French legend Agnès Varda will discuss her life and career as a visual artist at FIAF
French Institute Alliance Française, Florence Gould Hall
55 East 59th St. between Madison & Park Aves.
Tuesday, February 28, $30, 7:30
Series continues Tuesday nights through March 21
212-355-6100
fiaf.org
Over the years, FIAF has shown many films by Nouvelle Vague master Agnès Varda, the celebrated auteur behind such classics as Vagabond, Cléo from 5 to 7, The Gleaners and I, Jacquot de Nantes, and The Beaches of Agnès. Now the French Institute Alliance Française is bringing Varda herself to Florence Gould Hall for the special talk “Agnès Varda: Visual Artist,” taking place on February 28 at 7:30, moderated by art dealer Olivier Renaud-Clément. The Belgium-born, France-based Varda, who was married to Jacques Demy for nearly thirty years, will be focusing not only on her film career but her upcoming gallery show at Blum & Poe, which runs March 2 to April 15. The discussion also kicks off FIAF’s CinéSalon series “Agnès Varda: Life as Art,” which consists of Varda’s Daguerréotypes on March 7, with the 7:30 screening followed by a talk with Varda and curator Laurence Kardish, Jacqot de Nantes on March 14, and Lola on March 21. This is a very special chance to see the remarkable eighty-eight-year-old Varda, so get your tickets now.
Documentarians are always in search of unusual stories, and producer-director Amber Fares has found a real winner in Speed Sisters. The Lebanese Canadian cofounder of 
Nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary, Ava DuVernay’s devastating 13th is back for an encore engagement at IFC Center. DuVernay’s follow-up to the Oscar-nominated Selma, her feature debut about the 1965 voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery, examines the history of institutional racism from slavery to today, focusing on the phrase of the 13th Amendment that says, “except as a punishment for crime.” Using archival footage, animation, music, and new interviews, DuVernay traces the criminalization of African Americans beginning with the passage of the amendment in 1865. “There’s really no understanding of our American political culture without race at the center of it,” Harvard professor Khalil G. Muhammad says. The film explores the 150-year demonization of blacks as the government built a fear-based narrative that led to the frightening imbalance in the incarceration of African Americans that has escalated dramatically since the 1970s. Among the issues that are covered are mandatory minimum sentencing, the wealth gap, the crack epidemic, the Southern Strategy, the Three Strikes law, the KKK, the Central Park Five, the 1994 crime bill, white privilege, Nancy Reagan’s Just Say No program, Willie Horton, prison labor, the Civil Rights Act, and the ongoing cultural depiction of blacks as wild animals that need to be caged. DuVernay has assembled a wide-ranging collection of experts who share their views, including Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., Maryland state senator and ALEC member Michael Hough, educator and author Michelle Alexander, UConn professor Jelani Cobb, UC Santa Cruz professor emerita Angela Davis, former American Conservative Union chairman David Keene, Grandview University professor Kevin Gannon, Dream Corps founder and president Van Jones, American Conservative Union board member Grover Norquist, and formerly incarcerated activists Shaka Senghor, Pat Nolan, Cory Greene, and Craig DeRoche in addition to such politicians as David Dinkins, Charles B. Rangel, Cory Booker, and former Speaker of the House and presidential candidate Newt Gingrich. “The objective reality is that virtually no one who is white understands the challenge of being black in America,” Gingrich explains.
There’s an ominous cloud hanging over Tim Sutton’s deeply poetic Dark Night, a grim, gripping journey into the dark night of America’s soul. The title of Sutton’s third film, following Pavilion and Memphis, also references Christopher Nolan’s 2012 Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, for reasons that become apparent about halfway through. Dark Night opens with a close-up of a young woman’s disbelieving eyes, red, white, and blue lights flashing across her face; the camera then pulls back as the woman, wearing an American flag top, lowers her head, taking stock of an unrevealed tragedy. For the next eighty-five minutes, Sutton goes back to the beginning of this fateful day, following the lives of a small group of men, women, and children in a suburban Florida community as they go about their usual business. They play on computers, put on makeup, pet animals, and head over to the mall. One concerned mother and her detached son speak with an off-screen interviewer as if searching for reasons in the aftermath of a horrific event, but in this case it hasn’t happened yet. In many of the vignettes, there is little or no dialogue, as the characters, all nonprofessional actors mostly found on the streets of Sarasota, speak with their actions, particularly when several of the males, including a military vet and a teen with dazzling blue eyes, load firearms. In this Blue Velvet-like town, danger lurks just below the surface.
One of the best sports films ever made, Slap Shot is a riotously bloody look at minor-league hockey. Paul Newman — who declared this one of his favorite pictures — stars as Reggie Dunlop, an aging loser serving as player-coach of the Charlestown Chiefs and trying to keep his marriage going with Francine (Jennifer Warren). When the general manager (Strother Martin) tells him that the team is being shut down at the end of the season, Dunlop decides to send it off with a bang. Lying to his team that if the Chiefs fill the seats and start winning they will move to Florida, he incorporates a different style of play into their game, led by the brutal, vicious, and utterly hilarious Hanson brothers (real-life brothers Jeff and Steve Carlson and their Johnstown Jets teammate Dave Hanson), who never met an opponent they wouldn’t punch, trip, slash, spear, or slam face-first into the boards well after the whistle. Even Dunlop gets in on the fun, throwing his share of right hands. The only player not participating in the hijinks is Ned Braden (Michael Ontkean), who believes in sportsmanship and a more gentlemanly game of skill and beauty, not exactly what men like Ogie Oglethorpe (minor-league player Ned Dowd, whose sister, Nancy, wrote the book that the movie is based on, inspired by the real-life antics of the Johnstown Jets) and Tim “Dr. Hook” McCracken (Paul D’Amato) have in mind. You don’t have to be a hockey fan to love Slap Shot, which is really, when it comes right down to it, just a little film about the trials and tribulations of everyday life. Look for cameos by Paul Dooley, M. Emmett Walsh, Melinda Dillon, Nancy Dowd as Andrea, and actual hockey players Bruce Boudreau, Jean Tétreault, Connie Madigan, Cliff Thompson, and Joe Nolan, among others. Slap Shot is screening February 3 in the Metrograph series “Universal in the 70’s: Part One,” a tribute to the decade when the studio took advantage of the growing independent-cinema movement; the two-week, eighteen-film festival continues through February 7 with such other gems as Clint Eastwood’s awesome High Plains Drifter, Alfred Hitchcock’s Family Plot, Jeremy Kagan’s The Big Fix, and Don Siegel’s underseen Charley Varrick.