This Weekend on Cable: A Midsummer Night's Mad Max

Summer is finally here, for real, and just as you might drink and/or dress with the seasons, movies can nitro your vibe, if you know where to look. Cable programmers tend to think with the weather, too, and summertime means more out of the multiplex than hundred-million-dollar blockbusters...

Mad Max (IFC, Saturday @ 8:00 PM)

A prime choice for Father's Day weekend, restored to its original Aussie accents, this 1979 10-minutes-into-the-nasty future road movie still is the quintessential action classic fashioned from little money but pounds of filmmaking smarts (courtesy of director George Miller), untold miles of barren highway landscape, and a few volatile gallons of unstable petrol. Mel Gibson's career survived that haircut.

A Midsummer Night's Dream (TCM, Friday @ 6:00 PM)

Shakespeare by way of Warner Bros. and German-Expressionist theater director Max Reinhardt, circa 1935, but whatever is Shakespearean in this odds-bodkins Hollywood cocktail is not at all what makes it unique and indelible. That would be the simultaneously chintzy and cosmic visions of dancing faerie children ascending a circular stairway of mist (roping around a giant elm) straight into the Milky Way, of goblins parading through the moonlit birches, of a satyr carrying a swooning sprite into the night sky and submerging into it as if into a lake of oil, only her arms left swaying amid the stars. A golden-era freak that may be the most particularly designed film since The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, James Cagney or no James Cagney (as Bottom), this is an old-fashioned seasonal tsunami that reverbs with how much summer meant when you were a kid.

Valmont (Epix, Friday @ 3:30 AM)

Released 11 months after Stephen Frears's Dangerous Liaisons, this 1989 adaptation of the exact same book, by Milos Forman and starring Colin Firth and Annette Bening, is the less button-pushy and the sexier by a wide mile. Both cook with gender-war intrigue, but this overlooked take, from a filmmaker who knows his way around European chateaus, deserves a redo.

Bonjour Tristesse (TCM, Sunday @ 4:00 PM)

Director Otto Preminger's 1958 adaptation of Francoise Sagan's bestseller has spoiled nymph Jean Seberg try to sabotage playboy dad David Niven's relationship with new would-be mom Deborah Kerr on the French Riviera, a game that at first begins merrily but then turns to poison. A big-screen, on-location '50s melodrama of startling raw emotionalism, and one that never got its due even from Preminger-ites.

A Town Called Hell (Encore Western, Saturday @ 12:05 AM)

A neglected spaghetti-ish anti-western from 1971, shot in Spain and following irate widow Stella Stevens as she returns to the frontier town where her husband died to net herself a barrelful of revenge. It's certainly the only desolate, dusty western town populated by Telly Savalas, Robert Shaw, Martin Landau and Al Lettieri ("The Turk" from The Godfather).

Vagabond (IFC, Friday @ 4:55 AM)

All right, this Agnes Varda existentialism from 1985 isn't summery at all; in fact, it's outright frosty. Sandrine Bonnaire plays a young homeless woman who, at the outset, is frozen dead in a winter ditch. From there, we tread backwards, to her last weeks, glancing off of the rural community, enduring the projected prejudices and desires of others, and all the while absolutely resisting to live by even the most fundamental rules. Because it's stripped down to the bone, it's a helplessly gender-political statement.

Still Walking (Sundance, Saturday @ 3:45 PM)

This 2008 family drama by Hirokazu Kore-eda is a perfect example of what good Asian art film directors do more consistently than almost anybody -- limn out a muffled three-generation family history in the bumps, pauses and ellipses of a single weekend, without unrealistic melodrama or contrived resolutions. This got a tentative theatrical release in '09 and then more or less instantly evaporated, but it was one of the year's best films.

Oldboy (Sundance, Saturday @ 12:00 midnight)

The big movies of the Korean New Wave tend to play for keeps, and Park Chan-wook's 2003 psychofest may still stand as the movement's key exercise in primal-scream therapy. It functions as a convulsion of cascading vengeance scenarios, beginning with Choi Min-sik's mopey middle-ager awakening from a binge in a window-less cell dolled up to resemble a chintzy hotel room, complete with cable TV. Years pass, 15 of them, and after he's released his deranged lust for retribution pulls him in one direction as his still-unknown tormentor's scheme continues to yank him along in ways that aren't clear until the hair-yanking finale. Leave it at that -- but know it's a remarkably brutal film, and the story's epic scale is almost Shakespearean.

Single White Female (Encore Mystery, Friday @ 8:00 PM)

Taken as a single statement, the high-profile movie thrillers of the Reagan-Bush era (Fatal Attraction, The Stepfather, Pacific Heights, Bad Influence, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Poison Ivy, Unlawful Entry, etc.) say one nihilistic thing clearly: Never allow anyone access to your life. If you do happen to meet someone in a bookstore or hire a gardener, look out: They will sooner rather than later ruin your credit, kill your pet, change your locks and eventually try to murder you with their bare hands. It's a tough world out there, and we're all alone. This glossy button-pusher from 1992 tells the Ultimate Roommate Horror Story with plenty of wit and energy (directed by Barbet Schroeder), and there's even a queasy scene where Bridget Fonda leaves her man-filled bed to spy on psycho roomie Jennifer Jason Leigh's nocturnal masturbation session. But soon enough this walking dead-twin pathology is going for the knife drawer. Leigh is, as always, a hoot.