Thursday
Joy House
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Cinefamily's "Vive L'Amour" series continues with Leos Carax's rarely screened debut, Boy Meets Girl (1984). Made when Carax was just 23, it stars Denis Lavant and Mireille Perrier, and crackles with the same energy of invention and ambivalence as Godard's early love stories.
Friday
Another essential night at Cinefamily: The new restoration of Todd Haynes' Poison (1991) gets a 20th-anniversary screening, paired with Lodge Kerrigan's breakthrough, Clean, Shaven (1994). Both films deploy multiple voices, in concert and conflict: The former uses three loose adaptations of Jean Genet to consider homosexuality from a variety of angles while the latter attempts to reconcile the sounds and images at war inside one schizophrenic man's head.
The New Beverly offers two Altman classics, MASH (1970) and California Split (1974). The relatively underrated Split, a deadpan psychological buddy film about two gamblers (Elliott Gould and George Segal), is both one of Altman's funniest and, with its oblique narrative and swampy stereo soundtrack, most challenging.
If you've finally caught up with all the feature films nominated for Academy Awards, you can move on to the Oscar-nominated shorts. The documentary nominees debut at the Sunset 5 this week, while the animated and live-action shorts continue at the Nuart before moving to the Town Center in Encino and Pasadena's Playhouse on Friday, Feb. 25.
Fresh off an Audience Award win in the World Cinema Documentary division at Sundance, Asif Kapadia's Senna, about the great Brazilian Formula One racer, gets a weeklong Oscar qualifying run at the Town Center 5 in Encino.
Saturday
LACMA's Jane Fonda series continues with probably its most obscure offering, Joy House (aka Les félins), co-starring Alain Delon and directed by René Clément, a multiple Foreign-Language Film Oscar winner who would memorably bomb out with his next flick, Is Paris Burning?
Anjelica Huston will be on hand for the Aero's screening of her father's final film, The Dead (1987). Huston stars with Donal McCann in this adaptation of the final story in James Joyce's Dubliners.
The most high-profile film in the UCLA Archive's "Celebration of Iranian Cinema" series is also the best: Close-up, with its rigorous examination of the boundary between reality and fiction, laid the path for a large percentage of the world's most interesting cinema in the last two decades.
Monday
Fred Worden is described, by no less an avant-garde authority than Ken Jacobs, as a filmmaker who "drops depth charges into the psyche." His two shows at Echo Park Film Center (Sunday) and REDCAT (Monday) are sure to be memorable psychedelic affairs.
