CHICAGO: The first annual Chicago International Movies and Music Festival has begun and runs through Sunday. The movie half of that equation includes documentaries and videos featuring Bonzo Dog Band/Monty Python/Rutles mainstay Neil Innes (The Seventh Python), Sonic Youth, the New Pornographers, Feist, Elliott Sharp, and the underground music scene of Beijing. Feature films include Punching the Clown, a comedy in which satirical singer-songwriter Henry Phillips plays a version of himself trying to break into the Los Angeles music scene, and Lech Kowalski's East of Paradise.

NEW YORK: BAM pays tribute to IFC Films, a major force in the distribution of indie and international cinema that may have just gotten a little more major in the wake of the death of New Yorker Films. The program concentrates on recent films from overseas now being released here through the auspices of IFC, beginning with British artist-turned-director Steve McQueen's controversial Hunger, Hong-Jin Na's debut thriller The Chaser, and two films starring Louis Garrel, Christophe Honore's La Belle personne and Phillipe Garrel's Frontier of Dawn.

Hot on the heels of Anthology Film Archive's matched double bills of films by John M. Stahl and their remakes by Douglas Sirk, Film Forum uncorks Stahl's most overblown slice of stormy emotions, Leave Her to Heaven, a movie that bursts the chains of melodrama and gallops happily into the territory of Gothic black comedy. As the scary heroine, Gene Tierney watches people drown and uses a flight of stairs and the miracle of gravity to deal with the news that she's pregnant; Whatever she's doing, whatever is going on around her, Tierney gives the performance of someone whose director has promised her a lollipop if she can make it through the scene without changing expression. The movie is playing for a week in a glossy new 35-mm. restoration.