One of the great things about Wes Craven’s Scream was its pop-culture savvy. Its characters couldn’t make very easy marks if they’d seen every important horror movie ever made and, conversely, the psycho killer was an even more cunning villain because he’d seen all of those movies.

It was a smart film because Craven, his characters and his audience were on an even keel: They all lived in the now, they were all working with the same knowledge base and their only clichés were delivered or understood with self-conscious winks.

Guy Pearce’s dense, workaholic architect in the silly new trifle Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark couldn’t be less self-aware of the hackneyed horror film he inhabits. The movie’s audiences will always be 10 steps ahead of this lunkhead, who requires nothing short of a 2-by-4 to the memory bank to realize that the centuries-old gothic mansion he’s restoring might – gasp! – harbor some supernatural skeletons in its cavernous closets. He, and the film’s writers and director, are in deep need of some Clockwork Orange-like conditioning, set to a never-ending montage of clips from The Haunting, Rebecca, House and Pan’s Labyrinth, to name just a few.

If you’ve seen any of the film’s marketing, you’ll know that Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark is the product of the Pan’s Labyrinth auteur himself, Guillermo del Toro. He produced and co-wrote the screenplay – a quasi-retread of Pan’s about another girl running from her broken home toward the stuff of twisted fantasy – but his visionary directorial hand is sorely missed.

That dishonor is held by first-timer Troy Nixey, who couldn’t scare us with Alfred Hitchcock’s camera. Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark feels like a lame watered-down remake of a better film shot somewhere else, because it bears all the trappings of conservative Hollywood horror cinema: cheap false alarms, telegraphed scares, opportune lightning strikes and the employment of spasmodic, confusing cinematography instead of actually showing us what’s happening. Unable to ratchet up anything resembling suspense, we’re left expecting every shock moment, and none of them satisfy.

Del Toro and Nixey must be hedging their bets on the human story at the core of Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark – hoping it will help viewers overlook the flaccid scare tactics. The subject is childhood displacement; for vague reasons, 8-year-old Sally (Bailee Madison) is carted away from her mother’s home in Los Angeles and promised a transient tenure with father Alex (Pearce) in the spooky mansion he’s hoping will rejuvenate his architectural career. Sally doesn’t take to Alex’s new girlfriend Kim (Katie Holmes) or her relocation, and the film tries – unsuccessfully – to move us with Sally’s plight before easing us into the horror plot, some nonsense about a cabal of hunchbacked, rat-like creatures who live behind a grate in the boarded-up basement and feast, conveniently enough, on little girls.

Nixey needed to make us care about the characters to be invested in the horror plot, and in this regard, as with all other regards, he fails abysmally. He can’t seem to generate any lemonade out of his lemon of a cast. Pearce and Holmes are one-note performers – his is impatient frustration, hers is flustered brow-furrowing – who don’t register as anything but useful archetypes. Only Madison seems engaged by her character, treating her gradual entrapment by threats both foreign and domestic with genuine life-or-death terror.

Of all the simplistic stereotypes in this film – of all the clichés cribbed from the copious canon of haunted-house hysteria -- the most laughable is that of the creepy, inquisitive groundskeeper who knows everything. He’s played by Jack Thompson and, by the time he’s sliced and diced by the recently unleashed pests, it dawned on me the exact movie Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark seems to be remaking: The Beyond, Lucio Fulci’s lousy 1981 grindhouse take on the exact same subject; both films even begin with a historical prologue suggesting the horror plot that will reemerge in present day.

At least Fulci’s unapologetic gorefest had the creative hook of setting the haunted abode over an entrance to Hell, a cool arrangement for the exhausted proceedings. All del Toro and Nixey can muster are a few skittering Gollum knock-offs who want to eat.

DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE DARK. Cast: Guy Pearce, Katie Holmes, Bailee Madison, Jack Thompson, Julia Blake; Director: Troy Nixey; Distributor: Miramax; Rating: R; Opens: Friday in most area theaters.

Since Hollywood has virtually given up on making dramas, let alone serious female-centric films, the arrival of a quality release of some substance like The Help is remarkable. And in the summer yet.

This tale of black domestic workers in the homes of white families in Jackson, Miss., in pre-civil rights 1962, first gained fans from Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 novel. Now adapted and directed by Tate Taylor, a childhood friend of Stockett’s, the movie version should satisfy those readers, while widening the story’s following exponentially.

Taylor begins by softening the ride with comedy, as he risks depicting some of Jackson’s genteel racists as cartoonish caricature. But he soon turns matters to -- pardon the expression -- the dark side, as the stakes for these carefully subservient maids to participate in an oral history of their working conditions are high.

The film revolves around perky Emma Stone (Easy A, Crazy, Stupid Love) as college graduate and journalist wannabe “Skeeter” Phelan, but not so much that she dominates The Help over African-American actresses Viola Davis (Doubt) and Octavia Spencer as the first two maids to put their jobs, and perhaps their lives, on the line by agreeing to answer Skeeter’s interview questions about the two-tiered world of Jackson.

Davis projects great dignity and simmering rage as Aibileen Clark, masterful in the kitchen, substitute parent to her preoccupied employer’s children and full of bitter recollections of the cruel treatment that has been her daily existence. Spencer gets a breakthrough role as Minny Jackson, wrongfully accused of stealing from her employer, but resourceful in the way she exacts her revenge.

There are a few peripheral male characters, including a senator’s son who proposes marriage to Skeeter until he learns of her clandestine interview project. But for the most part, The Help revolves around the women of Jackson on both sides of the racial and social divide. And Taylor gets some choice supporting performances from such actresses as staunchly bigoted Bryce Dallas Howard, who is obsessed with separate and unequal bathroom facilities for the black help, and Jessica Chastain (Tree of Life) as a hopelessly unskilled housewife who secretly hires Minny to teach her the ways of southern cooking.

The always enjoyable Allison Janney plays Skeeter’s mother, perplexed and embarrassed by her daughter’s boat-rocking ambition. And late in the film, Cicely Tyson puts in an appearance as Constantine, the maid who raised Skeeter from childhood, and was abruptly banished from the Phelan home. It’s early by Oscar race standards, but expect some of the performance nominations to go to these women.

The Help is a compendium of small and large cruelties inflicted on hard-working women who were all but members of the family, except when barriers had to be raised. Ultimately, by telling their stories, those walls started to come down and Taylor’s film becomes a tale of triumph through the power of the truth.

THE HELP. Directed by Tate Taylor; Cast: Viola Davis, Emma Stone, Octavia Spencer, Allison Janney, Bryce Dallas Howard, Jessica Chastain, Cicely Tyson; Distributor: Dreamworks; Rated: PG-13. Now in area theaters.

J. Hoberman famously coined the term “hippie Western” to describe ’70s counterculture films like El Topo. But Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, released in 1995 and a budget title on Blu-ray as of Aug. 9 (Echo Bridge, $7.99) could be read as a hippie Western for Generation X. Not that the film is necessarily about free love – though we do witness a cowboy receiving oral sex outside a saloon and a pair of Indians enjoying coitus in the woods – or that is advocates drug use; the only substance pined for is legal tobacco.

The comparison is more in the ambience. Even more than other Jarmusch films, Dead Man has a druggy pace. It proceeds with the languor of a bunch of actors and filmmakers on downers who are told to shoot a quick B-picture and end up with a 121-minute spiritual exegesis on the afterlife.

Yes, this divisive film, ignored by audiences and embraced by a few maverick critics (it holds a tepid 58 percent rating on Metacritic), is still crazy after all these years, a holdover from the ’70s auterist autonomy, where the director was king and producers trusted his artistic vision unconditionally. And thank goodness they, in this case Miramax, did trust Jarmusch, because Dead Man is a singular experience as interpretable and poetic as William Blake, whose name is shared by Johnny Depp in the film’s leading role.

Depp’s Blake is not the legendary English poet; he’s a mere accountant from Cleveland riding a train to California so that he can accept a promised bookkeeping job for an influential machinist. His doom is foretold in a quotation before the film’s first image: He will, eventually, become the dead man of the title, even if the time of his passing is up to the viewer’s interpretation. The first dialogue exchanged in the movie, some six minutes in, comes courtesy of a colorful appearance by Crispin Glover as an illiterate train passenger who further prophesies Blake’s downfall, promising not an illustrious job but the man’s own burial.

Blake ignores the warning, of course, so that Jarmusch can put his own self-reflexive spin on a Western iconography: the “stranger comes to town” scenario. Dismissed by his potential employers, Blake wanders the wild new city like a listless, powerless Gary Cooper, picks up a recovering hooker outside a saloon, shoots and is shot by her vengeful fiancée and becomes an outlaw. On his tail are three guns for hire (Lance Henrikson, Michael Wincott and Eugene Byrd), sent by Robert Mitchum’s John Dickinson, the very man originally set to employ Blake’s services.

Mitchum, in one of his final screen roles, is one several stars who appear in a fun game of Spot the Cult Cameo. Alfred Molina is a devout general-store clerk, John Hurt is a snarky foreman, Gabriel Byrne is one of Blake’s many would-be assassins and Iggy Pop, Billy Bob Thornton and Jared Harris are loquacious trappers Blake encounters on his journey.

Anyway, as composer Neil Young interjects with his occasional shards of “le noise” on the soundtrack, Blake escapes with the help of the hilariously named Nobody (the great Gary Farmer), a mountain of a Native American whose wisdom and shamanic healing methods keep Blake safe through a road-movie, buddy-movie landscape increasingly littered with corpses.

Jarmusch’s most consistently violent film, the death in Dead Man is instantaneous and unceremonious. Blake is not impervious to the carnage, absorbing bullets like a sponge. At what point does he finally succumb to his demise? We’re not entirely certain. There are indications throughout the movie that he may be continuing on as a ghost, his mortal body eradicated by Byrne early in the movie, or perhaps that he was a dead man walking the entire time. But having integrated into Nobody’s Native American customs, his soul is insured a peaceful transition into its next form.

As much as Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt, Dead Man is heavy on what film theorists call intertextuality – the references to previous works that are embedded into the narrative. Western movie iconography, the histories of the actors, the black-and-white nature of the luminous cinematography, the quote that opens the story and the real William Blake’s oft-referenced poetry – all of these things are essential to and inextricable from Jarmusch’s own contributions.

The latter of these may be the key to the film’s position on life after death. Dead Man may be an extended two-hour death spiral, but Blake’s very name and his embrace of a new, violent poetics suggests the immortality of art and poetry, his mortal life giving way to a spiritual transcendence that can never be quashed. Pretty trippy, eh?

Aug. 16: The highlight of this week is Roman Polanski’s pitch-black comedy Cul-de-Sac, from 1966 (Criterion, $19.99 DVD and $27.99 Blu-ray). Donald Pleasance and Françoise Dorléac play the occupants of a beachfront castle invaded by a criminal and his dying partner, and eccentric happenings ensue. One of the last remaining Polanski features to receive a DVD release, it’s perhaps easy to see why: With its absence of likable or relatable characters, Cul-de-Sac is considered a hard pill to swallow. But, like The Fearless Vampire Killers, it’s a cult favorite among his fans. Extras include Two Gangsters and an Island, a documentary about the making of Cul-de-Sac, a 1967 interview with Polanski and a new essay by critic David Thompson.

This week also sees the domestic home-video debut of David Holzman’s Diary (Kino, $20.99 Blu-ray, $26.99 DVD). Before he became a mainstream director-for-hire, Jim McBride made this influential and unique parody of the cinema verité aesthetic, centering on a guy intent on filming every little bit of minutiae in his life – and the trouble this gets him in. Prescient in its presentation of an exhibitionist man shattering the designation between the private and the public, this is an essential film. This special-edition disc also includes McBride’s 1961 feature My Girlfriend’s Wedding as well as two of his short films.

Also on tap for this week: The Blu-ray debut of the Coen Brothers’ inexplicably popular The Big Lebowski (Universal, $22.49) and Criterion’s reissue of The Killing ($21.99 DVD and $22.49 Blu-ray), one of Stanley Kubrick’s earliest and most accessible thrillers, loaded with exciting extras include a remastered transfer of Kubrick’s 1955 noir Killer’s Kiss.

Aug. 23: Brazilian cinema takes center stage on a four-film box set by First Run Features titled The Best of Global Lens: Brazil ($29.99). Titles include the World War II road movie Cinema, Aspirins and Vultures, the political epic Almost Brothers and the modern silent film Margarette’s Feast.

Also, check out two titles from South Korean auteur Lee Chang Dong: Poetry (Kino, $29.99 DVD and $20.99 Blu-ray), one of 2011’s most critically acclaimed films, about an Alzheimer’s-suffering pensioner’s self-actualization thanks to a poetry class, and Secret Sunshine (Criterion, $25.99 Blu-ray and $19.99 DVD), a drama about grief released four years prior. Also of interest is Road to Nowhere (Monterey, $31.49 Blu-ray and $24.49 DVD), a Lynchian movie-within-a-movie thriller from the cult director Monte Hellman (Two-Lane Blacktop) – his first feature in more than 20 years.

Aug. 30: This week is simply a bounty of riches; were I to trumpet them all, I would need this entire column space. A few of the most staggering releases: The Coen Brothers Blu-ray collection (Fox, $47.99) compiles Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller’s Crossing and Fargo, and The Complete Jean Vigo (Criterion, $27.99 Blu-ray and $21.99 DVD) compiles the French director’s previously released masterpiece L’Atalante with his just-as-impressive shorts A propos de Nice, Taris and Zero for Conduct. Ingmar Bergman’s 1976 Face to Face finally gets a DVD treatment from Olive Films ($26.99), Universal unveils a limited archive release of Jack Cardiff’s The Incredible Shrinking Man ($14.99) and Cinema Guild issues, for the first time, Agnès Varda’s 1975 documentary Daggeroutypes ($29.95). Whew! Happy renting.

TCM Watch: Throughout August, TCM will be showcasing the work of an iconic star each night of the month. The network will pay homage to Orson Welles all night Aug. 8, with rarely screened – though easily rentable – features such as Mr. Arkadin (6:15 p.m.) and The Lady From Shanghai (2 a.m.). But the real treat here is a 4 a.m. showing of The Immortal Story. This late period, 58-minute Welles feature, released in 1968 and made for French television, is the master’s only movie shot in color. Welles costars with Jeanne Moreau in a story about a wealthy European merchant who plays games with the lives of a sailor and a beautiful young woman. But really, who cares about the plot – this is a forgotten Welles film, unavailable on home video in the States, given a new life and a new audience.

At 2:45 a.m. Aug. 13, as part of a James Stewart night, check out Tim Whelan’s The Murder Man, a well-received, though never released on video, ’30s crime film with Spencer Tracy as a newspaperman specializing in murder cases who becomes the subject of a murder case himself. Sounds to me like Samuel Fuller meets Alfred Hitchcock.

Classic horror lovers won’t want to miss the Lon Chaney tribute all day Aug. 15, featuring a number of unusual silent films. The evening concludes with five films Chaney made for director Tod Browning (of Freaks fame), beginning at midnight and running until the wee hours. They included the unreleased-on-video West of Zanzibar, about a mad ruler of a jungle monarchy; Where East is East, about an animal trapper in Indochina; and the particularly scarce and uncompleted London After Midnight, about vampires suspected of murder (isn’t that kinda what vampires do?).

On Aug. 16, catch a few rare gems with the star of the night, Joanne Woodward, including The Sound and the Fury (10 p.m.), Martin Ritt’s adaptation of the Faulkner novel; and The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds, Paul Newman’s complicatedly titled adaptation of Paul Zindel’s Pulitzer-winning play.

A Burt Lancaster tribute on Aug. 25 includes the only John Cassavetes film not released on DVD in the U.S. It’s called A Child is Waiting (6 p.m.), and it’s about an emotionally fragile woman (naturally) who becomes a teacher to handicapped children. Gena Rowlands and Judy Garland star alongside Lancaster.

These are only a few choices in a well-stocked month of star-themed days and nights. Other actors celebrated throughout August include Montgomery Clift, Jean Gabin, Carol Lombard and Humphrey Bogart.

How’s this for a premise: When a terrorist attack separates a Down syndrome-suffering woman from her caring and infinitely patient mother for the first time in her life, she is forced to confront a harsh outside world, emotionally connecting with the derelicts she encounters and vice versa.

Healthy and full of real-world nutrients, Anita is the kind of film that’s more good for you than entertaining – the cinematic equivalent of, to paraphrase President Obama, “eating our peas.” It’s more precious than Precious, but it charts a similar terrain, rubbing our noses in the misfortunes of a helpless minority and hoping its melodrama can finally Make a Difference.

The setting is Buenos Aires, 1994, and the real-life bombing of the Argentine Israelite Mutual Association building (AMIA, in Spanish), which took the lives of 85 people and injured hundreds more. Dramatized with immediacy and without frills, the explosion rocks the mentally impaired Anita (Alejandra Manzo) off the ladder of her mother’s business. Mom, played by the wonderful Oscar nominee Norma Aleandro, is nowhere to be found, having left for a brief visit to the AMIA. Anita is stranded amid the rubble with no comprehension of what just happened.

Non-practicing in their beliefs, the Jewishness of Anita’s family is beside the point – they are collateral damage from a politically motivated Hezbollah militia. Nonetheless, Anita has been a showcase film at a number of Jewish film festivals worldwide, including the Palm Beach Jewish Film Festival last December. But despite the angry and thoughtful quotation that concludes the movie, the political implications of Anita’s inciting incident are unexplored.

The only information about the bombing arrives in half-absorbed TV news reports. Argentine co-writer/director Marcos Carnevale, who previously gave us the senior citizen romance Elsa and Fred, instead focuses on the human element, rotating the narrative between Anita’s struggle to survive and her brother Ariel’s (Peto Menahem) attempts to find Anita and their mother.

Anita’s journey is portrayed, for the most part, with admirable naturalism, as she relies on the charity of a number of reluctant strangers, including alcoholic deadbeat dad Felix (Luis Loque), a family of squabbling Chinese shop owners and an abrasive nurse with a heart of gold (Leonor Manso). But Carnevale has a tendency to overplay his hand, layering a pretty but emotionally suffocating score over scenes that have enough power to move us on their own.

His attempt to stylize the aftermath of the sobering bombing with sentimental slow-motion comes off as tacky, creating a scene of choreographed carnage in an otherwise straightforward presentation. And a few lines of dialogue come off as phony bits of trailer bait: “You fell down the ladder, and my life fell into pieces,” observes the bedraggled Felix, in a laughably insightful moment of dimestore Zen.

Yet Anita is worth seeing, if only for the remarkable “performance” of Manzo as the title character. Carnevale’s decision to cast an actual Down sufferer in the central role gives the film its strongest credibility. The puffy, glassy-eyed actress is a heartbreaking cipher -- oblivious, confused and alone in this once-in-a-lifetime part.

She brings the kind of conviction that can’t be acted, only conveyed through learned experience. Where a professional actor might use a role like this to angle for an Oscar, Manzo performs without an iota of self-consciousness, becoming the documentary center of Carnevale’s well-intentioned fiction.

This film is certainly a plate full of cold vegetables, but sometimes I really like peas.

ANITA. Directed by Marcos Carnevale. Cast: Alejandra Manzo, Norma Aleandro, Peto Menahem, Luis Loque, Leonor Manso. Distributor: Menemsha. In Spanish with English subtitles. Opens: Friday at Living Room Theaters at FAU.

For years, I assumed I would simply never have the opportunity to see Skidoo, Otto Preminger’s critically and commercially maligned acid trip from 1968. The film was never even released on VHS and was therefore reduced to a distribution cycle as small as its perceived audience; you could see it at the occasional 35mm revival in New York or Los Angeles, or on a once-in-a-blue-moon screening on TCM.

In other words, Skidoo is a film whose reputation as an exasperatingly dated grasp at the counterculture youth market has, for almost every cinephile, preceded it in an awfully negative context.

Leave it to Olive Films, today’s top purveyor of marginal ‘70s movies, to finally grant the movie a DVD release (July 19, $22.49). A self-parodic Jackie Gleason stars as “Tough” Tony Banks, a retired gangster unmoored in ‘60s suburbia, chained to a ‘50s wife named Flo (Carol Channing) and daughter Darlene (Alexandra Hay), who’s joined a throng of hippies wearing body paint and traveling in psychedelic buses (cue the copious sitar music).

Tony is soon visited by a couple of his old mob ties, who force him out of retirement on the orders of their boss, a lecherous don named God (Groucho Marx, in his final screen appearance). He is to be sent to prison, where he is assigned to whack a stoolie named Blue Chips (Mickey Rooney), who runs a stock-market racket in luxurious solitary confinement.

While in prison, Tony accidentally imbibes some LSD from his draft-dodging cellmate, and hallucinatory insanity ensues. Outside the hoosegow, Darlene and Flo do whatever they can to track down the missing Tony, even if it means sleeping with the enemy. Oh, and did I mention the film is sort of a musical? Harry Nilsson, who cameos as a prison guard, wrote the film’s catchy, of-the-moment songs (one tune about food is probably a metaphor for socialism), often set to ludicrous song-and-dance numbers that must be seen to be believed.

After watching Skidoo in Olive’s crisp Cinemascope transfer, I found that the initial response makes some sense: It’s obvious Preminger was giving us an instant period piece, destined to feel like yesterday’s film the moment it was unceremoniously ousted from cinemas. Its scenes of LSD consumption shot through the filter of classic slapstick comedy epitomize exactly what Skidoo was, in the eyes of its critics: A prospective youth movie shot by, and starring, a bunch of unhip old guys who never took drugs.

Though an uncredited Rob Reiner was brought in to authenticate the dialogue in the hippie scenes, the characters come off not as real flower children but as every right-winger’s mental image of the perpetually stoned, politically juvenile counterculture.

But to completely dismiss Skidoo would be an injustice to a thoroughly, if uniquely enjoyable, mess that is rife with visual ingenuity and occasionally potent as a satire on American culture.

The opening shot is a classic: Before we see any character, Preminger lingers on a boxy old television, whose channels change every couple of seconds with the impatience of the living room’s ADD-addled viewers. One minute, it’s a John Wayne picture; the next, a Senate hearing; the next, a quack doctor peddling a miracle drug. In one commercial, a dog smokes a cigarette with his human owners; in another ad, an entire family wields guns as a way to bring them closer. It’s not as consistently brilliant as Bob Rafelson’s Head, but in moments like these, it comes close.

For Preminger, who staked his reputation on classic, prestigious studio films – Laura, Anatomy of Murder, The Man With the Golden Arm – Skidoo is more than the “odd film out” in his prolific oeuvre. It represents one of several identity-crisis films that confound auteur critics looking for any shred of directorial distinction. Though it has nothing in common with the films that made Preminger a name, it’s not without technical flourishes that reveal a modernist inspiration. An early split screen that divides the image between a black-and-white flashback and a present-day Technicolor conversation, is especially creative, and kudos to Preminger for going whole hog on Gleason’s first acid trip – a fantasia of hallucinogenic light and sound that culminates in the head of a cigar-chomping Groucho spinning atop a screw base.

This goes beyond where anybody else had gone or would go – J. Hoberman called Skidoo “the most LSD-tolerant movie ever produced in Hollywood” – and it deserves another look, if only for its batty commitment to its own uniqueness.

DVD Watch: July 12: The most exciting release of this week is the audacious, experiential Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Strand, $25.49 BD, $18.99 DVD), the latest from the hard-to-pronounce Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasuthakal. It’s a mystifying ghost story unlike any other. Criterion unveils its Blu-ray release of Mike Leigh’s Naked ($27.99), boasting many of the same extras of the DVD release but at a surprisingly more discounted price. This corrosive view of a subterranean England in the mid-‘90s is one of the best British films from that or any decade. Brazil, Terry Gilliam’s prescient satire on the bureaucracy of the future, also gets the Blu-Ray treatment (Universal, $18.99). Lastly, check out James Wan’s Insidious, one of this year’s best horror flicks and one that’s sure to become a cult classic (Film District, $19.99 BD, $16.99 DVD).

July 19: This week is all about Criterion’s release of Satyajit Ray’s The Music Room ($29.99 BD, $21.99 DVD), for the first time since its VHS release. One of the Indian director’s most acclaimed films, released shortly before his renowned Apu Trilogy, it depicts a wealthy man whose life falls apart as his aristocracy crumbles. This well-stocked disc includes a feature-length documentary about the director, functionally titled Satyajit Ray, and a French 1981 roundtable discussion with Ray.

July 25: For this week, I can recommend Jean-Pierre Melville’s Leon Morin, Priest (Criterion, $29.99 BD, $21.99 DVD). Released in 1961 and portraying an altruistic priest’s attempts to “save” a wayward woman, it stands alongside a number of shattering art-house films about faith. Keep it on your shelf next to Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest, Roberto Rossellini’s The Flowers of Saint Francis and the recently issued Of Gods and Men, which Sony released July 5.

I would be remiss if I failed to mention the 29 films that MGM released in late June, to online retailers only, as part of its Manufacturing on Demand series. These stripped-down discs, released on DVD-Rs and without special features or fanfare, will remain the only way to see these obscure titles for some time. They include Budd Boetticher’s tough-as-nails crime film The Killer is Loose ($17.99), the late-period Michael Curtiz thriller The Man in the Net ($19.99), Lindsay Anderson’s long-unseen Red, White and Zero ($19.98), and John Frankenheimer’s Cold War thriller The Fourth War ($19.98).

TCM Watch: Set your DVRs, because July looks like a great month for Turner Classic Movies rarities at inopportune times, starting at 5 a.m. July 12 with Young Winston. Directed by Richard Attenborough in 1972, the film dramatizes the early life of the British prime minister, culminating in his first election to Parliament. It has not been released on DVD, so this is the only chance to see it widescreen.

At 2 p.m. July 15, I recommend checking out a prescient media satire called Slander, from 1956. This one hasn’t been released on any format, and it stars Van Johnson as a children’s TV show host whose career is ruined by a tabloid magazine.

At 2 a.m. July 17, the network will screen Alain Resnais’ Mon Oncle D’Amerique, a renowned drama about three characters who model their lives off of film stars. It was released on DVD but is out of print. At 3:45 p.m. July 19, check out the Delmar Daves Western The Hanging Tree, a Gary Cooper vehicle that has never seen a DVD release.

And Amazon has never even heard of The Carey Treatment, Blake Edwards’ 1972 murder mystery with James Coburn, which screens at 11:15 a.m. July 26. Finally, at 2:30 p.m. July 31, don’t miss Peppermint Frappe, an unreleased 1967 drama by the Spanish auteur Carlos Suara (Spirit of the Beehive).