The Sleeping Beauty

Always a must-see cinema event, The Boston French Film Festival at the MFA opens with laughs this year as it screens Philippe Le Guay's The Women on the Sixth Floor (2010; July 7 @ 7:30 pm; July 9 @ 5:40 pm), a comedy about a bevy of Spanish housekeepers who turn a staid bourgeois family upside down.

Does a penthouse apartment in a skyscraper give you a better perspective on the ills of the society down below? In his documentary High Rise, director Gabriel Mascaro interviews the inhabitants of posh spots in the Brazilian cities of Rio de Janeiro and Recife and asks them tough questions about injustice, insecurity, the future, and the availability of parking.

Superman II (1980)

Remember Terence Stamp as General Zod in Superman II (1980)? He might prefer to forget it himself, and you might not want to see the whole film in order to catch his performance, but it's all there in the trailer featured in this year's Trailer Treats, just one of many in this annual collection of trashy coming attractions at the Brattle.

Nino Rota's famous theme for Fellini's 8-1/2

Imagine Hitchcock's Psycho or Scorsese's Taxi Driver without the lacerating, haunting music - or The Godfather films and Fellini's 8-1/2 without the lush scores of Nino Rota. Still masterpieces, just . . . not the same. The music without the movies, however, is well worth a listen as is demonstrated in the program Music For Movies: A Celebration Of Bernard Herrmann And Nino Rota at the Brattle, which is also currently running a series of each composers' films in honor of their centennials.

Andrea Dunbar's short life - she died at age 29 in 1990 as a result of her multiple addictions - was as tormented and astonishing as her three plays. They are uncompromising accounts of the desperate, defiled lives of the poor in the housing project in Bradford, England, where she grew up, including The Arbor, which is also the title of Clio Barnard's 2010 biographical film about her.

Monday was the second anniversary of the release of Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker,” and she would go on to become the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Director and Best Picture. But you’ve got to ask yourself, are women any better off in Hollywood now? It didn’t look that way in 2010, when almost no women in any category except in acting were nominated for anything.

Unlike Anthony Weiner or Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Arnold Schwarzenegger has a day job he can fall back on after saying "Hasta la vista, baby" to his political career. Lionsgate Films has announced that the former governor of California, currently disgraced husband and father, will star in its upcoming "The Last Stand," directed by hot Korean action master Kim Jee-Woon, whose semi-satirical Eastern-Western "The Good, the Bad, and the Weird," and relentless revenge slasher picture "I Saw the Devil" show a knack for emulating auteurs like Sergio Leone and Sam Raimi.

The Barefoot Contessa (1954)

Joseph L. Mankiewicz's All About Eve (1950) is included in just about everyone's top 10 best Hollywood movies list, and the line "Fasten your seatbelts. Its going to be a bumpy night" comes in at #9 in the AFI's list of greatest movie quotes. But that film is just one of the nearly two dozen Mankiewicz turned out in his richly varied, remarkable career.

Nobody had as much fun with human folly as Stanley Kubrick, and two of his satiric masterpieces screen this week at the Somerville Theatre. His X-rated adaptation of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange (1971) still shocks today. In a hilariously awful dystopia the only sympathetic character is Malcolm McDowell's sociopathic delinquent, perhaps because he croons "Singin' in the Rain" and listens to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony while engaging in his ultra-violence.

Night of the Creeps (1986)

Those who have passed by the Fourth Wall Project gallery recently will have noticed that the place has been overrun by the Vitamin Water people. Together with Coolidge @fter Midnite, they have scheduled a month-long series of events including tonight's free screenings of two visceral masterpieces by film school reject Fred Dekker.

Less graphic but perhaps more disturbing than Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange is his Doctor Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb (1964). It might be the funniest doomsday movie ever made, and certainly has the funniest character names, like Merkin Muffley and the Kissinger-esque nuclear scientist of the title, two of the three roles played by the great Peter Sellers.

Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler (2008) introduced many moviegoers to the sweaty, bloody, brutal world of professional wrestling on the fringes of the WWE. Robert Greene shows us more of this subculture in his documentary Fake It So Real, in which he explores with cinema-vérité intensity the dedicated gladiators of the Millennium Wrestling Federation of Lincolnton, North Carolina.

Two years ago Lee Daniels's Precious (2009), an adaptation of the novel Push by Sapphire, confronted viewers with its hardscrabble, intense story about an unwed teenage mother beset by inner-city and family turmoil. It defied the odds and became an Oscar-winning commercial hit (Best Supporting Actress for Mo'Nique; Best Adapted Screenplay for Daniels).

One of Boston's most vital and exciting film events, the Roxbury International Film Festival, now in its 13th year, begins tonight with Davey Frankel and Rasselas Lakew's The Athlete (2009), a biopic mixing dramatization and documentary about Abebe Bikila, the first black African to win an Olympic gold medal in the men's marathon - which he ran barefoot, no less.

During the 2008 Presidential election a rumor started that then GOP VP candidate Sarah Palin had attempted to ban Harry Potter from the local library when she first got elected as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska. As it turned out the rumor was false, - the first Harry Potter book didn't come until 1998.

Still, some kind of poetic justice seemed to be in play when the Palin documentary "The Undefeated" came out last weekend, the same day as "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2," the concluding episode of the Harry Potter film series.

Recent documentaries like Sweetgrass almost mystically put the viewer in touch with the purity and rhythms of nature. Equally transcendent is Michelangelo Frammartino's Le Quattro Volte (2010). Contemplating an old man, a goat, a tree, and some charcoal in the idyllic setting of Calabria, Italy, the film pretty much sums up all there is to know about life and death.

Kind of like Toxic Avenger by way of Trash Humpers, Jim Muro's Street Trash (1987) lives up to its title. Stinky derelicts start buying booze called Tenafly Viper at Ed's liquor store for a buck a bottle and unleash the cheapo, gross-out special effects. Not only a revoltingly hilarious indulgence in politically incorrect bad taste, the movie also reflects, not unlike Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, the contempt for poverty so popular during the Greed is Good era.