This Week On Cable: Meet Me at the River's Edge

From an Oscar-nominated glimpse at German radicals to a gorgeous '80s catastrophe to the punk classic that keeps on giving after a quarter century, the week in not-to-be-missed cable movies looks like 55 kinds of tumult and chaos. Read on for the most TiVoable essentials.

The appearance of the bundle-of-dynamite portrait of supercool Euro-terrorism, The Baader-Meinhof Complex, on Showtime 2 (Tuesday, 12:30 PM) is just the craziest flag waving. Tonight, if you have the Starz tendril Indiepix, there's more docudrama bloodshed with Alex Cox's immolating punk classic Sid & Nancy at 9:00 PM, followed up like one shot of rainbarrel whiskey after another by Tim Hunter's River's Edge (2:00 AM on Epix). Based on a true story of murder and modern teenage soullessness, the film is perhaps best known as the first real glimpse we had of Keanu Reeves, emerging from a pack of brain-dead northeastern teens as the one crispy pothead with a conscience. If there's stomach lining left, the rarely-screened Al-Jolson-as-happy-Depression-hobo musical Hallelujah I'm a Bum can be found later tonight on TCM (5:00 AM). For all of its startling sunniness, it still survives as a vision of American society on the brink of entropy.

HBO Signature is unveiling Pablo Larrain's Tony Manero (2008) (Wednesday, 1:00 AM), a Chilean gutter-wallow giving voice to the Pinochet coup of the '70s while intersecting with Taxi Driver as much as Saturday Night Fever The result is a slow slide into a sociopathic fallout not often seen in American movies anymore.

Collapses into inevitable mayhem are a time-honored and irresistible structure for modern movies. Few films took the idea to the wall -- and did it by way of distorted history -- as lovingly as 1980's Heaven's Gate (Epix, Wednesday at 2:00 AM). In its original, nearly four-hour form, the film plays like an opium vision of American bloodshed, recreating and ballooning the Johnson County Wars (cattle barons and their private armies vs. starving immigrants) into a self-mythologizing prophecy of corporate mercilessness. The lie of frontier idealism is debunked, and Vilmos Zsigmond's mistily gorgeous cinematography is virtually an act of mourning in and of itself.

Amid the corpses of blockbusters we'd rather forget we ever saw, Showtime 2 is also exhuming Joe Dante's never-appreciated kiddie-sci-fi fantasy from 1985, Explorers (Wednesday, 12:30 PM). It features both River Phoenix and Ethan Hawke as friends who build a backyard spaceship and fly it into the UFO orbit of the most inventive alien creature ever devised in the Spielberg '80s. This hyperactive anti-ET with a non-stop mouth and a brain full of stray Earth television signals is embodied by Robert Picardo in what is certainly his career peak, if not Phoenix's or Hawke's.