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July is the month when the anniversaries of successful political uprisings in Canada, France and the United States are joyfully celebrated by millions. So what better time than July to immerse yourself in two exhibitions in New York City that take the theme of revolution to heart? Revolutionary Film Posters, at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery, is a comprehensive exhibition of Russian film posters made from 1920 to 1933. The show includes multiple masterpieces by the Stenberg brothers (Georgii and Vladimir) and Alexander Rodchenko—and, as an added bonus, one of three existing models of Vladimir Tatlin's Monument to the Third International, a never-built 1,300-foot-tall tower that itself only existed as a scale model, yet nevertheless became one of the most celebrated works of revolutionary art in the 20th century. The second exhibition, Seeing Red: Hungarian Revolutionary Posters, 1919, at The Museum of Modern Art, collects posters from three of Hungary's most important graphic artists: Sándor Bortnyik, Bertalan Pór and Mihály Biró, whose red-hammer-hoisting figure was plastered all over Budapest in the years immediately after World War I, eventually becoming a potent political symbol to which fans of Shepard Fairey's "Hope" poster can certainly relate.

An antidote to the season of blockbuster sequels, the rollicking film festival Japan Cuts presents 32 new movies—blood-and-guts samurai flicks (Sword of Desperation), chicks-with-guns shoot-'em-ups (Yakuza Weapon) and finely detailed animation cinema (Osamu Tezuka's Buddha)—at Japan Society from July 7 to 22. Gladstone Gallery is also showing movies throughout the month, as part of its exhibition The Unfinished Film. Every weekday at 3pm, the gallery will play incomplete, fragmented films—whether deliberately unfinished, abandoned out of frustration or cut short by death or for financial reasons—such as Hollis Frampton's Magellan, Erich von Stroheim's Queen Kelly and others by the Maysles brothers (Albert and David), Jean-Luc Godard, Sergei Eisenstein and Pier Paolo Pasolini.

A trio of strong group shows this month pivots around social interaction and collective action. Taking Shape, an exhibition of sculptural works over the past 37 years, at Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, in SoHo, includes pieces by Joseph Beuys, Roxy Paine and Chris Burden that highlight the oppositional, and complementary, forces between civilization and nature. Interventions in the Landscape, at Galerie Lelong, in Chelsea, explores similar territory using photography and film by Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others. Meanwhile, The Women in Our Life, an exhibition celebrating the 15th anniversary of Cheim & Read, collects seminal pieces from 10 influential female artists on the Chelsea gallery's roster: Jenny Holzer, Louise Bourgeois, Alice Neel, Lynda Benglis, Diane Arbus, Chantal Joffe, Ghada Amer, Louise Fishman, Joan Mitchell and Pat Steir.

The Lower East Side–based Rachel Uffner Gallery riffs on a summer fashion staple with Summer Whites, on view through July 29. The group show includes different practices and disciplines—large-scale figurative painting, minimalist sculpture, photography—to illustrate that the neutral-seeming color can reveal just as much as it hides. The artists include Sol LeWitt, whose Cube on an Octagon was completed two years before his death in 2007; David Benjamin Sherry, who has an anticipated show coming up at James Fuentes Gallery in September; Ryan Wallace, whose Tablet 8 treats the painting surface as a plane that holds information; and Keegan McHargue, who contributed a small sculpture composed of re-created detritus. At the nearby Thierry Goldberg gallery, German painter Katrin Heichel has installed a set of paintings that focus on a more urban detritus—with dryly composed depictions of construction sites, street gutters and chain-link fences that hint at a former, and future, life—subtly entitled Pure Love. Ed Templeton's show at Half Gallery is more direct: Teenage Kissers collects more than a decade's worth of the artist's candid street photography, organized around a single, eternal and summertime-approved theme: young people in love.