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.

‘THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI’ at Kings Theater, ‘CARNIVAL OF SOULS’ at the Nitehawk Cinema and ‘PHOTOGRAPHING A GHOST’ at Light Industry (Oct. 31). If there’s a theme to this year’s Halloween movie offerings, it’s “silent films in Brooklyn.” At the restored Kings Theater in Flatbush — which doesn’t often show films, despite its history as a movie palace — the German Expressionist landmark “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1920) will screen with live accompaniment from jazz musicians. At the Nitehawk in Williamsburg, the band Long Distance Poison will provide a score for the 1962 cult classic “Carnival of Souls” (which is technically a sound movie, but let’s not nitpick). And Light Industry in Greenpoint will screen early shorts that draw on the prevailing interest in spiritualism at the time they were made. Some of these films use cinema technology to try to disprove the existence of ghosts; others, through movie magic, try to conjure them.
718-856-5464, kingstheatre.com
718-782-8370, nitehawkcinema.com
lightindustry.org

HANK AND JIM at Film Forum (Oct. 27 through Nov. 16). A companion series to a new book about the friendship between Henry Fonda and James Stewart, Film Forum’s retrospective positions the two stars as a study in contrasts — especially in cases when the theater will pair the actors’ movies in double features. Friday offers back-to-back Hitchcock movies: In “Rope,” Mr. Stewart serves as the voice of moral reason while foiling a pair of Leopold-Loeb-like killers’ pre-dinner-party murder; in “The Wrong Man,” Mr. Fonda plays a jazz musician who through a series of cosmically cruel coincidences is mistaken for a holdup man. Saturday provides a dual lesson in civic responsibility: Mr. Stewart is a credit to the Senate in Frank Capra’s “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” and Mr. Fonda shows the virtues of being an open-minded juror in Sidney Lumet’s “12 Angry Men.”
212-727-8110, filmforum.org

HOLY BLOOD: MEXICAN HORROR CINEMA at BAM Rose Cinemas (Oct. 27 through Nov. 2). BAM celebrates Halloween by offering a survey of terrifying films from Mexico, where a strain of Catholicism-inflected, hallucinatory cinema reigned supreme. The highlights include “La Tía Alejandra” (Friday), in which the Luis Buñuel protégé Arturo Ripstein offers his take on witchcraft; “Cronos” (Friday), Guillermo del Toro’s feature debut, centered on an antique dealer (Federico Luppi, who died last week) who acquires an appetite for blood; “Santa Sangre,” the 1989 comeback feature of Alejandro Jodorowsky, the midnight-movie auteur of “El Topo”; and “El Vampiro,” which brings the Dracula legend back to Mexico (where it had already been for a Spanish-language version of the 1930s Universal film).
718-636-4100, bam.org

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