Film

Andiamo, everybody. The Senator Theatre, in conjunction with the Little Italy Restaurant Association and the community of Little Italy, will kick off an open-air Italian film festival tonight in the parking lot at High and Stiles streets.The program of the festival, which will unspool over consecutive Friday nights this summer, has yet to be determined, but tonight's show will be a screening of "Heart and Soul," a rarely-seen film from the late 1940s by Vittorio DeSica ("Shoeshine," "The Bicycle Thief")

The film world suffered a loss with the recent death of comic actor Jim Varney. Varney might have made his reputation with the idiotic "Ernest" movies, but his last film performance was no doubt his most inspired. In "Existo," he plays a member of a manic performance art group trying to do battle with the forces of Christian fundamentalism. The film, which had its Baltimore premiere last year at MicroCineFest and returns Saturday to the Charles Theatre for a limited run, is filled with indelible moments, among them star Bruce Arnston hopping around on a pogo-stick that resembles a part of the male anatomy.

"Gimme Shelter" is landmark filmmaking on many levels. It's a devastating piece of social history, documenting The Rolling Stones' infamous 1969 concert at San Francisco's Altamont Speedway - a concert that included a gun-wielding man being stabbed and bludgeoned to death by the Hell's Angels, and that served notice that the era of Peace and Love was over. "Gimme Shelter" even captures the stabbing on film. Musically, it's a portrait of the youthful Stones - Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were in their mid-20s at the time - at their scabrous best, roaring through such classics as "Sympathy for the Devil"; "Under My Thumb"; and "Jumpin' Jack Flash."

PHOTOS DEPICTING everyday life - a woman pushing a stroller, friends playing, a couple in an embrace: The images are common, but in the context of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum they form a striking figure covering the inner walls of a tower three-stories high. These images, 1,500 of them, of a town called Eishyshok before a Nazi invasion became the impetus for filmmaker and Oakland Mills resident Jeff Bieber to produce the film "There Once Was a Town." The documentary, which tells the stories of four Holocaust survivors and their pilgrimage to their childhood home of Eishyshok (then a city in Poland and now part of Lithuania)

AUSTIN, Texas -- The phone is ringing. Again."Hi, Robert . . . !"Robert -- Robert Rodriguez, the 24-year-old filmmaker whose "El Mariachi" has cast him as Hollywood's newest Boy Wonder -- lets the answering machine take the call. The voice of Hollywood rings out."You did a fantastic job on the script. Just great. We'll wait to hear from the guys at Columbia." The voice is that of Mr. Rodriguez's agent at International Creative Management.The day before, Mr. Rodriguez express-mailed the screenplay for his sequel to "El Mariachi," the movie he wrote, directed and co-produced on summer break after his senior year at the University of Texas.

HOLLYWOOD -- In light of the death of one teen-ager and critical injuries to two others, the Walt Disney Co. said yesterday it will take the virtually unprecedented action of removing the scene the young men apparently imitated from a feature film.The scene in the current movie "The Program" shows college football players attempting to prove their mettle by lying in the middle of a highway as cars whiz by. It will be removed Friday and the film's coming-attraction trailers will be pulled from theaters, the studio said.

When a movie has barely made back half its cost - especially when it's a big-budget film that was supposed to be one of the so-called tent poles of the summer schedule - drastic measures are called for. The AMC theater chain, faced with an under-performing film that its top brass think deserves better, is offering a money-back guarantee on Cinderella Man, director Ron Howard's take on the underdog career of Depression-era boxer James J. Braddock....

Woody Allen: A Life in Film, by Richard Schickel. Ivan R. Dee Inc. 224 pages. $22.50. Sometime later this month, the 33rd feature film written and directed by Woody Allen - "Anything Else" - will be released. Most likely a few critics will praise it, many will express ambivalence and some will dismiss it as irrelevant. And American filmgoers will simply ignore it. For the noted movie critic and author Richard Schickel, this scenario represents the continued and unfortunate estrangement between Allen and American audiences.

Moviegoers who check out Seabiscuit during its engagement at The Senator will see a bonus available at no other theater, a six-minute compilation of vintage Fox Movietone newsreel clips showing Seabiscuit's famous match race against Maryland-bred War Admiral, as well as footage of the great thoroughbred at the dedication of a statue in his honor and in retirement, siring future champions. Senator owner Tom Kiefaber secured the rights to the footage from Fox and received the finished compilation on Tuesday.

The Carroll County Arts Council will hold its second annual series of award-winning international films next month. Films will be shown at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Fridays. Tickets are $5 for adults and $4 for council members, those ages 60 and older and children ages 12 and younger. Subscriptions to the series are $17 for adults and $13 for others. Scheduled movies are: Feb. 4: Osama, from 2003, in Pashtu with English subtitles; rated PG-13. Osama was the first Afghan film to be made since the end of the Taliban regime.