Ford Free Friday Nights. The St. Louis Art Museum presents music and movies the first Friday of each month. This month's film is Places in the Heart (1984). An old-fashioned populist drama with a timeless feel, Places in the Heart is both simple and familiar: Young widow (Sally Field), left unexpectedly without husband or income, fights to keep family intact and home afloat in Depression-era rural Texas. Aiding Field is a ragtag coalition of relations, blind boarder (John Malkovich) and black drifter-cum-farmhand (Danny Glover). The widow-in-distress plot is inarguably encrusted with clichés, but writer/director Robert Benton chips away to reveal the soft, still-vital center, and he avoids bathos by keeping a hard, realistic edge. Plays at 7:30 p.m. Dec. 7 at the St. Louis Art Museum auditorium. (CF)
Images of a Country that Never Sleeps: A Festival of New Greek Cinema. Webster University presents a showcase of Greek films released from 1998-2000. All dramatize contemporary life, are in Greek with English subtitles and play one time only. The festival concludes this week with three films. It's a Long Road, directed by Pantelis Voulgaris, is a series of three vignettes set in Thrace, Macedonia and Vietnam; it plays Dec. 7. Dimitris Stravrakas's The Canary Yellow Bicycle, which plays Dec. 8, is the story of a teacher who decides to help an illiterate boy, only to have his gesture negated by fellow teachers, the boy's parents and other children. Cheap Smokes, directed by actor-turned-director Renos Haralambidis, is a romantic comedy with a revolving cast of quirky characters and plays Dec. 9. Films start at 7 p.m. at Webster University. NR
