Crosstown Theater

Like a quasar burning past the gaslight, director Lisa Cortés’ eye-opening documentary explodes the whitewashed canon of American pop music. Little Richard: I Am Everything shines a clarifying light on the Black, queer origins of rock ’n’ roll, and establishes the genre’s big bang: Richard Wayne Penniman.

John Cassavetes’ hymn to that berserk business of performing, Opening Night is enhanced by its intense “old Hollywood” pedigree as Ben Gazzara, John Blondell, Paul Stewart and Cassavetes himself are the backing band for Rowlands’ knife-edged soloing.

A girl on the verge of womanhood finds herself in a sensual fantasyland of vampires, witchcraft, and other threats in this eerie and mystical movie daydream. Valerie and Her Week of Wonders serves up an endlessly looping, nonlinear fairy tale, set in a quasi-medieval landscape.

Serial Mom is a 1994 American black comedy written and directed by John Waters. Happy housewife Beverly Sutphin has a charmed life — a beautiful suburban home, a successful dentist husband, and two normal teenagers. However, when one of her son’s teachers speaks disparagingly of the boy at a parent-teacher conference, Bev runs the instructor over in the school parking lot.

One of the most thrilling movie epics of all time, Seven Samurai (Shichinin no samurai) tells the story of a 16th-century village whose desperate inhabitants hire the eponymous warriors to protect them from invading bandits.