The Museum of Modern Art is honoring the centennial of Rex Harrison. Tall, crisp, and capable of being snide and downright nasty in a way that only enhanced his seductiveness, nobody did sly like sexy Rexy. The programming, which mixes camp giggles such as Cleopatra and King Richard and the Crusaders with prestige bloat-a-thons such as The Agony and the Ecstasy and My Fair Lady, may be too true a picture of how much of this time on movie soundstages was not ideally spent, but the important thing is that it does include his most wonderful film performance in his greatest movie, the beyond-suave superstar conductor whose jealous suspicions towards his young wife (Linda Darnell) turn him into a whirling dervish in Preston Sturges's Unfaithfully Yours.

Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (1963), the director's heh-heh "commercial" movie, returns to the Film Forum for a two-week run, from March 14-27. Produced by Carlo Ponti and the uncredited Joseph E. Levine, with a cast led by Brigitte Bardot, Michel Piccoli, Jack Palance (as an overbearing movie producer), and Fritz Lang as his own bad self, working from the base of a best-selling Alberto Moravia novel and with an actual budget, Godard contrived to turn out one of the strangest and orneriest movies of his not exactly self-effacing career. Long considered a weird misfire, the movie inspired a number of Godard-watchers and other movie lovers to reconsider its qualities after it was revived at the Forum back in 1997; maybe this is going to become some kind of once-a-decade revival rituals. Terrence Rafferty recently used this latest engagement to grapple with the picture in the pages of The New York Times.

The Film Society of Lincoln Center's "Infernal Machines: The Films of Kim Ki-Young" (March 12 – 18) tips its hat to a maverick Korean filmmaker whose work made him a inspiration to many of the newer directors who have been behind the current Korean New Wave. Richard Pena describes him as an "instinctual artist" who "always seems ready to abandon correct or tasteful form for a powerful visual or aural effect. The rawness of the emotions on screen is more than matched by the directness of his cinematic style." Kim's audacity as a filmmaker may have been too much for the Korean film industry, which basically drove him out of the business by the mid-1980s. He was rediscovered and even returned to filmmaking in the mid-1990s but died in 1998.