An auteur of the old mold,Werner Herzog is never boringwhether its Aguerre, Wrath of God.

For most, knowledge of gay Harlem is confined to Judith Butler’s Paris is Burning, but this weeklong series includes documentaries profiling lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde, gay hustler Aaron Payne, bandleader Billy Strayhorn and other lesserknown gay black characters. I’m looking forward to Wolfgang Bausch’s How Do I Look, a 2007 update of Butler’s métier, the Harlem ball.

Israeli short story writer Etgar Keret is a literary superstar in his homeland, garnering accolades from Salman Rushdie and popular support from tens of thousands of readers. Keret writes punchy narratives, usually not longer than a few pages, that generally give a fantastical spin to everyday life.

Etgar Keret: Well, Jellyfish and $9.99 are both collaborations. One of them is with my wife [Israeli artist Shira Geffen], and the other is with Tatia Rosenthal [director of $9.99]. And I think that, whenever you collaborate with a person, it is a meeting point between you and that person. My wife and I, we really like many movies from French directors, so I think that our visual work finds a meeting point there.

The local selections in BAMcinemaFEST would deserve the title “New York Film Festival” if the name weren’t already taken. Instead, these works by younger, emerging filmmakers from the area ought to be grouped as the “New New York Film Festival,” for their collective status as an emerging crowd.

CANNES, PARK CITY,VENICE… Brooklyn? An overabundance of film festivals occurs annually, all exhibiting a subjective sampling of the “best” that cinema has to offer. New York City is just a microcosm of that international scene, with what seems like a film festival programmed for every week of every month.The New York Film Festival showcases safe movies from big-name international filmmakers; the Tribeca Film Festival focuses on precious indies; then there are countless screenings and events catering to ethnic sensibilities, peculiar peccadilloes as well as straight-to-DVD stylings of every niche’s greatest auteur.

Martin Scorsese looked a little out of place against the lavish backdrop of the French Riviera, but the crowd was still happy to have him there. Presenting a special restoration of The Red Shoes to an appreciative audience at the 62nd Cannes Film Festival, Scorsese absorbed the spotlight. “We love you, Marty!” someone with a French accent shouted. “Merci,” he replied. “I love you, too.” It must have been the kindest exchange between a New Yorker and a Frenchman in the history of the universe.

Street of Shame May 1, BAM, 30 Lafayette Ave. (at Ashland Pl.), Brooklyn; times vary, $11 You have to give it to BAM—they know how to program a festival. This one, Late Films, is as simple as

Those sunglasses, that snow-white pompadour… who doesn’t want to spend a “special evening” with Jim Jarmusch? You can talk about Ghost Dog and hanging out with Iggy and Johnny Depp and then later—over Red Stripes—gaze into each other’s eyes.Tonight, however, you’ll have to make do with curator David Schwartz quizzing the seminal indie filmmaker and watching clips of the upcoming film The Limits of Control.

Once a year for 30 years, the good folks at MoMA cast their eyes upon German film.This year in addition to screening new filmsincluding the very interesting looking doc Gegenschuss Aufbruch der Filmmacher,.

CINEPHILIA, MEANING “love of cinema,” has been well served by the extraordinary range of good films released so far this year. As usual, it’s not the big hits or consensus favorites that make a film-lover want to go back to the movies; it’s the films most critics ignore first time around (but that you might catch belatedly on DVD) that confirm why movies matter.

ALTHOUGH BRIAN DE PALMA lost his artistic bearings on the anti–Iraq War bandwagon, director Kathryn Bigelow found her perfect subject.That’s the difference between De Palma’s confused, preachy Redacted and Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. Bigelow (working from a script by Mark Boal) stays focused on the personalities of soldiers during Bravo company’s last 39 days of rotation in 2004 Baghdad.

WHY WASTE SPLEEN on Michael Bay? He’s a real visionary—perhaps mindless in some ways (he’s never bothered filming a good script), but Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is more proof he has a great eye for scale and a gift for visceral amazement. Bay’s ability to shoot spectacle makes the Ridley-Tony-Jake Scott family look like cavemen.

Under Our Skin, the Lyme disease documentary, is a tendentious film primarily interesting to the Lyme community, but its poignancy gives the film a somewhat wider appeal.

Judd Apatow’s raunchiness may go too far but it never goes deep. That’s the problem with Year One, which starts out spoofing prehistory but quickly veers into ridiculing religion. Its prehistoric and Biblical jokes don’t necessarily go together, but the mash-up assumes a derisive attitude toward religious historical belief no different than Apatow’s childish, self-serving, unprincipled approach to sex.

Imagine if Don Quixote tried to write Don Quixote. That kind of complex and quixotic self-exploration defines Alexander Olch’s The Windmill Movie, an extraordinary, if indulgent, documentary about indie filmmaker Richard P. Rogers that opens at Film Forum this week.

Ten years after his great expectoration of bile in Deconstructing Harry, Woody Allen comes up with Whatever Works—the most shameless, cynically titled Hollywood con job since the days of Billy Wilder. Having lost his originality, Allen here reboots the acerbic Deconstructing Harry by mixing in the rancid, misogynistic Mighty Aphrodite. It’s another of his old-goat/younggirl fantasies, but with TV’s Larry David in the know-it-all lecher role and Evan Rachel Wood as the bimbo sexpot. Only this time, Allen’s wet dream is primarily bile, adding little wit and then an avalanche of sentimentality.

The U.S. premiere of Alain Cavalier’s 1962 Le Combat dans L’ile at Film Forum (screening through June 18) resurrects the captivating images of Romy Schneider and Jean-Louis Trintignant, both young, vibrant and emotionally complex in ways actors rarely are anymore.Their classic glamour came back to mind while I watched The Proposal and The Hangover—contemporary movies that use actors in ways that disrespect the audience’s need for big- screen identification.

Co-writer/director Duncan Jones’ debut feature Moon is a modest but nonetheless exciting bit of (derivative) speculative fiction. As the film’s vision of the future is obviously cobbled together from a myriad of sources—most importantly 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris—it only really becomes involving after the first half hour has given us sufficient set-up. Although Jones and co-writer Nathan Parker add nothing novel to the mythic canon they’re working in, they do provide a very satisfying bit of genre falderal, albeit one that’s a little too literal-minded.

TONY SCOTT’S FILMS start from the premise that Americans are bored—and secretly resentful—of their lives. He specializes in violent, fragmented spectacle that feeds this boredom by drowning out subtlety and complexity. Yet, he’s the good Scott; brother Ridley is merely a pretentious windowdresser of big themes. Tony’s best movies (Spy Games, Domino) match hyperactive style to intricate storytelling, which suggests he could probably make a good film if he shook the super-cynical hucksterism out of his system.