Lakeview Terrace (Starz Edge, Thursday @ 11:20 AM & 7:05 PM)
Neil LaBute's 2008 domestic-peril thriller pits Samuel L. Jackson's despotic beat cop against Patrick Wilson's pampered, lacrosse-scholarship white boy in a tony LA neighborhood, complicated by Wilson's interracial marriage (to Kerry Washington). It works like Fatal Attraction worked because it targets anxiety, and in many ways it's Wilson's film. Though no accomplished actor, he's absolutely convincing doing guileless narcissism and astonished jeopardy, his ridiculously pristine, nearly hairless good looks giving him the aura of a Beverly Hills chihuahua who can't understand why he's being kicked.
Diabolique (IFC, Tuesday @ 9:15 AM & 4:45 PM)
The 1955 French thriller by Henri-Georges Clozout that trumped Hitchcock at his own game. Despite having been ripped off ten thousand times since, it still manages to deliver a spinal shock.
This 1966 world-beater by Monte Hellman takes the promise of anti-western nihilism all the way to the cliff edge; if Hemingway and Camus had decided to spend a drinking week in Utah while making a western, this is what they'd have come back with. Warren Oates as a hard-scrabble trailsman, a young Jack Nicholson as a serpentine assassin, Millie Perkins as a hateful, moneyed Eastern bitch with Penelope Cruz eyes, and Will Hutchins as the blathering innocent earmarked for brutality -- four figures running headlong into a genre maze amid the most intimate and lyrical use of landscape in the history of the western. Unmissable.
Metropolis (Indiepix, Wednesday @ 1:20 AM)
Not the 1927 Fritz Lang film but the 2001 anime supernova, which dazzles and befuddles and then climaxes (with all due ecstacy) in a wholesale urban apocalypse scored to Ray Charles's "I Can't Stop Loving You."
Sweet Smell of Success (HBO Signature, Thursday @ 7:45 AM)
Arguably the gnarliest, darkest, most verbally vicious film noir of all, this 1957 Alexander Mackendrick New York howl of ultra-cool desperation occupies the very low levels of gossip columnists and public relations, with Burt Lancaster as Lord of Reputations and Tony Curtis as the weasel looking for a rope to the top.
Radio Days (Epix, Thursday @ 9:30 AM) Woody Allen has seen career peaks and troughs like few other working filmmakers, but his run in the 1980s was so remarkable that this memoir-comedy -- set in, around, and on top of radio culture as it was experienced by a Coney Island nebbish-kid (Seth Green), among others -- was relatively unsung. It's beginning to look like one of his masterpieces, an enormous canvas of ethnic satire, all-American period flavor, eccentric characters, throwaway gags, high-octane nostalgia, and personal (for Woody) ardor. Repeatable.
Kicked in the Head (Starz Edge, Tuesday @ 3:50 PM)
Amid the '90s indie craze, Matthew Harrison was a die-hard New York moviehead who first made culty waves with his infamous short "Two Boneheads," and got Martin Scorsese to exec-produce this loopy, bughouse day-in-the-life of a New York schnook (the riotously disjointed Kevin Corrigan), who finds himself jobless, homeless and pestered by a bad-news uncle (James Woods), an unwanted girlfriend (Lili Taylor), a cranked buddy (Michael Rapaport) and a troublesome cache of mob coke he can't seem to unload. Filled with running gags and stalking the outskirts of Coen/Tarantino territory (Russian gangsters blurt malapropisms like "What the hell in the fuck does that mean?"), the movie is an unpretentious bender, staggering through its paranoid landscape like a rummy with a bellyful of hootch and no particular place to be.
More 1997 indie firestarting: Gregg Araki's postpunk vision of Tori Spelling-era L.A. is, characteristically for him, in your face, down your throat, and out your ass. The soap operatic narrative contains all the usual elements of apocalyptic teendom: sexual violence, suicidal junkiehood, nihilism, disconnected adults, aliens, and tortured narcissism (the characters all have huge portraits of themselves in their rooms), and Araki amps up the nonsense level with a truckload of witty cameos, including Christopher Knight and Eve Plumb (Peter and Jan Brady) as a gay junkie's Scandinavian parents, plus Traci Lords, Rose McGowan and Shannen Doherty as alien-vaporized valley chicks.
The Baader Meinhof Complex (Showtime Family Zone, Thursday @ 11:05 PM)
Wait... "Showtime Family Zone"? Double check your channel listing, because this not a family film, but in fact a sexy stick of retro-news dynamite, reincarnating the famous '70s Euro-terrorists in all of their bullets-and-bras glory.
See, here the channel designation is correct: this 1978 abomination wasn't meant to be funny, but it is -- when it's not cringe-explosive (Peter Frampton! Bee Gees!) or simply so spectacularly wrong you can't help but wonder if humans in fact made it and not miswired, drink-serving robots.