NEW YORK: The Brooklyn Academy of Music gives the borough's literary poster boy a chance to display his wide-ranging taste in movies with the program Jonathan Lethem Selects (October 15 - November 19). Those looking for hard-to-find rough gems will be especially attracted to the "Hitman Double Feature" on October 22, with Don Siegel's The Hitman (1958) paired with the taut B classic Murder by Contract (1958), well directed by Irving Lerner and starring Vince Edwards as an icy fellow who's putting himself through college by performing mob hits on the side. On November 12, a screening of the gritty seventies Dustin Hoffman vehicle Straight Time will be followed by a discussion between Lethem and the movie's director, Ulu Grosbard.
LOS ANGELES: The Los Angeles County of Museum of Art presents Life and So Much More: The Films of Abbas Kiarostami (October 12 - 27), with ten features and three triple bills of shorts by the leading figure in Iranian cinema. A great opportunity for the curious or the benighted to catch up.
BERKELEY: Attention, Leone freaks: Once upon a Time in Widescreen: The Films of Sergio Leone (October 12 - 28) has everything you could want — the Dollars trilogy, Once Upon a Time in the West, Once Upon a Time in America, and the messed-up but lovable Duck, You Sucker, starring Rod Steiger as a Mexican bandit and James Coburn as a wayward IRA soldier — in the format you love, with many of them shown in restored prints.
WASHINGTON, D.C.: We may not have a labor movement in this country anymore, but that's no reason not to kick back and celebrate the 2007 DC Labor Filmfest (October 11 - 17) at the AFI Silver Theater. "Organized and presented by the Metropolitan Washington Council of the AFL-CIO, the Debs-Jones-Douglass Institute and the American Film Institute," the festival presents "an array of new films and beloved classics about work and workers," including a mini-fest of works by the living soul of socially committed British kitchen-sink drama, Ken Loach. (The selection includes Loach's Los Angeles movie, Bread and Roses and his little-screened documentary on the 1980 British miners' strike, Which Side Are You On?) The program also includes the Japanese comedy Hula Girls, the German documentary Our Daily Bread, and that one American movie in a billion that says something about working for a living in a way that most people seem able to relate to: Mike Judge's Office Space.
— Phil Nugent