Sam Katz is at it again. The trailer for the latest chapter in the mayoral candidate-turned-filmmaker’s amazing series, Philadelphia: The Great Experiment, is out, promising one of the most illuminating, and perhaps controversial, installments yet. (Click here to see previous episodes and webisodes.) 

From the very beginning, Philadelphia has proven itself to be “the testing ground for everything really important that goes on in this nation,” observes Sharon Ann Holt, Executive Director of the New Jersey Humanities Council, and one of the esteemed talking heads to be featured in the trailer – and the film. Episode V covers the city’s history from 1979 to 1994, a time of racial division, marked by  the election of the city’s first African American mayor, the MOVE conflagration, the breaking of the “gentleman’s agreement” on the height barrier, allowing for the skyscraper-ed cityscape we now enjoy, and other dramatic political, cultural and social changes.

Episode V, still being assembled as we speak (if you have archival material, contact Katz) will be broadcast in the fall of 2014. Episode IV, “The Fight – 1965-1977,” is set to be shown June 20 on Channel 6 ABC. In the mean time,  watch the Episode V trailer (below), and be sure to “like” The Great Experiment on Facebook, www.facebook.com/historyofphilly

Raquel Welch in the clutches of a giant pteranodon. Jason, of Jason and the Argonauts, of course, sword-fighting a septet of skeletons. Cyclops and dinosaurs and centaurs, oh my!…. Ray Harryhausen, the genius animator who brought fantastical dinosaurs and demons, ancient gods and giant gorillas to life in some of the greatest fantasy films of the 1950s and 1960s, died Tuesday in London, age 92. A huge influence on several generations of filmmakers (Tim Burton, Peter Jackson, Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro, just about everybody at Pixar, Disney and DreamWorks Animation), Harryhausen apprenticed with King Kong animator  Willis O’Brien and then went on to develop his own sophisticated brand of stop-motion animation, placing his intricately detailed, hand-built models into otherworldly and exotic tableaus. One Million Years B.C., The 7^th Voyage of Sinbad, Mysterious Island, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms – Harryhausen didn’t direct them, but his inventiveness and imagination defined these films.  

Check out the Jason and the Argonauts skeleton battle below.

Ed Koch died in the wee hours of the morning of Friday, February 1^st . He was 88. Later that same day, Koch – Neil Barsky’s endlessly intriguing and illuminating documentary portrait of the three-term New York City mayor – opened in theaters in the city. It’s conceivable that all the front page obituaries and local TV news appreciations gave Barsky’s movie a bump at the box office, but the filmmaker, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and hedge fund exec, isn’t so sure.

“If his intention was to increase box office sales, he should have stayed alive,” says Barsky about the subject  of his fascinating film, playing now at the Ritz Bourse . “He would have been promoting the film. I mean, notwithstanding my own charms, he would have been on,Jon Stewart, on David Letterman... everywhere. He was a real ham.”

That hamminess certainly comes off in the film. Koch, who served as mayor from 1978 to 1989, relished being the center of attention -- and almost sulked when he wasn’t.  But Koch’s ill-timed death caused Barsky, a novice filmmaker, to realize how fortunate he had been.

Colin Firth, who won an Academy Award for The King’s Speech, and Emma Stone, who won the Teen Choice Award for Choice Movie Liplock (for Crazy, Stupid, Love, of course!) have signed on as the leads in Woody Allen’s thus-far-untitled 47^th film, to be shot this summer in the south of France. Although details are few about the Woodman’s latest, it does mark his return to the Continent after shooting his last pic, Blue Jasmine, in San Francisco.. That one, with Cate Blanchett, Alec Baldwin and Sally Hawkins, opens in late July.

After ditching New York City in the mid-aughts to shoot Match Point in London, Allen has made six other films in Europe: Scoop, Cassandra’s Dream and You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger in the U.K., Vicky Cristina Barcelona in Spain, Midnight in Paris in France and To Rome with Love in Italy.  

An inspiring and intoxicating mix of the old and the new, Blancanieves – a Spanish black-and-white silent that takes the Brothers Grimm’s Snow White fable and flips it and spins it, wondrously – snuck into the Ritz Five last week. If you loved how the Oscar-winning The Artist celebrated the spirit and technique of vintage Silent Era classics, you’ll love Blancanieves even more so. Pablo Berger’s playful but perceptive gem is set in 1920s Seville, and tells the tale of Carmen (Sofia Oria as a child, Macarena Garcia as a woman),  raised by her wicked stepmother (Maribel Verdú, of Pan's Labyrinth and Y Tu Mama Tambien fame) and then cast out, presumed killed. But of course Carmen, aka Blancanieves, isn’t dead. Instead, she takes up with a wandering band of dwarf toreadors, learning to fight bulls. Carmen becomes a star, in fact, in the bullring, which doesn’t make her old stepmom very happy.

Dreamy and surreal, gorgeously shot, with a rich and compelling score from composer Alfonso de Vilallonga, Blancanieves pays homage to the Golden Age of European cinema, and revels in the dark magic of fairy tales. It is nothing short of a masterpiece. Four stars out of four stars, it is easily among the year's best films.

42, starring Chadwick Boseman as Brooklyn Dodgers legend Jackie Robinson – the player who shattered Major League Baseball’s color barrier – shattered a box office record, too. The film, with Harrison Ford as Dodgers owner Branch Rickey, scored the best opening weekend numbers -- $27. 4 million – of any baseball-themed motion picture, ever. What’s weird, though, is that the film 42 bumped fropm the top slot is The Benchwarmers, the 2006 screwball comedy starring John Heder, Rob Schneider and David Spade. Its opening weekend grosses: $19.7 million. Who knew? Who can even remember?

Number three on the list is a bit more reputable: Moneyball  (2011), with Brad Pitt, which took in $19.5 million. Rounding out the top five in the baseball box office stats: The Rookie (2002), with Dennis Quaid, at $16 million, and the Geena Davis/Madonna/Tom Hanks all-femme baseball pic, A League of their Own (1992), at $13 million.

The late Roger Ebert once called sad-eyed Buster Keaton “the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies.” On Thursday night, April 18, Not So Silent Cinema – a project created by Philly/Boston composer Brendan Cooney, dedicated to presenting vintage silents with newly minted live musical accompaniment -- will put Ebert’s decree to the test, offering up four early ‘20s Keaton gems: “The High Sign,” “The Goat,” “Cops” and “One Week.”

Cooney, a founding member of the West Philadelphia Orchestra, plays piano for the evening’s screenings, joined by Andy Bergman on clarinet and Kyle Tuttle on banjo. The Not So Silent Trio’s new work for the Keaton shorts is rooted in, yes, American roots music – ragtime, old-timey blues and bluegrass, Klezmer and hot jazz.

These Keaton pieces are absolutely wonderful. In “The Goat” (1921), Buster is mistaken for Dead Shot Dan, a “highly intelligent and kindly faced murderer,” and comic mishaps ensue.   In “The High Sign” (1920) he plays a truly conflicted dude – a drifter hired to operate an amusement park shooting gallery who then gets recruited to both protect a businessman and kill him. The opening inter-title sums up the existential dilemma: “Our Hero came from Nowhere  -- he wasn’t going Anywhere and got kicked off Somewhere.”

Yes, John Doe, Aimee Mann, Loudon Wainwright  and Joe Henry – all in the same movie!  The folks at ‘XPN, in cahoots with the Philadelphia Film Society, have put together a four-day fest of films celebrating music and musicians, and driven by song. One of the highlights has to be Pleased to Meet Me, screening Friday. X-man Doe stars as a rocker whose career has hit the rocks, so to speak (bankruptcy, a lawsuit, writer’s block), and who throws himself into a 24-hour recording session with a group of totally disparate (and a few desperate) players to try to save the day. Mann is the producer who puts Doe’s character, Pete Jones, together with Henry, Wainwright et al. Director Archie Borders, joined by Doe and Wainwright (whose character is a theremin-ist) will be on hand for a post-screening discussion with World Café host David Dye.

Another highlight, also on Friday: a live performance from Future Folk, aka Nils d’Aulaire and Jay Klaitz, stars of The History of Future Folk. The film, an audience award winner at last year’s Philadelphia Film Festival, is an extremely likable low-fi/sci-fi tale about two space aliens who land in Brooklyn, discover music, and start pickin’ and playin’ -- with red buckets on their heads. The movie shows at 6:45pm at World Cafe Live.

Descriptions of all the films and a full schedule can be accessed here.

Les Blank used to screen his 1980 doc, Garlic Is as Good as Ten Mothers, in a unique “format” -- a kind of funky version of Smell-O-Vision. That is, he’d get the film rolling and then start cookin’ up a pot of garlic, letting the aroma waft over the crowd.

Similarly, when Blank showed Always for Pleasure, his 1978 celebration of all things Cajun (the cuisine, the music, the people), he was known to serve up red beans and rice from the back of the house.

There was even a culinary angle to his short 1980 doc, “Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe” – the result of a bet Herzog made with Errol Morris: that Herzog would eat his shoe if Morris ever got around to finishing his pet cemetery doc, Gates of Heaven. Morris did finish, Herzog did eat his shoe (spiced, seasoned and cooked at Chez Panisse, Alice Waters’ famous eatery), and Blank captured the moment on film.