Our guide to film series and special screenings. All our movie reviews are at nytimes.com/reviews/movies.
INAUGURATION OF THE DISPLEASURE DOME: COPING WITH THE ELECTION (Jan. 20-24) at Anthology Film Archives and AUTOCRATIC FOR THE PEOPLE: AN UNPRESIDENTED SERIES OF STAR-SPANGLED SATIRES at IFC Center (through April 2). New York’s revival programmers aren’t taking the inauguration quietly. Anthology Film Archives has put together a scorching bill of movies about dissent and dystopia. These include Peter Watkins’s “Punishment Park” (Jan. 22 and 24), from 1971, in which antiwar protesters must choose between prison sentences and a dangerous desert trek, and Robert Kramer’s riveting “Ice” (Jan. 21-22). Released in 1970, Mr. Kramer’s speculative procedural, influenced by the documentaries of that era, imagines the mechanics and distrustful infighting of a coalition of activist groups plotting violent action against an American government at war in Mexico. Elsewhere in the city, the Autocratic for the People series at IFC Center continues this week with Ernst Lubitsch’s “To Be or Not to Be” (Jan. 20-22), from 1942, in which Jack Benny — as the self-proclaimed “great, great Polish actor Joseph Tura” — leads his troupe in a Nazi-foiling charade.
212-505-5181, anthologyfilmarchives.org
212-924-7771, ifccenter.com
BASED ON A BOOK BY PATRICIA HIGHSMITH at the Metrograph (through Jan. 23). Chance encounters — whether on trains (“Strangers on a Train,” Jan. 20 and 23) or in department stores (“Carol,” Jan. 22) — may be something of a hallmark of movies made from Ms. Highsmith’s novels, but this retrospective also offers an opportunity to consider the range of textures and approaches her fiction has inspired. It’s hard to imagine that the same Tom Ripley, a recurring character in her books, who was embodied so suavely by Alain Delon in “Purple Noon” (Jan. 21) and guardedly by Matt Damon in “The Talented Mr. Ripley” (Jan. 20), both taken from the same novel, could also be the grungy art-world scammer played by Dennis Hopper in Wim Wenders’s knotty, morally ambiguous “The American Friend” (Jan. 22).
212-660-0312, metrograph.com
‘PANIQUE’ at Film Forum (Jan. 20 through Feb. 2). A murder roils an ever-chattering, tight-knit Paris suburb. But Monsieur Hire (Michel Simon), a bearded, reflective outcast regarded warily by his neighbors, saw whodunit — and confronts the lover (Viviane Romance) of the man responsible (Paul Bernard). But with the residents already leery, the pair endeavors to cast suspicion on Hire. The allegory is thick and the camera movements are vertiginous in this bleak, slow-burning 1947 noir from Julien Duvivier, adapting a 1933 novel by Georges Simenon, in what plays like an unusually direct indictment of wartime anti-Semitism in France.
212-727-8110, filmforum.org