Our guide to film series and special screenings happening this weekend and in the week ahead. All our movie reviews are at nytimes.com/reviews/movies.
GARRETT BRADLEY’S ‘AMERICA’: A JOURNEY THROUGH RACE AND TIME at BAM Rose Cinemas (Oct. 11-17). In a half-hour, black-and-white short called “America,” Bradley, a filmmaker and artist, has created a work that, she has stated, “constructs an alternative history of African-American representation onscreen.” In the coming week, BAM will show the film in seven different programs designed to spark conversations on black presence in movies. On Friday, “America” will play with what exists of the rediscovered, unfinished 1913 film “Lime Kiln Club Field Day,” considered by the Museum of Modern Art to be the earliest surviving footage from a feature with a black cast. On Sunday, Bradley’s short is matched with last year’s “Hale County This Morning, This Evening,” and she will participate in a discussion with that film’s director, RaMell Ross.
718-636-4100, bam.org
[Read about the events that our other critics have chosen for the week ahead.]
NO JOKE: ABSURD COMEDY AS POLITICAL REALITY at the Museum of the Moving Image (through Nov. 16). The premise of this retrospective is that no political context is too dangerous or self-parodic for satire; as proof, it offers several films that found different ways of taking a torch to reality. In the case of “Starship Troopers” (on Saturday), both the film and the book versions were interpreted as endorsements of fascism. The Yes Men (who will appear at an event on Sunday) have made movies in which they punk real-world figures, while Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street” (on Nov. 10) captures the amorality of financial-sector vampires in a druggy rush of fast-paced editing. In “Monsieur Verdoux” (on Nov. 17), Charlie Chaplin responded to the carnage of World War II by casting himself as a serial killer.
718-784-0077, movingimage.us
‘TORA-SAN, OUR LOVABLE TRAMP’ (‘IT’S TOUGH BEING A MAN’) at Film Forum (Oct. 11-17). The title character of this 1969 feature is one of the most popular figures in Japanese cinema — a blundering but sweet drifter played by Kiyoshi Atsumi in 48 features (said to be a record for an actor making appearances in one role). This is the first film in the series (directed, like most entries, by Yoji Yamada), which produced movies for nearly three decades. Japan Society lists two others on its schedule: “Tora-san’s Runaway,” on Nov. 1, and “Tora-san Meets His Lordship,” on Dec. 6.
212-727-8110, filmforum.org
