Georges Melies

In conjunction with its "Drawing Dreams" exhibition of the work of production designer Dante Ferretti, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is presenting a program of film clips and speakers titled "Arresting Images" on Thursday at its Samuel Goldwyn Theater. The academy developed the event in cooperation with the Art Directors Guild.

The central image of the luminous, mesmerizing "A Tale of the Wind" (at the Nuart) is that of an elderly man sitting on a chair atop a sand dune in China's Gobi Desert. He is Joris Ivens, renowned 90-year-old Dutch-born documentarian, who is waiting for a wind to come so that he may tame it. This he cannot really do and knows it, but says, "Filming the impossible is what's best in life."

Space Age madness has invaded this column in the form of two very different ongoing exhibitions. Production stills by pioneering film fantasist Georges Melies--best known for the 1902 silent classic "A Trip to the Moon"--are at the Muckenthaler Cultural Center in Fullerton through Oct. 6. And two young artists have put Breeden Gallery's new location in Orange on the map with an evocative interpretation of post-"Star Wars" culture.

OVER the last half-century, Kenneth Anger has emerged as one of the icons of American avant-garde cinema. Endlessly imaginative and original, Anger is also a pioneer in expressing and exploring homoeroticism on screen in ways that are daring and often outrageous but that also elicit an inescapable sense of recognition. Anger's work reveals his fascination with the occult, and he ranges easily from the ethereal to a jangly thicket of pop culture images.

This year's Oscar nominees for cinematography present a particularly varied cross-section of contemporary filmmaking at a time when the very infrastructure of how movies are made and seen is in transition. Consider: 35-millimeter film prints are being phased out in favor of digital projection. Consumer still cameras can be used to shoot high-definition digital video. Video on demand is becoming a popular viewing option. Even the venerable Eastman Kodak, which produces the film stock on which many movies are made, recently filed for bankruptcy protection.

After a few stagnant years, DVD sales have started to slip, and Blu-ray discs, despite the plummeting price of players, have yet to pick up the slack. But the crop of box sets is, if anything, more sumptuous than ever, in both content and presentation. With archivists at studios and indie distributors continuing to dig deeply and inventively, the year's best collections afford ample opportunities for both nostalgia and discovery, for lovers of old Hollywood, art film and classic TV alike.

"Around the World in 80 Days" sails along on a slipstream of pleasant scenery, amusing incident and the boundless charms of its appealing leading men, Jackie Chan and Steve Coogan: It's an unexpectedly buoyant spectacular.

Two new Imax movies arrive just in time for the July 4 holiday--"Across the Sea of Time" today at the Edwards Imax 3-D Theater in the Edwards 21 Megaplex in Irvine and "Special Effects" Thursday at the California Museum of Science and Industry's Imax Theater in Exposition Park. "Across the Sea of Time," in Imax 3-D, imagines a young Russian stowaway (Peter Reznik) landing in New York in hopes of finding family members.

Steven Dunning's touching and incisive "Now Chinatown" screens tonight at 7:30 as part of the American Cinematheque's bimonthly Alternative Screen series at the Egyptian. In the film, the demure, wistful Lee (Lianne X. Hu) has been sent by her parents to Los Angeles to work at a family friend's modest Chinatown restaurant to help support an ailing grandmother back in China.