Things To Do: New Directors/New Films, Wong Kar-wai at Apple Soho

New Directors/New Films
Now – April 6, 2008
Presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Center and Department of Film, and The Museum of Modern Art
Screenings are at Film Society's Walter Reade Theater
MoMA's Titus 1 Theater
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The thirty-seventh edition of New Directors/New Films debuts this week at the Film Society and the MoMA. Over the next week, twenty-six features and six shorts will unspool, including Courtney Hunt's bleak and moving Frozen River, about an American single mom smuggling Canadians across the border, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.  In the New York Times, A. O. Scott suggests that the festival should be retitled "Serious Directors/Small Films," noting how the slate moves from whimsy-filled personal dramas such as Emily Hubley's The Toe Tactic and Israeli film Jellyfish to realist works such as Lance Hammer's Ballast and Azazel Jacob's Momma's Man.

Wong Kar-wai at Apple SoHo
April 1, 7:00 – 8:30 p.m.
103 Prince Street, Manhattan
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With his swoony, romantic films Chungking Express, Happy Together, and In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-wai set his place in the cinematic firmament as an auteur and artiste. Catch him at the Apple store as part of indieWIRE's series of conversations with directors, and find out what he has to say about his much-delayed English-language debut, the Norah Jones starrer My Blueberry Nights, which received a decidedly mixed reception at Cannes. Film journalist Dennis Lim will moderate the discussion. Expect  Wong to show scenes with Jones as a heartbroken, lovelorn lass who loves blueberry pie and decides to road-trip across America, meeting Jude Law and Natalie Portman along the way. As moldy as the film may sound, it's still a chance to get up close and personal with a genius, and the free, first-come, first-served talk should fill up quickly.