Blue Steel (Cinemax, Tuesday @ 3:35 AM)
Bigelow's sleek, muscly feminist genre hit from 1989 has Jamie Lee Curtis as rookie NYC patrol officer beset by the psychopathic attentions of gone-berserk Wall Street broker Ron Silver. Bigelow may've won Oscars for a low-budget, ultra-realist war indie, but she used to make super-glossy, supercool pulp.
Husbands & Wives (Indieplex, Tuesday @ 12:35 PM & 9:00 PM)
Allen isn't just spinning his wheels lately; he's cutting ruts to China. Go back to 1992 with this nasty, creepy, often discomfiting saga about two middle-aged couples in New York and how their marriages are dissolving like tissues in the rain. The final film with Mia Farrow, before the Soon-Yi Previn scandal, and featuring yet another, but not the last, older-man-with-teenage-girlfriend romance.
Cape Fear (Encore Drama, Wednesday @ 8:00 PM)
Martin Scorsese's 1991 noir remake isn't paradigmatic Scorsese, but it's still a cataract of restless, innovative visual storytelling that makes his recent blockbusters look conventional. Robert DeNiro is a homicidal ex-con, Nick Nolte is his guilty lawyer.
Sam Raimi used to make comedies, usually with zombies, but this 1985 slapstick bulldozer Raimi (and co-writers Joel and Ethan Coen) goes for Three Stooges broke. The Rube Goldberg litany of gags, centering on a pair of cretinous exterminators/hitmen (Brion James and Paul Smith), leaves virtually nothing out, except the measure of wit needed to make it really funny. Of course both Bruce Campbell and Frances McDormand are lurking around in the chaos.
Any Given Sunday (5Star Max, Tuesday @ 1:45 PM)
Oliver Stone's big-ass football saga, made in 1999 when the director was at the height of its fame and influence, and a must for fans of the game, and of Al Pacino overacting, and Jamie Foxx. But watch out -- the most convincing performance is from Lawrence Taylor, just six years after his retirement from the Giants, as a desperate player looking for a final bonus but risking his life on the field.
Cleavagefield (Cinemax, Wednesday @ 11:50 PM)
Yes. The best straight-to-cable-softcore-parody title ever. Worth seeing for the title alone. And the fake credits: star Tallulah Blankhead, screenwriter Fargo Gondorff. Amy Reid appears using her real name.
Queen Christina (TCM, Tuesday @ 10:15 PM)
The 1933 Greta Garbo classic, topping off an all-day fest on TCM for John Gilbert, about whom everyone was supposed to have forgotten by 1938. He was a charmer, though, and this is a superhumanly beautiful romance, for which Gilbert was cast as the result of an ultimatum of laid down by his leading lady/ex-lover.
The Good German (IFC, Wednesday @ 6:05 PM)
Steven Soderbergh will try anything, and here, with George Clooney, Cate Blanchett and Tobey Maguire, he essentially remakes The Third Man (or at least postwar Euro-noir like it) in black-and-white but with all of the violence, sex and profanity they couldn't stuffed in, and wouldn't have anyway, in 1950.
Anatomy of a Murder (TCM, Wednesday @ 10:30 PM)
Otto Preminger's groundbreaking 1959 courtroom psychodrama, turning a seamy Southern murder trial into a sweaty, rape-happy psycho circus with the help of James Stewart as the least scrupulous defense attorney in film history and a brand-new-to-movies George C. Scott as his Army-appointed, junkyard-dog opponent. Unforgettable: Lee Remick as a black-eyed slattern whose violated but incredibly questionable virtue instigates the whole megillah. This was one of the movies that helped shock-start the old Hollywood into what became the '60s, and it dates better than last year's Oscar winners.