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."

An Evening with Jeff Bridges

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Dudes, we've abided long enough. The Film Society welcomes the new decade with the one-and-only Jeff Bridges, unplugged and in support of Crazy Heart and his lauded turn as country has-been Bad Blake. That role is yet another memorable portrait in a gallery that ranges from Obadiah Stane to a certain Lebowski, Starman to young Texan Duane Jackson in The Last Picture Show. This 1971 classic from Peter Bogdanovich (and Bridges' breakthrough) screens after a discussion in which the Dude riffs on "Advanced Pretend" and his life thus far.

Waterpod: Autonomy and Ecology

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Like a goodwill ambassador, Mary Mattingly's floating habitat the Waterpod Project spent five months on New York's highly toxic seas, touring and trumpeting its sustainable, community-first cause in each of the five boroughs. This survey documents that experimental, terrain-free period with videos, photographs, art works, journal entries, and miscellanea. A Back to Land party on January 22 is the capstone, with a special "cleaning" meal planned alongside performances, films, and journal readings. There are also a few edifying discussions slated, including one on interactive architecture with artist Natalie Jeremijenko and BLDGBLOG creator Geoff Manaugh.

Coffin Joe, Brazil's Horror Superstar

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Before making pornochanchada to ride out the '80s — otherwise soft-core sex-comedies with titles like 24 Hours of Explicit Sex — José Mojica Marins created his caped legacy, Zé do Caixao. Genteelly suited with a top hat and better known to horror aficionados as Coffin Joe, this narcissistic undertaker remains a favorite export from Brazil. The Film Society screens four of his surreal exploitations, beginning with the ultraviolent 1964 debut, At Midnight I'll Take Your Soul. In this low-budget trip through São Paulo, Coffin Joe starts his grail-like quest to conceive a perfect child, one that he'd continue in the sensational follow-up, This Night I'll Possess Your Corpse.

Akira Kurosawa Centennial

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Ahead of Akira Kurosawa's centenary on March 23, Film Forum more or less runs through the auteur's consummate filmography (on queue: Ikiru, Seven Samurai, Yojimbo) in six action-packed weeks. Two masterpieces also bracket this domo-arigato series: Stray Dog, an early, naturalistic film about a detective and the search for his missing gun in postwar Tokyo, and Ran, Kurosawa's superlative, late-career translation of King Lear to the feudal East and its tragic, color-specific daimyos. The former stars Toshiro Mifune and the latter Tatsuya Nakadai, two Japanese icons who reappear throughout a canon that incorporates everything from pulp to Noh theatre, Shakespearean tragedy to the almighty Bushido code.

Penelope Umbrico: Leonards for Leonard & 5,537,594 Suns From Flickr (Partial) 5/30/09

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On May 30 of last year, Brooklyn-based artist Penelope Umbrico keyed "sunset" into Flickr's search engine and received 5,537,594 matches. The virtual orbs found on this date provide the "raw" material for her latest eye-catching work, prosaically if scientifically titled 5,537,594 Suns From Flickr (Partial) 5/30/09. Umbrico crops these found suns into prints to fill the exhibiting Natman Room, which happens to be subject of her other project, Leonards for Leonard. In this installation, she looks into the history of the space to highlight the charged line between pre- and post-digital times.

L'eclisse

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L'eclisse has one of the most elegant codas on celluloid. Before this cool and sobering crescendo, Michelangelo Antonioni documents an affair between Eros' dream couple of Monica Vitti and Alain Delon, here playing a translator and a stockbroker. The two beauties meet after Vitti leaves a writer (Francisco Rabal), and their ensuing pas de deux — fleshed out across Rome and its monumental architecture — is more or less stamped with an expiration date. This conclusion to Antonioni's trilogy on alienation (one that loops in L'avventura and La notte) is a perfectly composed ode to modernity and its many entanglements.

The Beaches of Agnès

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The "Agnès" of the title would be the one and only Varda. In this lovely autobiographic portrait, the New Wave's only femme auteur relates her extraordinary life story through telltale photographs, choice film clips, and present-day captures of her whimsy and joie de vivre. Jacques "Umbrellas of Cherbourg" Demy was her husband and memories of the passed-on director tint the picture blue, but, in general, the film captures Varda's omnivorous, onward-we-go spirit as she inhales the world around her. Hardly a recluse, the octogenarian also boasts an incredibly varied rolodex, from Chris Marker and Alain Resnais to Harrison Ford and Jim Morrison.

Jacques Tati

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Jacques Tati onscreen this time of year is inspired programming since the elegant Frenchman's oeuvre basically stamps a capital X on consumerism and the season of 'Mas. But restored 35mm prints make seeing his comedic touchés to increasing depersonalization a must, especially his 1967 pièce de résistance Playtime, in which his chaos-prone Monsieur Hulot is loosed in minimalist Paris. All of Hulot's other satiric and pantomimic misadventures are screened too, from M. Hulot's Holiday to Mon Oncle (and its architectural intricacies) and through to the lesser-seen Trafic. This retrospective also includes shorts and his adieu/ode to the circus, Parade.

Back by Popular Demand

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For its last hurrah of the year, the Film Society plays best-loved titles from programs gone by, like Latinbeat and First Light: Satyajit Ray. The international slate is 11-strong, and dates as far back as 1948, when Orson Welles released his Macbeth. Other second comings meriting a tenner include The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow's look at Baghdad through the eyes and nerves of a bomb-disposal patrol; Solaris, Andrei Tarkovsky's magnificent adaptation of Polish sci-fi writer Stanislaw Lem's novel; Bitter Rice, Giuseppe de Santis' neo-realist pic about on-the-lam lovers and the rice harvest they encounter; and Revanche, in which Götz Spielmann elegantly lingers on the crime genre's trinity of guilt, revenge, and redemption.

The New Typography

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A typographic manual and manifesto, Jan Tschichold's 1928 The New Typography heralded a "see" change in how the printed page was laid out. Thereafter, Central Europe's stylistic rule was out with the floral, typecast symmetry and in with punchy, sanserif free form — as Tschichold put it, "Asymmetry is the rhythmic expression of functional design." This modernist installation features Soviet Russian, German, Dutch, and Czechoslovakian type-and-photo designs for posters, magazines, and brochures, among other printed matter.

Short Films from Pixar

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With its ballooning list of all-ages favorites — from Toy Story to WALL-E — Pixar has become the byword for animated excellence. This Midas touch extends to its shorts too, and over the holiday break, MoMI offers a roll-call of its best miniatures. The amusing 16-minute program screens at the top of each hour, and includes the studio's first film, Luxo, Jr, by John Lasseter. Other titles on the timeline include For the Birds, Ralph Eggleston's lesson in comeuppance; Jack-Jack Attack, Brad Bird's extra scene with the baby of the superhero Parr family from The Incredibles; and Presto, Doug Sweetland's sketch about a star magician and his disgruntled rabbit.