Bet you haven’t heard of this one before. We kid, we kid. Fritz Lang’s massively influential vision of the future—lambasted at the time of its original release by none other than H.G. Wells—screens tonight at 7:30pm at Queens Theatre in the Park. You can thrill once more to Brigitte Helm’s genius double performance as activist Maria and her evil robot doppelgänger, not to mention Lang fixture Rudolf Klein-Rogge as the crazed inventor Rotwang. Consider this an appetite-whet for Kino International’s upcoming release of the 210-minute original cut, which Roger Ebert reports on here.

A highlight of the 2008 Film Comment Selects series, Heinz Emigholz’s Schindler’s Houses is a nonnarrative motion picture collage of 40 L.A. homes and structures built by architect Rudolph M. Schindler. It’s lulling in the best way—Emigholz’s slow, tracking camera induces a kind of transcendental trance state, and each building resonates with an unspoken, though still deeply felt sense of history. It’s definitely a rewarding way to spend an evening, so head on over to Anthology Film Archives where it will screen at 7pm.

Crime writer Raymond Chandler penned his first original screenplay for the George Marshall directed film noir, The Blue Dahlia (1946). To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Chandler’s passing, the Film Society of Lincoln Center will be screening Dahlia, which stars Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, tonight at 9pm. You have a choice of attending the movie by itself or also a prescreening illustrated lecture by the CEO of Film London, Adrian Wootton.

Head off the beaten path this evening and check out Alex Ross Perry’s feature film debut, Impolex, at 92YTribeca. It recently won two prizes (Foreign Picture and Foreign Actor) at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival, and the plot synopsis (”Months after the end of World War II, fresh-faced Tyrone is sent on a mission by the U.S. Army to locate and retrieve German rockets”) promises a mixture of low-budget derring-do, eccentric emotionality and Pynchonesque discursiveness. Perry will answer questions after the screening in a discussion moderated by Spout staff writer and TONY contributor Karina Longworth.

Team Film’s all about the specialty theaters this weekend. Film Forum is the place to be for our two five-star picks, Claire Denis’s recent 35 Shots of Rum (her latest, White Material, screens in this year’s New York Film Festival) and John Huston’s blue-collar boxing classic Fat City (1972). The Museum of Modern Art is where you’ll find our four-star selection, Harmony and Me, starring indie-rocker Justin Rice. And for a retro fix, head on over to the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Juliette Binoche tribute, where you should be certain to catch Damage (1992) and Flight of the Red Balloon (2007).

The second season of the essential and eclectic 92YTribeca series Queer/Art/Film—curated by filmmaker Ira Sachs (The Delta, Forty Shades of Blue, Married Life) and BUTT magazine contributing editor Adam Baran—begins this evening at 7:30 pm with a screening of the 1948 British noir So Evil My Love. It stars Ray Milland as a sensuous cad who works his wily charms on a widow played by Ann Todd. The great Geraldine Fitzgerald is a featured player, and it was this bit of casting that first attracted the attention of drag performer Everett Quinton, who will introduce the movie.

Tonight at 6:50 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music you can see one of the first movies to emerge from Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute. El Norte (1983) follows two immigrants, a brother and a sister, on their perilous journey north from Guatemala to the United States. Getting there is only half the film. Once they’ve crossed over, a whole new set of challenges arise. The screenplay, which director Gregory Nava cowrote with Anna Thomas, was nominated for an Oscar.

Tonight, Film Forum wraps up its Monday series “Mason Most Noir,” with several screenings of Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. It’s a nutball Technicolor love story photographed by the great Jack Cardiff (cinematographer on such varied productions as The Red Shoes, Rope and Rambo: First Blood Part II) and starring James Mason and Ava Gardner. Plot takes a backseat to sensation, and there’s no better way to experience it than with this newly restored 35mm print.

If the gloomy skies and misty weather keep you indoors this weekend, but you still want to satisfy your cinemagoing appetite, be sure and check out this page, where our own Joshua Rothkopf is filing dispatches from the Toronto International Film Festival. There are sure to be some titles that’ll soon see release stateside, so it’s good preparation. Should you decide to venture out, we’re most keen on the documentary The Painter Sam Francis, which is now playing at Anthology Film Archives. We’re more mixed, though still pretty positive, on Joe Berlinger’s Big Oil documentary, Crude (at IFC Center), and Shane Acker’s postapocalyptic animated feature, 9 (in wide release). And for a bat-shit-crazy fix, you could do worse than Gamer, the latest from Crank series auteurs Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor.

Jacques Tati is one of cinema’s great comic performers. Tonight at 8pm at the Museum of Modern Art, you can catch his officially sanctioned masterpiece Mon Oncle (1958). Winner of a special Jury Prize at Cannes, recognized by the New York Film Critics Circle and awarded the Best Foreign Film Oscar, the movie marks Tati’s second go-round as the bumbling, pipe-smoking Monsieur Hulot. This time out the character navigates a changing, increasingly modernized suburban landscape, which is at tremendous odds with his quaintly old-world upbringing. It’s not a critique so much as a generous, all-encompassing compare-contrast: Tati never uses comedy to thumb his nose, but to uncover the humanity lurking within his rigorously composed frames. The end of Mon Oncle—in which Hulot’s relatives send him off to find a full-time, “respectable” job—segues beautifully into Tati’s next effort, the astonishing Play Time (1967), which was sadly not greeted with this film’s commercial and critical hosannas.

It makes a perverse kind of sense that the Lauren Bacall vehicle The Fan is playing twice this evening at Clearview Chelsea. It’s an aging-diva campfest that courts a predominantly gay audience, yet also blatantly (and often hilariously) insults them. Sally Ross (Bacall) is a fading starlet who takes on the lead role in a Broadway musical—the brilliantly titled Never Say Never—to resuscitate her career. Trouble is, she has an obsessive, closet-case fan, Douglas Breen (Michael Biehn), who’s writing her increasingly threatening letters and starting to infiltrate her circle. None of this stops Sally from readying her gay-gay-gay comeback: Take special note of the rehearsal scene in which she “sings” the immortal refrain, “No energy crisis/My professional advice is/Get off your huh!/And!/Go!” Douglas, meanwhile, is becoming more and more handy with a straight razor (one of his practice kills is more offensive in its homo baiting-cum-bashing than the entirety of the William Friedkin debacle Cruising). But really, who wouldn’t want to slit Sally’s throat after her mangling of this catchy Marvin Hamlisch tune:

We at Team Film are big fans of writer-director Kelly Reichardt whose masterful girl-and-her-dog parable, Wendy and Lucy, made a splash at numerous festivals last year. This afternoon at 4pm, The Museum of Modern Art is screening her prior feature, the equally terrific Old Joy. As is typical of Reichardt’s work, the setup is deceptively simple: Two friends, Mark (Daniel London) and Kurt (Will Oldham), go on a camping trip in the Oregon mountains. Nothing much of consequence happens on the surface; the meat of the tale is in the unspoken tensions that arise from the men’s interactions, especially during a surreal idyll in a woodland hot springs. Ambiguity is Reichardt’s forte—we never feel that these characters are being hollowly defined for us. Their mystery remains intact up to and beyond the film’s heartbreaking final shot.

Do you think it’s fuckin’ funny that Martin Scorsese’s gangster-film classic is almost 20 years old? Nearly everything in this Hollywood retelling of the rise and fall of mobster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) is memorable, from Joe Pesci’s psychotic Tommy DeVito to a penultimate shot that cribs astonishingly from “The Great Train Robbery” (1903). As far back as we can remember (and as far forward as we can conceive), this is and will always be one of Scorsese’s best. You can catch it today at 4pm at the Musuem of Modern Art.

One of the best Hurricane Katrina documentaries, Trouble the Water, screens at 7pm this evening at Bluestockings bookstore, in honor of its release on DVD. Codirectors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin will be on hand to discuss how they came to tell the story of aspiring New Orleans rap artist Kimberly Rivers Roberts, whose first-person footage of the storm fills the doc’s early portions. After this harrowing beginning, Deal and Lessin follow Roberts and her family as they navigate the tangled bureaucratic “support system” set up in Katrina’s wake. She eventually decides to leave the only home she’s ever known, but this presents its own share of disappointments and challenges. Important issues of race and class are engaged with, though Deal and Lessin show there are no easy answers to be had. It’s all one can do—and it has to be enough—to simply survive.

What’s so wonderful about Mike Leigh’s recent Happy-Go-Lucky—screening tonight at 7pm at the Museum of Modern Art—is its multifaceted exploration of the lead character, Poppy (Sally Hawkins). Like the film’s intentionally misleading title, a good many people have taken her bubbliness at face value, not recognizing that it masks as complicated a soul as any in the Leigh canon. Poppy’s carefree approach to life shapes how we view her in the varied situations she’s placed in. She’s empathetic and endearing when dealing with a troubled child at her elementary-school day job, passive-aggressively grating when visiting her family and almost too sure of herself when interacting with a mentally unstable homeless man (Stanley Townsend). The heart of the film, though, is the scenes between Poppy and Scott (Eddie Marsan), a gloomy driving instructor who challenges her every giggly whim. Their interactions ultimately reveal the cracks in Poppy’s facade—by the final fade-out we see her perpetual happiness for both its genuineness and its fraudulence. It’s one of Leigh’s best. Don’t miss it!

It’s not the best time for new releases. No movie received more than three stars in this past week’s issue, which isn’t to say that there’s nothing interesting or pleasurable in Cold Souls, Julie & Julia or Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania. Regardless, you might want to make this a repertory weekend. Anthology Film Archives has a wide selection of ’70s grit programmed by grindhouser William Lustig (word is John Flynn’s The Outfit is particularly noteworthy). The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Cary Grant program continues through the weekend (Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, The Talk of the Town and Suspicion are on the bill), and IFC Center has midnight showings, Friday and Saturday, of the Coen brothers’ insane Barton Fink and David Lynch’s also-not-so-normal Eraserhead. And hey, there’s always Landmark Sunshine’s midnight showings of cigar chomper John Milius’s ode to ’80s conservatism, Red Dawn. Wolverines!!!

It’s midway through the Ang Lee retrospective at the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Tonight at 9pm you can see his second feature, The Wedding Banquet. This is a culture-clash comedy of manners that follows gay Tawainese-American Wai-tung (Winston Chao) as he sets up a false marriage with female tenant Wei-wei (May Chin), to please his soon-to-visit parents. Many farcical misunderstandings result, though Lee maintains an even-keeled, observational tone throughout. The film shared the Golden Bear at the 1993 Berlin Film Festival and was nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar.

Hot Blood could have staked its place in cinema history for its ad copy alone: “Jane Russell shakes her tambourines and drives Cornel wild!” proclaimed the trailer for Nicholas Ray’s widescreen whatsit. Is it a tale of two Gypsies in love? A bawdy, bursting ode to outsiders? An abrasive avant-garde musical? It’s all this and more, as shown by the scene in which Wilde’s “hot blooded” Stephano Torino proves his romantic mettle by violently dancing a rival out an apartment window onto a sprawling city backlot. This is widely viewed as a lesser entry in the Ray oeuvre, so it’s due for reappraisal. You can catch it any of three times today at Film Forum (2:55, 6:30 or 10:05pm).

You could do worse than prostitute yourself to Cary Grant, and that’s exactly what Helen Faraday (Marlene Dietrich) does in Josef von Sternberg’s pre-Code classic, Blonde Venus (1932). It’s all to humanitarian ends, of course, as Helen is trying to raise the money to help cure her radium-poisoned husband Ned (Herbert Marshall). She meets Grant’s millionaire playboy, Nick Townsend, while performing in a salacious nightclub act, and the sparks fly. As is usual with Von Sternberg, the film is a wonder to look at, and it features one of Dietrich’s most memorable numbers (“Hot Voodoo”), in which she stripteases out of a gorilla suit. See it tonight at 6:50 and 9pm at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Julie Taymor’s terrific film adaptation of William Shakespeare’s oft-reviled revenger’s tragedy is couched as a young boy’s action-figure fantasy come to life. Fresh off her Broadway triumph with The Lion King, Taymor didn’t put away childish things so much as find the sanguine adult metaphors within them. Titus is caked in dirt, blood, grime and shit, though its palette gets surprisingly cleaner as the film goes on. The infamous final dinner scene—in which mad monarch Titus Andronicus (Anthony Hopkins) serves his nemesis Tamora (Jessica Lange) her meat-ground sons—might as well be taking place in 2001′s sterile alien chamber. Every sight and sound is searing, be it the new set of “limbs” given to Titus’s daughter Lavinia (Laura Fraser) or Harry Lennix’s authoritative rendering of the villainous Moor, Aaron. The film screens tonight at 8pm as part of the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s “The Bard Goes Global” series, and Taymor will be in attendance.