Film

What if we could heal our economic woes, reduce unemployment to less than 1 percent, and solidify America's position as the world's greatest financial and military power? What if we could do it all in only a handful of years? That's the utopian world offered in The Purge , a riveting, thoughtful psychological thriller starring Ethan Hawke ( The Woman in the Fifth ) and Lena Headey ( Game of Thrones ) which opens Friday. The Purge is set in an America that has instituted a simple formula for achieving economic success: Cull the population once a year, cutting out (killing)

The weeds are sky-high in Times Square. Deer run the avenues, hopscotching around abandoned cars. Mass graves fill Central Park. Manhattan, in the year 2012, is a ghost town. Not even Rudy Giuliani could save the place. But maybe Will Smith can. In I Am Legend , a big-budget adaptation of Richard Matheson's 1954 sci-fi novel (and two film versions: the 1964 Last Man on Earth and the 1971 Charlton Heston-starring Omega Man ), Smith plays Robert Neville, a military scientist who seems to be the last man in Manhattan.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan - Pakistan deployed its army to protect diplomatic missions in Islamabad on Thursday amid some of the most sustained and violent protests yet against an American-made film that denigrates Muhammad. "We have to do everything we can to protect foreigners in the country," Information Minister Qamar Zaman Kaira told the GEO television channel, criticizing violence he said was an attempt to sabotage the government's call for peaceful rallies Thursday. "Is this the way to show respect to our Prophet?"

It's impossible. It's exhilarating. It's a quick fix. It's total immersion. It's that strange beast known as a film festival, a time to be surprised and startled, provoked and transported - and on occasion, to be bored or enraged. And it's a time to tear around town with your dog-eared, marked-up program guide - or your thumb-smeared calendar app - hustling to get to the next screening before the theater lights go dark. The 21st Philadelphia Film Festival began Thursday night with one of the strongest opening entries ever, and certainly the most Philly-centric: David O. Russell's Silver Linings Playbook . (The raw and rollicking Bradley Cooper/Jennifer Lawrence dramedy romance starts its theatrical run Nov. 21.)

Bridgeton, N.J., is poised for its second annual one-day/one-film food festival, April 21, with a screening of Like Water for Chocolate , director Alfonso Arau's 1992 film based on the novel by Laura Esquivel. Eventgoers will be treated to a beer/wine tasting with appetizers before the film, and a full-course dinner and dessert after it, with a meal inspired by the foods in the movie story line and produced by local restaurateur-experts in Mexican cuisines. Traditional Mexican music and a cooking demonstration round out the evening at the Ashley McCormick Center, a former furniture emporium on East Commerce Street.

The man responsible for bringing the controversial film, "Hail, Mary," to Philadelphia pondered the dozen religious protesters who were praying the rosary on the street below and felt a certain sense of relief. "We think this is the easier part now," film programmer Ray Murray, a Roman Catholic, said yesterday afternoon in his second-floor office as the French movie began a one-week run at the Theatre of the Living Arts on South Street. "We've been under a lot of tension with the letters and calls . . .," Murray said.

The people behind the selling of the movie "The Last Temptation of Christ" are hoping the good word from the nation's movie critics will keep the box office humming. Although Universal Pictures refuses to talk about the marketing of the movie, it's clear that the studio is shunning TV advertising in favor of a low-profile newspaper campaign to reach the movie's target audience and to cool opposition to the film. And one industry observer speculated that to counter the outcry against the film, the company had been forced to spend more on advertising than it wanted.

Color film is expensive and getting more so. Several years ago, market manipulations pushed silver prices to $50 an ounce, and manufacturers of film and paper escalated prices sharply. Now that silver is back to less than $10 an ounce, film and paper prices keep going up, with no ceiling in sight. One way to economize on film is to buy in volume. A roll of Kodachrome 36's costs $7 list, but if you buy 20 rolls at a time almost any dealer will give you a discount, and of course if you buy a case, 300 rolls, some will cut the price further and even store it for you. Buying film in quantity from discounters is not a bad idea, because lower prices ensure rapid turnover of stocks, meaning that you will be getting fresh film, not something that has been gathering dust on the shelf.

It begins with teenagers drinking "just for fun. " It ends in death. During a 13-minute color video, a car carrying a drunken driver and his friend veers out of control on a narrow, County Line Road bridge. The car strikes a guardrail and flips onto its roof. Workers from the Horsham Township Volunteer Fire Company and Rescue Squad rush to the scene and perform lifesaving emergency procedures. But the teenagers die. The video, which took volunteers from local school districts and businesses two years to make, simulates the dangers of drunken driving in an effort to dissuade teenagers from making fatal mistakes, one of the producers said.

You don't have to be a fan of environmental Vice President-elect Al Gore to enjoy Tropical Rainforest, the Franklin Institute's new film, opening in the Omniverse Theater Nov. 20 for a seven-month run. The movie will bring to four-story life the flora and fauna of some of the world's rain forests. You'll see a blue Ulysses butterfly emerging from its chrysalis; leaf-cutting ants marching across a log with their bounty; pythons looking you in the eye and more. The film also focuses on recent destruction of some of these fragile environments.