• Tw Li's "Self (Involved) Portrait"

I saw a crowd of onlookers who ranged from scandalized to righteously indignant to cynically amused gather around TW Li's video installation Police Brutality Grid when it showed in September at Margin Gallery.

Li's video, photography and performance aggressively lampoon systems of control and the impact of technology on daily interaction. His work shows in Noble & Superior Projects' In(di)visible exhibition, which opens Friday 11/20.

• Matthew Mascheri's "Second City" from DomeFest 2008

Highlights from DomeFest, the annual Albuquerque competition of full-dome video art, screen Thursday 11/19 at part of "The End of the World," this month's installment of the Adler Planetarium's Adler After Dark program.

The six-source HD video is projected in a 360 degree environment on the 2,300 square foot dome in the Adler's Definiti Space Theater.

• Doug Lussenhop aka Douggpound

Eric Wareheim of Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! and former Chicagoan Doug Lussenhop, AKA DJ Douggpound, curate Surprises!, the first of two opening night video programs for the Public Media Institute's Select Media Festival 8 at Heaven Gallery.

Surprises! includes Wareheim's video for Major Lazer's "Pon De Floor," Lussenhop's for Juiceboxx's "100 MPH," Jake Kasdan's for The Bird and the Bee's "Diamond Dave," Eric Fensler's for Cass McCombs and Ariel Pink, Ray Tintori's very creepy video for MGMT's "Kids," and Tim & Eric's pilot for the Neil Hamburger game show The New Big Ball.

• William Lyman Grant in "Frontwards"

William Lyman Grant "stumbles through the wreckage of labored reunions, unsure infatuation, drunken nonsense, and the barren wastelands of North Dakota" in the DIY comedy Frontwards, premiering Thursday 11/19 at the Portage Theater.

• Tony Leung Chiu-Wai in "Red Cliff"

After 16 years in Hollywood, Hong Kong action auteur John Woo made his triumphant return to Asian production with the two-part Chinese historical war epic Red Cliff, the first half of which was the most expensive and most successful film in Asia, ever, on its release last year.

The Western release, a condensed version that combines the two parts, has a free preview screening Monday 11/16 at Landmark's Century Centre.

• Nadia Oussenko in "On Falling..."

The dance films Arch of Repose by Jan Bartoszek and On Falling... by Nadia Oussenko, which sold out their Wednesday premiere at the Music Box, get an encore screening Friday 11/13 at Alliance Francaise of Chicago.

• Maestro Harrell plays Pimp D in "Lowering the Bar."

A comedy set in an alternative high school featuring Maestro Harrell (Randy on The Wire) and improv juggernaut TJ Jagodowski, Kenneth Yoder's Lowering the Bar won this year's Chicago Comedy TV Pilot Competition.

Lowering the Bar is one 26 short films and videos screening Saturday 11/14 in MoFest 5.

• "The Wall"

East German artist Jürgen Böttcher, also known as Strawalde, went to work for the state film production company DEFA after his paintings were ideologically blacklisted in the 1950s.

He captured the deconstruction of the Berlin Wall and the ghostly operations of disarmed border guards in his 1990 documentary The Wall, playing Thursday 11/12 as part of the the Goethe-Institut Chicago's free screening series Made Behind the Wall: Masterpieces of East German Cinema.

• Viggo Mortensen in "The People Speak"

Rapper Lupe Fiasco and actor Michael Ealy (Barbershop 1 & 2) perform live readings alongside author and filmmaker Anthony Arnove, who screens excerpts from his documentary The People Speak, Wednesday 11/11 at Northwestern.

Arnove adapted the film from the book Voices of a People's History of the United States, which he cowrote with Howard Zinn. It's free and "open to members of the Northwestern University community."

Doc Films will host a free preview screening of Werner Herzog's giddy, frequently hilarious cop thriller Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. Producers Gabe and Alan Polsky will take questions after the screening, which begins at 9 PM on Tuesday, November 10, at the Max Palevsky Cinema, 1212 E. 59th Street.

Animator Alexander Stewart and Boxstep frontman Eric Graf attempt to capture a live, public version of the viral video experience with YouTube Assembly, Tuesday 11/10 at the Nightingale.

The hosts will trade projected YouTube clips and solicit audience commentary, "In the spirit of the popular YouTube interface, except out loud and in real time with no anonymity."

• "Great American Desert"

A staged celebration of the Hiroshima bombing and a seasonal camp of RV drivers share the Arizona landscape in British filmmaker Stephen Connolly's 2007 short film Great American Desert, invoking, Connolly says, "an examination of ‘social liberty’ in the West in relation to war, spectacle, the environment and consumerism."

Great American Desert screens in "Occasional Pieces," a selection of Connolly's short films and videos Saturday 11/7 at the Nightingale

• "Youssou N'Dour: I Bring What I Love"

Youssou N'Dour: I Bring What I Love plays a discounted screening courtesy of Black World Cinema, a day ahead of a weeklong run.

Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi's tribute to the iconic Senegalese singer and activist screens Thursday 11/4 at Chatham 14.

• George Clooney in "The Men Who Stare at Goats"

The Men Who Stare at Goats officially opens in a midnight screening Thursday 11/5, but if you can't wait that long, Gen Art hosts a preview screening and after-party with hosted drinks, Wednesday 11/4.

• "The Pool"

Before the ubiquity of reality TV, Chris Smith and Sarah Price set the standard for tragicomic portraits of quixotic dreamers with American Movie, their 1999 documentary about would-be horror auteur and fellow Wisconsinite Mark Borchardt.

The film's cult status launched Borchardt's acting career. But even after winning a 2007 Sundance Special Jury Prize, Smith struggled to find distribution for The Pool, his wry and touching fiction debut about a poor Indian teen who takes a pool cleaning job to spy on the rich girl he pines for, and maintains a veneer of optimism for his younger friend despite their abject circumstances.

The Pool screens Tuesday 11/3 in the Midwest Independent FIlm Festival.

• "The Principal Story"

"We're sinking all this money into the war and into pork barrel projects, it's unbelievable to me that we don't invest in our education system," local filmmaker Tod Lending told me in a 2008 interview, during production on his documentary The Principal Story. "That's where the culture grows out of."

The principals Lending and co-director David Mrazek follow in the film face problems originating far beyond their school walls, in the poverty, malnutrition, crime and family dysfunction of their surrounding communities. But their passion and commitment have allowed them to make progress in turning around struggling schools on the west side and in Springfield.

The Principal Story screens for free Tuesday 11/3 at No Exit Café.

• "The Yes Men Fix the World"

Clean-cut pranksters The Yes Men, who last week falsely announced on behalf of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce that the chamber had reversed its opposition to pollution controls, have made a career of impersonating corporate suits to shine a light on the excesses of globalization.

Lumpen magazine hosts a workshop with the Yes Men Thursday 10/29 to plan an action that will follow the Chicago premiere of their film The Yes Men Fix the World Friday 10/30 at the Music Box Theater.