Black Orpheus (TCM, Saturday @ 8:00 PM)
The most evocative tropical film ever made, this 1959 peacock of a movie transposes the Orpheus-Eurydice myth to Rio amid Carnivale, and the heavy dose of South American colors, non-stop samba music, sweat, dancing, copulating and Brazilian zest can make you dizzy. The tale is tragic, of course, but one-hit-wonder director Marcel Camus determinedly turns on the juice, and in the end it's spectacularly life-affirming.
Bonnie & Clyde (TCM, Friday @ 3:45 AM)
Arthur Penn's 1967 groundbreaker, ultraviolent for its day and a big hit that lit the gasoline fire of the American New Wave, is also an indelible saturation experience in the Depression nostalgically remembered as one long, hot, dusty mid-American summertime.
Key Largo (TCM, Saturday @ 6:15 PM)
A cliche-fest but still a throbbing genre hothouse, this 1948 John Huston film noir based on the Maxwell Anderson play is set, imperatively, on the titular Florida island in off-season and during a typhoon, trapping a gaggle of gangsters (led by Edward G. Robinson's sadistic kingpin) with a handful of honest victims, including Humphrey Bogart's disillusioned war vet. Claire Trevor won an Oscar as a weepy lush, and though the film is filthy with hard-boiled dialogue and character, it's the humid atmosphere, with the storm raging outside, that's irresistible.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Encore Western, Saturday @ 8:00 PM)
The combination of George Roy Hill's direction, William Goldman's witty script and Paul Newman and Robert Redford's charisma and comic timing -- all of it feather-light -- keeps this well-loved 1969 anti-anti-Western feeling new. But it's the late '60s sun flares, film-stock haze and ironic good humor that makes it a summer movie through and through, down to the post-coital bicycle ride on a sun-drenched morning, scored by a B.J. Thomas song we've all heard too many times.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet's massively popular digitized romance met with French derision in 2001, for its paradigmatically frothy vision of Parisian-ness, but it scored internationally anyway. Serendipitous French gamine Audrey Tautou pursues love with a primitive's faith in coincidence, signs, fate and magical thinking, and the sun-soaked film expresses it in every frame, using every digital trick in the then-newly-written book.
They Might Be Giants (Retroplex, Sunday @ 8:20 AM)
One of the oddest studio films of the '70s, this poetically titled 1971 mystery has George C. Scott as a deranged judge who thinks he's Sherlock Holmes and Joanne Woodward watching his back as a psychotherapist who happens to be named Watson. Rich New York flavor, loads of character-actor bits, and a congenial air of defiant nonsense rule.
Sleeper (IFC, Sunday @ 10:30 AM & 5:45 AM)
Woody Allen used to toy with genre and use his imagination, and this 1973 farce could shock anyone whose sat through his last half-dozen recyclings. Allen is a Greenwich Village health-food store clerk who wakes up from a cryogenic sleep into a goofy, '70s-ish future, complete with robots, orgasm-producing technology, 10-foot-long vegetables, and a fascist government in need of overthrow. Constructed from one-liners, mostly, but it's still priceless.
Dancing at the Blue Iguana (HBO Zone, Saturday @ 2:35 AM)
Another lost auteur: Michael Radford was well on his way to a hat trick after 1984 (1984) and White Mischief (1988), but then he had a mushy hit with Il Postino (1994) and he's been throwing gears ever since. This 2000 indie is a slice of life in a California strip club, where the likes of Daryl Hannah, Jennifer Tilly, Charlotte Ayanna and Sandra Oh work. Heavily improvised and brutally frank, it's such a off-putting thing that it was barely released in the U.S. Does it need a second chance?
The Thing (More Max, Sunday @ 5:20 PM)
John Carpenter's explosively gruesome 1982 remake of the 1951 suspenser is, of course, a perfect mid-winter movie, but counterprogramming could work if your A/C is cranked up. Reviled upon its release and remembered most for its hellish, syrupy animatronic special-effects (they're pretty foul in spots, but in others absolutely unforgettable), it's actually an expertly crafted redo of The Lost Patrol, wherein a shapeshifting alien besieges an arctic science station entertainingly populated by Kurt Russell and a crew of eleven great character actors (Wilford Brimley, Donald Moffit, Richard Masur, Keith David, Charles Hallahan, T.K. Carter, etc.). From the dog acting to the music to the ominous fades-to-black, Carpenter knew what he was doing here, for a change.