Naranjas California… Love is hard in I Am Cuba (Photo: Milestone Films)

This weekend's worthwhile cinematic happenings around New York:

--"Soy Cuba." That is the way it starts, and that is pretty much how I Am Cuba makes you feel as it lilts from one shot to the next through the cities and plantations of pre-revolutionary Cuba. The first and only Soviet-Cuban co-production, Mikhail Kalatozov's 1964 jaw-dropper yields a handful of stories dramatizing the era's cultural, sexual and economic exploitation and the subsequent rebellion that lifted Fidel Castro to power. As propaganda alone, the film survives as a curio worth a look for its social-realist edge. But as pure cinema, I Am Cuba employs enough trick shots, narrative switchbacks and lighting stunts to make you view the subway ride home in roiling black and white.

Along with a new print of I Am Cuba, Film Forum features Vincente Ferraz's making-of documentary I Am Cuba: The Siberian Mammoth. In all honesty, you could do worse than Ferraz's chronicle, which revisits both Soviet and Cuban cast and crew members forty years later to both recover their impressions and share the international triumph I Am Cuba has since become. But you could also do a hell of a lot better; Ferraz offers virtually no background on the film's technical achievements, and namechecks Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola as I Am Cuba's saviors without sharing their individual perspectives on what makes the film great. Anyhow, I would never encourage movie-hopping (never never never!), but if you ever feel impelled to make your own double feature, this might be a good time. Think Cuban—expropriate it!

--Garbo, this, Garbo that—everybody has Greta Garbo on their minds this month as they commemorate the centenary of her birth. Foremost among the Swedish siren's New York admirers are the lovely people at the Scandinavia House, who launch their three-month Forever Garbo retrospective tomorrow on Park Avenue. The series starts with Camille and ends appropriately enough in December with that earth-shattering closing shot from Queen Christina. The museum will also display a collection of rare Garbo photos and memorablilia in a separate exhibiton through November 12. But do remember to drink a toast and have a piece of cake Sunday, Garbo's big 1-0-0.

--The Complete Billy Wilder continues at the Museum of the Moving Image with Ray Milland's Oscar-winning turn in The Lost Weekend. As an East Sider, I am always moved thinking of the sprained arm Milland sustained trying to hock his character's typewriter in the shadow of the Third Avenue El, his getting wasted at P.J. Clarke's, his encounter with the Yorkville clock, so on and so forth. Very romantic, let me tell you. The film may not be Wilder's best or worst, but does it have to be? Well, I guess maybe if you are A.O. Scott.