Weekly Movie Picks: Subtitle Film Fest, Jon Jost, Suspiria, Westerns & More

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Grindhouse
The Girl from Starship Venus (AKA The Sexplorer) is a space nudie starring Monika Ringwald as an astronaut from Venus who lands in London's swinging Soho district circa 1975. Her mission? To research sex customs on the planet Earth. This is paired with The Legend of the Wolf Woman, a 1976 horror film from Italy whose title pretty much says it all. A beautiful woman seeks men out, has sex with them then turns into a werewolf and rips them to pieces.

Of all the week's films Slithis is probably the one that has the most relevance for Angelenos, featuring as it does a mutated nuclear sea monster that terrorizes the residents of Venice, California. This is followed by Screams of a Winter Night, a horror film that takes the urban legend about a murderous, hook-armed man stalking teenagers at make-out point, and transplants it to a bunch of college students on an ill-fated camping trip.

The weeks closes out with a regional double feature set (could it be anywhere else?) in the South. Hot Summer in Barefoot County features a city cop who goes undercover to bust a ring of sexy female moonshiners. And I have no idea what Redneck Miller is about, but since it was made in 1977 and it's on the grindhouse bill, I'm gonna guess it features some combination of these elements: Daisy Duke cutoffs, mud, a fat sheriff, moonshine, petite braless breasts bouncing around under thin cotton T-shirts, rowdy teenagers swimming at the lake, denim overalls, a corrupt businessman, a dirty shack, ribs, someone chawing on a stalk of hay.

WHEN: Mon., April 9 - Sat., April 14; various times
WHERE: The New Beverly: 7165 Beverly Blvd. (1 block West of La Brea Ave.)

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Olympia, Part 1 – Festival of the People
The Goethe Institut will screen the first part of Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl's morally dubious but visually stunning paean to the Nazi-led Olympic Games of 1936. The screening is part of the Goethe Institut's year-long celebration "40 Years Berlin – Los Angeles," which includes a film program that spans early, rarely-seen German silent films to movies from the latest Berlin Film Festival.

WHEN: Tuesday, April 10 at 7:00 p.m.
WHERE: Goethe Institut Los Angeles, 5750 Wilshire Blvd. Suite 100,
COST: $5 general admission; free for Friends of the Goethe Institut

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Albert Maysles
Albert Maysles who along with his brother David directed some of the most enduring documentaries of the last half century (Salesman, Grey Gardens, Gimme Shelter) will be the guest of honor at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The program will feature an overview of Maysles’ work and a discussion of his cinema verité approach to documentary filmmaking through conversation and film clips.

WHEN: Thursday, April 12 at 7:30 PM
WHERE: Linwood Dunn Theater at AMPAS: 1313 North Vine St. (Hollywood South of Fountain)
COST: $5 for the general public, $3 for Academy members and students with a valid ID.

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Subtitle Film Festival
Koreatown plays host to the first annual Subtitle Film Festival, a four-day event featuring nine cutting-edge films from Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Thailand. The slate includes Confession of Pain, the latest film from Andrew Lau and Alan Mak, the directorial team behind Infernal Affairs who have reteamed for a crime thriller starring Tony Leung as a detective investigating the death of his father; Dorm, a Thai ghost story set in a boys' boarding school; 4:30, a drama directed by Singapore's wünderkind Royston Tan about the unlikely friendship between an 11-year-old boy and 30-something man; Memories of Tomorrow, a Japanese film starring Ken Watanabe (Letters from Iwo Jima) as a businessman facing early-onset Alzheimer's; and the U.S. premiere of Patrick Tam's first film in 17 years, After This Our Exile, a simple father/son tale.

WHEN: Thursday, April 12 - Sunday, April 15
WHERE: MPARK4 Theaters: 3240 Wilshire Blvd., 3rd Floor, (Koreatown, 1 block West of Vermont Ave.
COST: Advance tickets cost $8 online or $10 the day of the screening theater box office. Each film will only screen once during the festival.

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Reinventing the West(ern)
LACMA kicks off a month-long screening series that highlights the darker, more violent, more cynical Westerns that began cropping up after World War II and ran through the 1970s until the genre's demise. The series includes McCabe & Mrs. Miller Robert Altman's stylized, mud-soaked Western starring Warren Beatty and Julie Christie; Marylin Monroe's second-to-last film, The Misfits, in which she stars as a divorcée who falls for an over-the-hill cowboy played by Clark Gable; and Hud, which features a brilliant performance by Paul Newman in the title role of Hud Bannon, a ruthless asshole who could care less about his family, their farm or the mores of small-town life.

This Friday it's the John Wayne standard The Searchers, which features the Duke as a former Confederate soldier who spends years searching for his young niece captured by Comanche Indians but grows more disturbed and filled with hatred as the years drag on. This is followed by Ulzana's Raid, a 1972 film about a young cavalry lieutenant (Bruce Davison), sent to capture a renegade Apache who has led a bloody raid against white settlers. Alan Sharp, screenwriter and associate producer of Ulzana's Raid, will be on hand for a Q&A after the screening.

WHEN: Friday, April 13
7:30 pm - The Searchers; 9:40 pm - Ulzana's Raid
WHERE: LACMA: 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (three blocks East of Fairfax Ave.)

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Suspiria
Dario Argento's classic horror film about a young American dancer who comes to Europe to join a famous ballet school that turns out to be a front for something much more sinister will be screened at midnight on Friay, the 13th. Suspiria features another one of the all-time great movie taglines: The only thing more terrifying than the last five minutes of this film are the first 90!

WHEN: Friday, April 13 at MIDNIGHT!
WHERE: Nuart Theater: 11272 Santa Monica Blvd. (at Sawtelle Blvd. in West LA)

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John Jost – La Lunga Ombra
The UCLA Archive presents the local premiere of John Jost's (All the Vermeers in New York) latest feature, La Lunga Ombra, an improvised film shot in Italy that "reflects the disquiet that pervaded Europe in the wake of September 11, 2001." Jost will be in attendance for a post-screening Q&A.

WHEN: Sunday, April 15 at 7:00 p.m.
WHERE: melnitz movies
WHERE: The Billy Wilder Theater at The Hammer: 10899 Wilshire Blvd. (at Westwood Blvd.)