The Science of Sleep (HBO Comedy, Saturday @ 4:00 PM & 3:50 AM)
Michel Gondry's purest movie, sans Charlie Kaufman head games, but still a dreamy, loopy trip as Gael Garcia Bernal plays a Spanish 20-something in Paris whose life is a chaotic tug of war between reality and his extraordinarily rich and messy dream life -- which intervenes so often and so matter-of-factly we often do not know whether or not what we're watching is inside the hero's lovable head. Naturally, the two realms bleed into each other, particularly once he meets Charlotte Gainsbourg as a somewhat prickly craft-artist living next door who shares Stephane's passion for handmade toys, recycled junk and dedicated pretend-play. Released in 2006.
Memento (Starz Cinema, Friday @ 8:05 PM)
Christopher Nolan's 2000 signature film, and still a temple-throbbing world-beater, with Guy Pearce as a lost schmuck with no short-term memory hunting for his wife's killer, though it may well be him. If you haven't seen it lately, there's hardly a reason to go out.
Hellraiser (Encore Action, Friday @ 8:20 PM)
Clive Barker's maiden voyage into moviemaking (made in 1987), and an alt-universe nightmare that still makes an outlandishly nasty parable on sexual secrecy and perverse compulsion.
The Beauty and the Beast (TCM, Sunday @ 8:00 PM)
Jean Cocteau's definitive 1946 incarnation of the fairy tale, and a supremely dreamy July daydream, shot with silvery shimmering by Henry Alekan, and infused with nursery wonder. Jean Marais's leonine Beast is fab, but Josette Day's serene maiden is close to an ideal.
Fantastic Voyage (Thriller Max, Saturday @ 5:45 AM)
Shrunken scientists injected into a sick person's bloodstream! Watch out for the floating corpuscles! See white blood cells adhere themselves to Raquel Welch's chest -- and Stephen Boyd tearing them off!
Eraserhead (Sundance, Saturday @ 6:30 PM & 2:45 PM; Sunday @ 1:30 PM)
Talk about alt-worlds: David Lynch's 1977 feature debut and still the hermetic psycho-indie by which all others are measured. Once you're in, you wonder seriously about being able to get out.
Donnie Darko (Encore, Friday @ 3:20 AM)
Enveloped in a mood of cultural doom and psychological unease that is persistently haunting, Richard Kelly's saga of teenage alienation unrolls in a more or less constant state of cataclysm - internal or external, you decide.
Coraline (HBO Signature, Saturday @ 8:30 AM)
On the surface a body-snatcher nightmare for pre-adolescents, Henry Selick's handmade 2009 version of Neil Gaiman's book also posits a parallel anti-world that may actually exist in the heroine's head. A good deal scarier and more interesting than it should be.
Monterey Pop (Sundance, Saturday @ 12:00 noon & 4:45 PM)
D.A. Pennebaker's 1968 big-ass-concert documentary doesn't offer a virtual reality per se, unless you were there and inhaled, of course. Sitting all the way through the Ravi Shankar performance may send you into a stupor, however.
Synecdoche, New York (Starz Cinema, Sunday @ 1:15 PM)
This supreme Charlie Kaufman whatzit, in which surrealistically depressed Philip Seymour Hoffman creates a gargantuan theater project to mirror his life, may be dealing out a simulacra within a simulacra, particularly in its mythic last act. Or not. Still working on it.