I'll leave the commentary on poster design to the far more knowledgeable Adrian Curry, but in rounding up notes on events happening around the US (outside of New York, which'll have its own roundup in a bit), a handful of posters caught my eye, starting with this one for Other Cinema's Fujiyama in Red, a live program aimed at raising funds for Japanese Tsunami Relief and named "after the 1990 Kurosawa movie that foresaw the catastrophe." Tomorrow night in San Francisco; scroll down for details.
Brian Darr: "It's hard to imagine a better time for a San Francisco movie lover to partake in the by-now almost subversive act of watching a great classic film in a cinema, than when our city's architectural pride and joy, the Castro Theatre, devotes its screen to a 70mm film series, as it will for eight days starting this Saturday night, when it plays West Side Story, which repeats on Sunday. Monday and Tuesday bring Jacques Tati's Play Time, which I'd like to see in 70mm at least once every year. Another movie I can never tire of plays Wednesday, Thursday and Friday: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. The series wraps up the following Saturday and Sunday (June 11 & 12) with twice-daily showings of Lawrence of Arabia."
Another Hole in the Head Film Festival is off and running at the Roxie Theater through June 17, and the San Francisco Bay Guardian's #1 horror fan, Cheryl Eddy, introduces the weekly's collection of capsule previews.
Also in the SFBG, Max Goldberg: "There are glimmers of Pasolini's later films in Mamma Roma…, but its most significant innovation may lie in its yoking melodrama to a caustic modernist sensibility, thereby preparing a whole vein of art cinema later epitomized by RW Fassbinder. Mamma Roma's lessons may well have been absorbed, but it still looks tender and dire as ever." Saturday and Sunday at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
LOS ANGELES
The UCLA Film & Television Archive presents Smooth Operator: The Opulent Eroticism of Radley Metzger through June 17. From Sarah LaBrie and Karina Longworth's quick list of local events in the LA Weekly: "Campy and erotic, [Camille 2000, 1969] features digitally restored footage enhanced by Piero Piccioni's loopy, acid-tinged score. Metzger will introduce the film, and an after party follows in the Hammer Museum courtyard."
"In the 25 years since her first feature, Magdalena Viraga, Nina Menkes has remained one of the few American directors working at feature length whose films — in both form and thought — are genuinely radical." Phil Coldiron in the LA Weekly: "Menkes's main preoccupation across her six films (including Phantom Love and her latest work, Dissolution, which screen at the Downtown Independent this week) is violence in all its forms, and her approach, oblique yet intuitive, has yielded results that have more to say on the subject than any American director since Peckinpah or Cassavetes." For Kevin Thomas, writing in the Los Angeles Times, Dissolution is "not only her most accessible but arguably her most accomplished work to date."
In the LAT, Susan King tells the story behind Dances With Films, a festival of independents running through June 9.
CHICAGO
Tonight "marks the beginning of a new film program called Shock Theater, organized by Michael Phillips, former programmer of the Bank of American Cinema. On the first Friday of every month, Phillips will screen a double feature of classic-era horror films in Chicago's hip Wicker Park neighborhood." And Movie Morlocks' Suzi Doll interviews him.
"Once little more than a safe haven for every zero-budget zombie movie spit out of the Midwest, the Chicago Underground Film Festival, now in its 18th year, continues to grasp for an identity," argues AA Dowd in Time Out Chicago, where the overview touches on half a dozen titles. Andrea Gronvall, JR Jones and Ben Sachs's capsules in the Reader are plumper, while Bill Stamets concentrates on this opening weekend in the Sun-Times. For Newcity Film, Ray Pride talks with artistic director and programmer Bryan Wendorf.
The Human Rights Watch Film Festival is in town for another week and you'll find previews from Ben Kenigsberg (TOC) and Ben Sachs, Ignatiy Vishnevetsky and JR Jones (Reader).
ELSEWHERE
The Radical Visions of Jerzy Skolimowski screen at Harvard Film Archive from today through June 13. In his overview of the series for the Boston Phoenix, Peter Keough notes that "the director will be on hand after the screening [of Essential Killing, 2010] for what should be a spirited Q&A."
Good Morning Freedom! - Spanish Cinema After Franco is on at BFI Southbank in London through July 7.
And of course, the Seattle International Film Festival carries on through June 12. In the Stranger, Charles Mudede would like to draw your attention to this weekend's screenings of Hurricane Kalatozov, Patrick Cazals's doc on Mikhail Kalatozov, "who gave the world the film, I Am Cuba, that contains the greatest sequence in all of cinema."
For news and tips throughout the day every day, follow @thedailyMUBI on Twitter and/or the RSS feed.