NEW YORK: Film Forum celebrates the life and career of director Jules Dassin, an American expatriate who died last year, at the age of 96. With such pictures as the French heist picture Rififi (1955), the prison picture Brute Force (1947), and the 1948 tribute to the virtues of on-location filming The Naked City, Dassin can claim a lot of the credit for shaping the evolution of the crime genre during its ripest years; the schedule also includes everybody's favorite underappreciated Dassin film, the 1950 LOndon-set cult classic Night and the City, with Richard Widmark giving the performance of his career as an ambitious grifter whose inability to put a cap on his ingenious schemes proves the downfall of everyone around him, himself included. Also included are such rarities and oddities as the truckers' noir Thieves Highway (1949) with Richard Conte and Jack Oakie and the 1968 Up Tight, a remake of The Informer that transposes the story to the black militant scene in the days after the assassination of Martin Luther King. Rounding things out are more than half a dozen of the films that Dassin made starring his wife, Melina Mercouri (Never on Sunday, Topkapi).
Today marks the beginning of the annual New Directors/New Films festival, which among New York film freaks marks the first real day of spring. This year's schedule begins with Amreeka, Cherien Dabis's film about a Palestinian family who immigrate to America at the time of the invasion of Iraq. The closing night attraction, on April 5, is We Live in Public, director Ondi Timoner's long-awaited follow-up to her 2004 documentary DiG!
FLORIDA: The 11th Annual Sarasota Film Festival runs March 27 through April 5. This year's festival includes a retrospective tribute to director Hal Ashby, with screenings of The Landlord, Shampoo, The Last Detail, Harold and Maude, Bound for Glory, and others, and with appearances by Ashby biographer Nick Dawson, Illeana Douglas, Norman Jewison, and Jon Voight. There's also a complete retrospective of films that document the work of artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who will also appear at a Q & A.
PHILADELPHIA: There's also the Philadelphia Film Festival and Cinefest 09, starting tomorrow and running through April 6. The opening night attraction is the comedy (500) Days of Summer. It stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. Let's assume that you're already in Philadelphia. What the hell else do you need to know?
