Grindhouse The week begins with a John Hayes double feature. In Grave of the Vampire, legendary vampire Kroft awakens and rapes a woman in a graveyard. The resulting child doesn't need milk. He needs… blood! This is paired with Jailbait Babysitter, which stars Therese Pare as a teenager who's turned out by an older prostitute (Lydia Wagner). Wednesday and Thursday it's a double-bill of Hong Kong action beginning with the Bruce Li (not to be......

Grindhouse Monday and Tuesday it's The Muthers, a combination blaxploitation and women-in-prison flick that stars Janine Bell and Rosanne Katon as a pirate duo who must rescue Bells sister from the private jail of an evil coffee plantation owner, followed by Fight for Your Life, a revenge thriller about a pacifist black minister whose family is taken hostage and tortured by a trio of convicts, until he finally snaps and wreaks his vengeance. Wednesday and......

Grindhouse The week begins with a pair of 70s actions flicks. The Lady in Red, which has one of my favorite taglines of all time "She's made of bullets, sin & bathtub gin!" is a gangster film starring Robert Conrad as John Dillinger and Pamela Sue Martin as his moll. (Bonus: it was written by John Sayles.) In Bare Knuckles a Los Angeles bounty hunter tracks a psychopath who murders women by using kung-fu. Then......

Grindhouse There probably isn’t a single night I wouldn't enjoy going to the Quentin Tarantino-curated Grindhouse Festival at the New Beverly. On Monday & Tuesday it’s a double bill of Rolling Thunder, a revenge flick about a Vietnam vet who goes on the warpath after his wife and son are killed by thugs, and The Town That Dreaded Sundown, a 1977 film that's set in 1946 about a hooded killer stalking the terrified residents of......

Drawing Restraint Why woo your sweetheart with such tediously traditional notions as flowers, teddy bears and edible panties when you could watch Matthew Barney and his inamorata Bjork going at each other with flensing knives on the deck of a Japanese whaling vessel in Drawing Restraint 9? And if that's not enough Barney for you, there's the making-of documentary Matthew Barney: No Restraint. His work has sometimes been described as a "hauntingly dreamlike fantasy......

Monday, February 5 Creative Screenwriting Magazine is sponsoring a free screening of Children of Men followed by a Q&A with writer/director Alfonso Cuaron and co-writer Tim Sexton. WHEN: Mon., Feb. 5 at 7:30 PM. WHERE: DGA Theater, 7920 Sunset Blvd. (betw. Crescent Heights & Fairfax) RSVP: Go to the Creative Screenwriting website and sign up to receive information about future events. You should then receive an email with further instructions about how to sign up......

It's hard to believe that Jordan Mechner is only in his 40s. He's accomplished an awful lot in a short period of time. Hailed as a visionary game designer, Jordan is an icon in the video game industry. His first game, "Karateka," was an immediate success. Using innovative character animation techniques, Jordan's next game, "The Prince of Persia," redefined the look and feel of video games for years to come. Currently adapting the screen......

UCLA Film and Television Archive's tribute to filmmaker Don Siegel continues this weekend with a screening of "Madigan" and "Private Hell 36" on Saturday, August 7, 2005. LAPD Chief William Bratton will be on hand to introduce these two police procedurals and testify to their versimillitude. We wonder if he'll make the connection between "Madigan's" tale of a cop on the edge searching for a gun lost during an unauthorized raid and Officer Jim......

On Saturday, December 11th, Santa Monica Museum of Art will exhibit "Black Belt," a group show of artwork, curated by the Studio Museum of Harlem, exploring the intersection between African American and Asian American cultures from the 1970s and 1980s. The forty five works in different mediums by nineteen contemporary American artists interpret political and philosophical connections among people of color, pop culture, and urban life. When the show opened in New York last......

On the first anniversary of Leni Riefenstahl's death, the Goethe-Institut and UCLA Film and Television Archives, supported by the Fahey/Klein Gallery, team up for a tribute to a filmmaker, whose daringly innovative documentaries earned her both acclaim as a cinematic genius and contempt as a propagandist for Hitler. Branded as a Nazi after 1945, she never made her way back into the movie industry. However, her revolutionary film techniques deeply influenced later generations of......