Zombies, psychos stalk the Brattle
If Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's recent double feature "Grindhouse" was your cup of tea, then you're in luck: the Brattle Theatre is hosting a full-on Alice-in-Wonderland-style demento tea party of bawdy, bloody, micro-budget exploitation films starting Thursday and running through May 29. Dive into cheapo movies that feature flesh-eating zombies, psycho-stalkers, and early Kurt Russell! Scary!
The genre thrived from the late 1960s through the early 1980s, and on May 19 at 3 p.m. there's a panel discussion about its history and tenacity. Among the attendees will be archivist Liz Coffey of the Harvard Film Archive and programmer and "exploitation guru" Lars Nilsen of the Alamo Drafthouse Cinemas in Texas.
The full schedule is online at brattlefilm.org , or call 617-876-6837 .
The first-ever Cambridge Science Festival finished up last weekend, but the conversation continues at WGBH, which has built an online mini-site called Science City.
Among the offerings are new video podcasts (or "vodcasts") profiling MIT scientists who are proud to be wonks by day and artists by night. Subjects include chemist Romiya Glover , who develops HIV testing devices and coaches the cheerleading squad at Worcester Polytechnic Institute; electrical engineer Shaundra Bryant Daily , who created a computer program called G.I.R.L.S Talk that helps kids understand their emotions and who is also a member of the MIT Dance Troupe; and environmental engineer Kerri-Ann Richard, who's a whiz at groundwater hydrology and hazardous waste clean up and also rocks out with the group
Featured as well are audio reports from the festival from WGBH health correspondent Helen Palmer on new ways of looking at DNA and the marrying of science and music, podcasts from the producers of the public television science show " Nova, " and three science-oriented shorts submitted through an open call by Massachusetts residents Maria Simmons of Hanson, David Kennedy of Wellfleet, and the Boudreau family of Georgetown.
The full table of contents with links to everything is at wgbh.org/sciencefestival.
"ROAD" FEVER: The biggest buzz out of Glasgow these days is "Red Road," a thriller about a woman who works at a surveillance firm, spots a man from her past, and starts stalking him. At February's BAFTA awards -- the British Oscars -- director Andrea Arnold received the award for Special Achievement by a first-time writer-director, and at last year's Cannes festival the film won the Jury Prize. (Arnold also got a US Academy Award in 2005 for her live-action short "Wasp.") Belmont World Film is hosting a sneak preview of "Red Road" on Monday at 7:30 p.m. at Studio Cinema in Belmont (617-484-3980 and belmontworldfilm.org ). It then opens at the Kendall Square Cinema on Friday.
SCREENINGS OF NOTE: Satyajit Ray's "The World of Apu" plays on Tuesday at 7 p.m. at the Harvard Film Archive as part of the "Masterworks of World Cinema" series (617-495-4700 and hcl.harvard.edu/hfa).
The North Charles Institute is a methadone treatment program based in Cambridge. For more than 30 years it has provided detox services along with individual and group therapy, relapse prevention programs, and HIV education. "Waking Up: A Story in Four Parts" is a documentary produced by the institute that looks at four recovering addicts who have gone through its programs. It was produced by Watertown's Wednesday Morning Productions and Chelmsford's 2PM Productions; brother and sister team Pete Pedulla and Mary Ellen McDonnell of 2PM shot, directed, and produced it. "Waking Up" plays on Wednesday at 6 p.m. at the Brattle Theatre (617-876-6837 and brattlefilm.org ).
At the Museum of Fine Arts this week, in addition to the Boston Gay & Lesbian Film/Video Festival, Phil Grabsky's documentary "In Search of Mozart" seeks to override the work done by Milos Forman's 1984 "Amadeus," which depicted Mozart as a giggling ninny. It plays Thursday at 3:30 p.m., Saturday at 1 p.m., and five additional times through the end of the month (617-267-9300 and mfa.org/film). Also at the MFA, the fictional "Dreaming Lhasa," about a filmmaker at work on a documentary about political exiles from Tibet who falls in love with one of them. It plays Thursday at 6 p.m., next Sunday at 10:30 a.m., and two more times the following week. And both long-time soccer fans and more recent conscripts who got caught up in last summer's World Cup will want to get to the Institute of Contemporary Art today at 11 a.m. or Thursday at 7 p.m. for "Zidane, a 21-Century Portrait." Seventeen cameras were used to film superstar Zinedine Zidane during a 2005 match before his retirement last year (and before the head butt in the World Cup that made him famous even to non-fans), capturing everything from the frenzy of the crowd to the fierceness in Zidane's eyes. Filmmakers Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno make their directorial debut after long careers as video and installation artists, and Scottish rock band Mogwai provides the soundtrack (617-478-3103 and icaboston.org).
Leslie Brokaw can be reached at lbrokaw@globe.com. 