Monday Happenings

Arty Beats

-- Beat Research is not just a dance night in Cambridge; it's also a class at MassArt. Once a year, students from the class get the chance to debut their bangers on an actual dance floor. Catch beats, videos, and live performances from MassArt students. It's curated by DJ Flack, who also happens to be the instructor of the class. (Be warned: Beat Research once invented an entirely new genre of dance music.) The Enormous Room, 567 Mass. Ave., Cambridge, 9 p.m. Free.

Movies

-- The HFA continues its Nagisa Oshima retrospective with Band of Ninja (1967), Oshima's only anime. Not much of an animator, when Oshima decided to adapt Sanpei Shirato's samurai revenge tale, he simply filmed the pages of the manga. The effect is eerie yet engrossing. Harvard Film Archive, Carpenter Center, 24 Quincy St., Cambridge, 7 p.m. $8/$6.

-- Over in Brookline, it's an evening of 1930s comedy with the Marx Brothers classic Duck Soup (1933) presented as a double feature with Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933), a depression-era musical that might hit all the right notes in today's economy. Coolidge Corner Theatre, 290 Harvard St., 7 p.m.

Still from Band of Ninja courtesy Harvard Film Archive.