Carmen de Lavallade examines her life and career in multimedia one-woman show (photo by Christopher Duggan)
Who: Carmen de Lavallade
What: As I Remember It
Where: Baryshnikov Arts Center, Jerome Robbins Theater, 450 West 37th St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves., 866-811-4111
When: February 19-21, 24, 8:00, February 25, 1:00, $25-$30
Why: Legendary dancer and choreographer Carmen de Lavallade’s one-woman show, As I Remember It, was developed during two residencies at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in 2012 and 2014. The production will now make its New York premiere at BAC February 19-25, with de Lavallade using archival footage, personal writings, and live dance to share her compelling story, which includes performing onscreen and/or onstage with Dorothy Dandridge, Harry Belafonte, Josephine Baker, Duke Ellington, and many others; she has also choreographed for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, the Dance Theatre of Harlem, Philadanco, and the Metropolitan Opera. Sadly, since the show began its tour, de Lavallade’s husband of nearly sixty years, multidisciplinary artist Geoffrey Holder, passed away in October 2014, but the eighty-three-year-old de Lavallade has soldiered on. (Their love story was told in Linda Atkinson and Nick Doob’s 2006 documentary, Carmen & Geoffrey.) The hour-long As I Remember It is directed by longtime character actor Joe Grifasi and cowritten with dramaturg Talvin Wilks; the lighting is by James F. Ingalls, video design by Maya Ciarrocchi, set design by Mimi Lien, and costumes by Esther Arroyo. The February 25 matinee finale will be followed by a conversation with the ever-lovely Ms. de Lavallade.
Lovingly restored several years ago by Janus Films in a new 35mm print, Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon, which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, tells the story of a young boy (Pascal Lamorisse, the director’s son) who makes friends with an extraordinary red balloon, which follows him through the streets of Belleville in Paris, waits for him while he is in school, and obeys his every command. But the neighborhood kids are afraid of this stranger and go on a mission to burst the young boy’s bubble. Lamorisse gives life and emotion to the balloon (more than twenty-five thousand were used in the making of the film) in a masterful use of simple special effects well before CGI and other modern technology. The Red Balloon also features the splendid music of Maurice Leroux and the fine photography of Edmond Séchan, which beautifully sets the large red balloon against the gray of the streets and buildings of Paris’s Ménilmontant district. The thirty-four-minute film can also be seen as a parable about Jesus and the birth or Christianity, though it’s best not to read too much into it. The Red Balloon is screening daily February 16-21 at 1:00 at the Museum of Moving Image in conjunction with city schools’ winter break. On February 19 at 2:15, the museum will be hosting “The Red Balloon Animation Adventure,” an hour-long workshop ($5) for children ages six in which kids can create their own little Red Balloon movie. 
In his second film as writer, director, producer, and composer (following Dark Star, which he cowrote with Dan O’Bannon), low-budget maestro John Carpenter turns an about-to-be-abandoned police station in the fictional L.A. ghetto of Anderson into the Alamo in the urban-angst thriller Assault on Precinct 13. Setting the stage with a pulsating synth score and a beautifully cheesy opening-credits design, Carpenter captures the rage and unrest burning inside America in the 1970s in this claustrophobic tale of revenge. Austin Stoker stars as Lt. Ethan Bishop, an easygoing cop who is given the supposedly painless job of monitoring a police precinct in South Central Los Angeles on its final day of business, as a few of the last remaining workers pack up boxes and bid the place farewell. But following a police ambush of the Street Thunder gang and the senseless murder of a little girl, an ever-increasing number of gang members soon descend on the station, seeking bloody retribution. Bishop is forced to defend the precinct with secretaries Leigh (Zimmer) and Julie (Nancy Loomis) and dangerous convicts Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Joston) and Wells (Tony Burton) as the power is cut off and their weapons dwindle. The unending stream of gang members swarm around the station like zombies, trying to burst through doors and windows, as the cops and the cons struggle to come up with a plan to save themselves before all hope is lost. “The very least of our problems is that we’re out of time,” Leigh says to Wilson, who replies, “It’s an old story with me. I was born out of time.”
