Avi Scher & Dancers will present two world premieres as part of its second season at Alvin Ailey Citigroup Theater (photo by Matthew Murphy)
Alvin Ailey Citigroup Theater
405 West 55th St. at Ninth Ave.
April 23-25, $29
www.avischer.com
Born in New York City and raised in Israel, twenty-seven-year-old wunderkind choreographer Avichai Scher has danced with the New York City Ballet, the Joffrey Ballet, the Metropolitan Opera Ballet, and others while also creating commissioned works for companies all over the country. Avi Scher & Dancers debuted at Jacob’s Pillow in 2009, then held its first New York City season last April at the Alvin Ailey Citigroup Theater. They’re back on West 55th St. this weekend, presenting a two-hour program April 23-25 that includes the world premiere of Mirrors, with music by Elena Kats Chernin and Dustin O’Halloran, played live by pianist David LaMarche and violinist Francesca Anderegg; Utopia, danced by Misa Kuranaga and Joseph Gatti and set to Rachmaninov, with Benjamin Bradham at the piano; Classroom Fantasy, with pianist Craig Baldwin performing music by John Field; and the world premiere of the three-part DreamScapes, with music by Timothy Andres, Matt McBane, and Max Richter. The company features nineteen dancers with such pedigrees as the Joffrey, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Complexions Contemporary Ballet, New York City Ballet, American Ballet Theater, San Francisco Ballet, and Boston Ballet, many as principal dancers and/or soloists.
Toshirō Mifune is a lone samurai on the road following the end of the Tokugawa dynasty in Akira Kurosawa’s unforgettable masterpiece. Mifune comes to a town with two warring factions and plays each one off the other as a hired hand. Neo’s battles with myriad Agent Smiths are nothing compared to Yojimbo’s magnificent swordfights against growing bands of warriors that include one man with a gun. Try watching this film and not think of several Clint Eastwood Westerns (particularly Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, since this is a direct remake of that 1964 Italian flick) as well as High Noon. Yojimbo will be screening at 11:00 am on April 22, 23, and 24 as part of the IFC Center’s Weekend Classics — Kurosawa series, which continues next week with the Kurosawa-Mifune follow-up Sanjuro.
In this Yojimbo-like tale, Toshirō Mifune shows up in a small town looking for food and fast money and takes up with a rag-tag group of wimps who don’t trust him when he says he will help them against the powerful ruling gang. Funnier than most Kurosawa samurai epics, the film is unfortunately brought down a notch by a bizarre soundtrack that ranges from melodramatic claptrap to a jazzy big-city score. Sanjuro will be screening at 11:00 am on April 29-30 and May 1 as part of the IFC Center’s Weekend Classics — Kurosawa series, with half of the proceeds from all festival screenings benefiting 
For the third time in about a month, this rarely screened cult classic is being shown in the city, so you have no excuse to miss it yet again. Inspired by Rene Daumal’s Mount Analogue: A Novel of Symbolically Authentic Non-Euclidean Adventures in Mountain Climbing, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain also involves symbolically non-Euclidean adventures in mountain climbing, funneled through Carlos Castaneda, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, and magic mushrooms and LSD galore. What passes for narrative follows a Jesus look-alike thief (Horacio Salinas) and an alchemist with a thing for female nudity (Jodorowsky) on the path to enlightenment; along the way they encounter the mysterious Tarot, stigmata, stoning, eyeballs, frogs, flies, cold-blooded murder, naked young boys, chakra points, life-size plaster casts, Nazi dancers, sex, violence, blood, gambling, turning human waste into gold, death and rebirth, and the search for the secret of immortality via representatives of the planets, each with their own extremely bizarre story to tell. Jodorowsky, who is credited with having invented the midnight movie with the acid Western El Topo (1970), literally shatters religious iconography in a kaleidoscopic whirlwind of jaw-droppingly gorgeous and often inexplicable imagery composed from a surreal color palette, set to a score by free jazz trumpeter Don Cherry and Archies keyboardist Ron Frangipane. (Frangipane also worked with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who produced this film with their business manager, Allen Klein.) The Holy Mountain — which brings a whole new insight to Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle — is filled with psychedelic mysticism centered around the human search for transcendence in a wilderness of the sacred and profane. Jodorowsky’s work can move you deeply, but don’t expect it to make much sense. Sit back and let in pour in and over you — you’ll feel it. You may hate it, but you’ll feel it. Although you’ll definitely hate the very end.
There’s something not quite right about the Smiths, and first-time writer-director Philip Gelatt isn’t about to share their deep, dark secret until he’s good and ready in the psychological horror-thriller The Bleeding House. Mother Marilyn (Betsy Aidem), father Matt (Richard Bekins), eighteen-year-old son Quentin (Charlie Hewson), and sixteen-year-old daughter Gloria (Alexandra Chando), who only responds when called Blackbird, are living a cloistered life in a lonely house in the Texas woods, exiled by the community ever since a neighbor’s place mysteriously burned down, with the family inside. When a very odd southern gentleman named Nick (Patrick Breen) shows up at their doorstep one evening, asking to stay for the night because his car broke down, Marilyn at first refuses to allow a stranger into their midst but soon changes her mind, deciding that it might be good karma for the Smiths to help out a person in need, and boy do they need some good karma. But when they ask Nick, who is all dressed in white and speaks in an affected voice, what he does for a living and he says he cuts up people, well, things do not necessarily appear like they’re about to go the Smiths’ way. Gelatt provides plenty of twists on the slasher genre in The Bleeding House, eschewing sudden shocks, chase scenes, loud music, and ear-piercing screams in favor of a relaxed, calm pace, a subtle score by Hildur Guðnadóttir, and more intellectual thrills and chills reminiscent of the Showtime series Dexter. It doesn’t get much more creepy than the way Nick addresses Blackbird, saying her name in a way that is both menacing and mothering as he comes to learn that she is at the heart of the family’s secret. Making its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, The Bleeding House is bloody good fun. (Gelatt will be at the Apple Store on Prince St. on April 25 at 6:00 for a free Meet the Filmmakers program.)
