This Weekend On Cable: From Allen to Zoe, 9 Reasons to Skip the Multiplex

The Karate Kid? Is that the best they can do? If you turn it into a hit, things will never change. It'd be like asking McDonald's to serve lobster when the gristle burgers they already sell buy the board members plenty of private jets already, thank you. You probably don't need to be told, but big-screen LCD TVs can be had for what you'd spend on maybe 12 nights at the movies. Twelve Karate Kids! Plus some cable...

Killing Zoe (IFC, Saturday @ 1:45 AM)

Roger Avary, otherwise known for selling the back-of-the-gun-shop story from Pulp Fiction to Quentin Tarantino and then accepting an Oscar with him, directed this thumpingly anxious bank-robbing saga that same year, trailing Eric Stoltz to Paris where he meets Julie Delpy's hooker/bank clerk and links up with smack-dosed crook buddy Jean-Hughes Anglade. A modestly sized stick of dynamite.

Fahrenheit 451 (TCM, Sunday @ 3:45 PM)

They're planning to remake this Ray Bradbury novel, too, but it'll just be stupid chases. Ah, well. This 1967 version, filmed in England by Francois Truffaut, is an artifact from its period. It's also prophetic; this is a dystopia in which reading books is a frowned-upon habit of the unfashionable past, and people (like Julie Christie's housewife) have more profound relationships with virtual-reality avatars than they do with their spouses. Ouch.

Cradle Will Rock (Indiepix, Saturday @ 10:40 AM & 6:40 PM)

Tim Robbins's 1999 broad-as-a-barn screwball comedy lays out one of American lefty culture's most beloved and exultant sagas: as part of the Roosevelt-era Works Progress Administration, the 1937 Federal Theater production of the pro-labor musical The Cradle Will Rock, directed by a 22-year-old Orson Welles. When it was abruptly shut down before its premiere amid Congressional red-hunting, the operetta was nonetheless performed in a quickly rented theater 21 blocks away (the ticket holders walked en masse) in open defiance of federal mandate, without sets or orchestra, and with the union-bound actors singing their roles from the seats. It's an irresistible scenario, and Robbins plays it like a Marx Brothers movie, with Orson Welles (nicely embodied by Angus Macfadyen) as Groucho and Mercury Theater producer John Houseman (Cary Elwes) as Margaret Dumont. Also in attendance are Hank Azaria, John Turturro, Emily Watson, Bill Murray, John Cusack, Ruben Blades (as Diego Rivera), Susan Sarandon, and so on.

Zelig (HBO Signature, Saturday @ 5:00 AM)

Amid Woody Allen's most fecund period, this 1983 mock-doc satire beat This Is Spinal Tap by a year. It also had a real meal on its plate: the nature of identity in a century of idolatry and personality culture. The phenomenon the film pretends to pick over is the nature of a nebbishy man (Allen) from the '30s who was so empty he would adopt the attributes of whomever was close by (Hitler, Lindbergh) like a chameleon. Plenty of laughs, especially if you're familiar with Susan Sontag and Bruno Bettelheim.

Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson (Encore Western, Saturday @ 8:00 PM)

Robert Altman's idea of a Bicentennial celebration, this grim 1976 parade of mutated history -- focusing almost entirely on the eponymous Wild West show and its cheesily heroic depiction of Native American subjugation -- barely acknowledges the requirements of drama in its disgusted skewering of showbiz prevarications. Easily the least entertaining of Altman's key movies, it's also his most outraged.

La Jetee (IFC, Sunday @ 2:00 PM)

It's only a half-hour long, but it's also one of the world's handful of shorts that are required viewing. Chris Marker's 1962 brooder is a time travel story, filmed almost entirely by way of black-&-white photographs, remade decades later as Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys. Gilliam is fine, but Marker is better.

The Crimson Rivers (Starz Edge, Saturday @ 2:30 AM)

A glossy, gruesome policier, Mathieu Kassovitz's film may be the only French film we've ever seen that owes nothing to French film and everything to American blockbusters - namely the forensic serial-killer thriller wave initiated by The Silence of the Lambs, and David Fincher's Seven in particular. Still, it ends up in an Alpine private school that's the home of deranged nuns, glacier-frozen bodies, some kind of nearly Lovecraftian eugenics conspiracy. Vincent Cassel and Jean Reno are the mismatched cops out of their league.

Wild Oranges (TCM, Sunday @ 12:00)

Not so much forgotten as never regarded at all, this 1924 King Vidor melodrama is a Southern Gothic that predates its own genre (and The Sound and the Fury), in which romance in the bayou is tangled up with a white trash family dominated by a homicidal idiot. Shot on location and bursting with all manner of rat, spider, 'coon and gator, the movie is all atmosphere, particularly during the final hunt through the decaying swamp mansion, where storm winds rip through broken windows and make the hallways as dramatically windswept as a Brontë hilltop. The actors share tight master shots with live alligators, and the brawl that climaxes the film is almost certainly the most convincing and most brutal of the silent era.

The Brothers McMullen (IFC, Saturday @ 3:30 PM)

Does Ed Burns's debut indie hold up? Maybe the most and least you can say for it is that it shared theater time in 1995 with Terry Zwigoff's doc Crumb, and the two scan like good and evil versions of the same mad-family movie: Three dysfunctional brothers with a dead-but-still-hated bully of a Dad wrestle with women and their own obsessions. One culminates in reconciliation, the other suicide, but both know you don't need shotguns or serial killers or computer animation because there's a movie in every family.