Film Series in NYC This Week

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Our guide to film series and special screenings. All our movie reviews are at nytimes.com/reviews/movies.

FUTURE IMPERFECT: THE UNCANNY IN SCIENCE FICTION at the Museum of Modern Art (July 17 through Aug. 31). With about 70 movies, this spectacularly ambitious sci-fi series at MoMA explores the far reaches of the genre, giving space not only to the usual suspects, like Steven Spielberg and Philip K. Dick (whose novel “A Scanner Darkly” the director Richard Linklater turned into a mind-bending animated film that will show on Tuesday and Wednesday), but also to experimental filmmakers like Michael Snow and Ben Rivers. The first-week highlights include “The Brother From Another Planet” (Monday and next Friday), starring Joe Morton as an alien in New York. The director, John Sayles, will introduce the Monday screening.
212-708-9400, moma.org

JAPAN CUTS: FESTIVAL OF NEW JAPANESE FILM at Japan Society (through July 23). Japan Society’s annual series offers a deep dive into recent Japanese cinema; many of the films shown in past editions haven’t gone on to get distribution in the United States. Highlights of this year’s program include the French-language “Daguerrotype” (Tuesday), named for the 19th-century photographic process, from the prolific director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (“Creepy”); and “Over the Fence” (Thursday), a drama from Nobuhiro Yamashita (“Linda Linda Linda”) that will serve as the festival’s centerpiece. The series closes with a sneak preview of the anime feature “In This Corner of the World” (July 23), adapted from a manga series about life in Hiroshima Prefecture during World War II.
212-715-1258, japansociety.org

SCARY MOVIES X at the Film Society of Lincoln Center (July 14-20). Once a year, when the highbrows at the Film Society are on summer vacation (or, more likely, previewing titles for the New York Film Festival), gorehounds take over the Walter Reade Theater. The programming at this 10th-anniversary edition of Scary Movies blends new horror (the Australian thriller “Killing Ground,” showing in a preview on Saturday) with revivals of some fairly disreputable work, including “Happy Birthday to Me” (Saturday), a 1981 slasher film from J. Lee Thompson (the original “Cape Fear”); “Parents” (Monday), from 1989, in which a boy fears that the leftovers he’s fed at dinner may be human remains; and the 1993 film “My Boyfriend’s Back” (Monday), in which a dead teenager returns as a zombie to take his crush to the prom. Both “Parents” and “My Boyfriend’s Back” are directed by the character actor Bob Balaban, who will attend the screenings.
212-875-5601, filmlinc.org

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