This Week on Cable: 10 Doozies Worth Discovering All Over Again

This just in: Xavier Samuel is or isn't gay! Robert Pattinson's hair knocked a woman unconscious in Santa Monica! Holy crap! I don't care! Movies, as The Kingsmen once almost sang, that's what we want. On cable this week: One hundred kinds of movie love, minus the gossip...

Wild Bill (Epix, Monday @ 8:00 PM)

Walter Hill's moody, dreamy, angry 1995 Western biopic has Jeff Bridges in the title role, Ellen Barkin as Calamity Jane, a supporting cast of serious intelligence, fogbanks of opium smoke, and a lovely anti-Western sense of regret and nostalgia. So overlooked in its day you can be forgiven for never having heard of it at all.

Mulholland Dr. (Starz Cinema, Monday @ 10:30 PM)

Hopefully you didn't manage to avoid intimacy with David Lynch's 2001 masterwork, crafted from the remains of a failed TV pilot into the new millennium's most mysterious and torrential ode to lost innocence. If it's been nine years, it's time to do it again.

The Don Is Dead (Encore Action, Wednesday @ 12:05 AM)

Another forgotten artifact - a post-_Godfather_ Mafioso thriller from 1973, about efforts to unseat underworld kingpin Anthony Quinn. It's not The Godfather. But it's the '70s, and therefore a lot closer to the pavement than we're used to today.

Used Cars (Retroplex, Thursday @ 9:35 PM)

For my money Robert Zemeckis's best film (1980), and nothing more than a cheapjack comedy about rival used car lots, one of them manically managed by a plaid-jacketed Kurt Russell.

Modesty Blaise (Fox Movie Channel, Wednesday @ 3:59 AM)

Once long ago, movies based on superheroine comics had the common sense to be A) irreverent and B) all about sex, and so this Joseph Losey epic, from 1966, is a dishy, silly espionage goof with Monica Vitti as the eponymous superagent, Terence Stamp as her love interest, and Dirk Bogarde as a slithery, bleach-blond archvillain. Austin Powers-ish when Mike Meyers was all of 3 years old, and '60s-camp served up like a roast pig with an apple in its mouth.

Cabin Fever (IFC, Thursday @ 11:30 PM) Eli Hostel Roth's debut resembles genre riffs from the 1970s, when making a gory chiller with four friends and a patch of grim woods was de rigueur for drive-in exploitationeers. Here, a hermit oozing with a cataclysmic bleed-out contagion spoils the vacation, and beginning with the sound of flies over the opening credits, Roth's sure-handed movie is rife with queasy deadfalls, from the hemorrhaging stranger despoiling a snazzy Jeep, to the hero (someone with the gay-porn-ready name of Rider Strong) pouring Listerine on his dick after impulse-screwing.

8 Women (Encore Mystery, Tuesday @ 4:20 PM) Eight hot French movie stars, that is, all riffing for director Francois Ozon and on each other in a house with a man's body upstairs: Catherine Deneuve, Emmanuelle Beart, Isabelle Huppert, Virginie Ledoyen, Ludivine Sagnier, Fanny Ardant, etc. A party movie, and timed like a Swiss watch.

Paris (Sundance, Tuesday @ 10:00 PM & 4:00 AM)

Cedric Klapisch's 2008 city-symphony audience-warmer intertwines in vintage-Woody-Allen fashion half a dozen or so Parisian lives, all of them starving for or bruised from romance, including Juliette Binoche's soured divorcee, her sick brother Romain Dupris, a Paris scholar (Fabrice Luchini, the least savory French actor alive) making a play for a luscious student (Inglourious Basterds' Melanie Laurent), etc.

Buffalo '66 (Showtime, Monday @ 3:15 AM)

A masterpiece? Enigmatic, heartbreaking and visually inventive, Vincent Gallo's 1998 effort might be the most pungent and least sentimental movie about a horrific childhood ever made in this country. Gallo admitted the movie is semi-autobiographical, and you can tell (the house in the film is actually one of the houses Gallo and his apparently disastrous family lived in during his childhood). Gallo plays a loser released from prison after a five-year stint during which he's constructed fabulous lies for his parents about a successful government job and a fiancee. Desperate to impress the parents he cannot actually tolerate, he kidnaps (Christina Ricci), a voluptuous young tramp he finds in a tap-dancing class, and persuades her to pretend she's his wife. It's a film of astounding textures, going ultra-gritty with outdated stock but also creating a mini-nightclub dream-world for monster dad Ben Gazzara, inserting super-8 home-movie memories right into the larger image, and depicting an imagined gun slaughter by circling his camera around the frozen participants, with their splattered blood frozen in midair. Zoiks.

Man of the West (TCM, Wednesday @ 3:45 PM) This Wednesday TCM is running deep with an Anthony Mann retro, and you can do your own hit-record planning, but amid the nerve-ending noirs and an assortment of oddballs (did Mann really make God's Little Acre?), there's this 1958 western, a forerunner of Unforgiven and a death-shrouded genre march in which an aged Gary Cooper (sick with cancer) faces off against Lee J. Cobb's Lear-like bandit chief for the sake of Julie London, and eventually confronts his own propensity for darkness.