierzy, the poster became an experimental blank slate rather than some fill-in-the-film template. MoMA's timely exhibition testifies to the movement's revolutionary import: their variously symbolic, typographic, and off-subject compositions transformed war-torn Warsaw into a colorful and playful "street gallery" — one city paper even tallied votes for favorites.

Frank Lloyd Wright: From Within Outward

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Simon & Garfunkel's "So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright" — a bossa nova-ish ode to the architect — features the twosome solemnly crooning that "architects may come and architects may go and never change your point of view." Indeed, few artists have kindled as much inspiration and imitation as the triple-threat (architect/interior designer/writer) modernist. To celebrate 50 years of iconic residence along 5th Avenue, the Guggenheim hosts an exhaustive tribute to its maker, illustrating the refined Wright way — an organic, case-by-case approach to space that melds form to function — through drawings, photographs, correspondences, models, and digital animations. From environmentally kind Usonian homes to the museum's tranquil spiral, the 64 projects offer his elegant blueprint for a more perfect union with nature.

David Seidner: Paris Fashions, 1945

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By August 1944, France had been liberated from the clutch of the Vichy regime, but war had left its proud-as-a-peacock couture trade in tatters. Fortunately, the French breathe style — even sans le sou — and in that historic instance, it was just a matter of shrinking expectations. Christening their haute fundraiser Théâtre de la Mode, top-rung Parisian designers such as Lanvin and Balenciaga fabricated over 230 dolls, each outfitted in carefully-matched finery and situated on sets by artists like Jean Cocteau. After decades of safekeeping, the pint-sized relics returned in 1990 with the illustrious lensman David Seidner reframing them on an abandoned theatre set. ICP's commemorative, small-scale exhibition features an original doll and 15 of these posh color portraits.

The Late Film

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If an auteur's debut is their dear-reader, then their last few films come into sight as postscripts: a variation on a deep-seated theme, some unexpected sketch, or simply, a few colorful impressions before the fare-thee-well. BAM's venturesome new series selects 24 late-career projects that are well worth a second look. The parade of man-made efforts (Agnés Varda's short Le Lion volatile is the sole outlier) includes Ozu's irresistible Good Morning, John Ford's rarely-shown salute to his "other" 7 Women, and Godard's sui generis adaptation of King Lear. Other canonized names include Ousmane Sembene (Faat Kiné), Billy Wilder (The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes), and Manoel de Oliveira (A Talking Picture), who maintains a pic-per-annum clip even at 100.

Krik? Krak!

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Tonight, the FIAF presents a lively session of krik-krak. For the uninitiated — or non-Haitians — this musical bit of patois denotes the Caribbean country's take on an age-old oral practice: the call and response. Traditionally, raconteurs hyped up their audiences by asking, "Krik?" An attentive and spirited "Krak!" became the prompt for the stories and jokes to begin. As part of the PEN World Voices Festival, Haitian storytellers gather tonight to regale those adventurous enough to participate.

Klaus Moje: Painting With Glass

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As a German Down Under, glass-art virtuoso Klaus Moje has single-handedly made Australia a hub for that fine art's evolution. Artist before artisan, Moje creates his inventive and alchemical work inside a kiln — a technique (called "kiln-forming") that deviates from the more traditional practice of glassblowing. Within the furnace, temperatures tip 1700 degrees Fahrenheit as countless pieces of glass — rods, strips, and other choice scraps — are patterned and then fused into intricately polychromatic pieces that seem to imagine color-field paintings in 3-D as well as handsome flat panels. For instance, Moje's ambitious, four-paneled masterpiece, The Portland Panels: Choreographed Geometry (made specifically for this comprehensive, 68-object exhibition), contains 22,000 hand-cut strips of glass.

Viridiana

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Blasphemy is to Luis Buñuel's iconographic oeuvre as faith is to Catholicism — one-word tenets for worshippers of each Spanish institution. Considered to be his finest single-fingered salute to the Church, Viridiana (1961) features what might be the auteur's most incendiary scene: a Last Supper that casts aside the apostles in favor of beggars and other reprobates. That final, institution-battering tableau is just the capstone; beforehand, this sublime cinematic provocation shadows the curious temptations and tribulations of its titular nun (Silvia Pinal) during her last visit to uncle-benefactor Don Jaime (Fernando Rey). Viridiana also marked Buñuel's return to Spain after a quarter-century exile; although the film claimed the Palme d'Or, Spanish authorities banned it until Generalissimo Franco's death.

First Light: Satyajit Ray from the Apu Trilogy to the Calcutta Trilogy

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Long before India became the center of the cinematic universe, Satyajit Ray was radioing in vivid, day-in-the-life messages from the subcontinent. The undisputed raja of Indian cinema, Ray's oeuvre is marked by compassion, humor, and East-meets-West commentary. Zeroing in on the first half of Ray's transcendent output, FSLC's 20-film series opens with the auteur's singular bildungsroman, Pather Panchali (1955), a film inspired by the Italian neo-realist classic, Bicycle Thieves (1948), and inscribed in film history as one of the medium's greatest debuts. Other hard-knock tales in which to bask include the concluding two-thirds of the Apu Trilogy (Panchali is part 1), the trenchant Calcutta Trilogy, and the absolutely wondrous Adventures of Goopy and Bagha (1968).

Winners of the Prix Louis Delluc

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Prix Louis Delluc winners are an illustrious bunch, indeed. In 1950, the ascetic splendor of Robert Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest swayed the jury; three years later, they found that certain je-ne-sais-quoi in the sly, elegant slapstick of Jacques Tati's M. Hulot's Holiday; and, come 1970, their tastes shifted to the cerebral eroticism of Eric Rohmer's penultimate Moral Tale, Claire's Knee. For two weeks, BAM rolls out the tricolor carpet to welcome a dozen recent and ancient honorees. The selections include Abdel Kechiche's naturalistic knockout, The Secret of the Grain (2007), Jacques Becker's spirited antecedent to the Nouvelle Vague, Rendezvous in July (1949), and the premiere of Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Raymond Depardon's sign-off to his pastoral trilogy, Modern Life.

C16 feat. Julianna Barwick

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For Cinema Sixteen's latest sight-and-sound godsend, Brooklyn-based musicians Julianna Barwick and Sarah Lipstate each construct a Niagara of cascading, experimental noises. Barwick's music — think slipping-and-sliding vocals that sound miles off, particularly once they're looped into a hypnotic blur — is the perfect, incantatory accompaniment for Joel Schlemowitz's 1734 (a hand-painted curio based on Emily Dickinson's 1734th poem, which opens with the suggestive hook, "Oh, honey of an hour…") and Kenneth Anger's Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, an occult short whose saturated tones, magick superimpositions, and ceremonial excess just bellow for such an otherworldly sound. Lipstate, meanwhile, takes the stage as Noveller (her solo noise project) to score a suite of her fantastic shorts.