There’s nothing funny about an old man, struck with terminal cancer, who only finds the courage to admit that he’s gay after the death of his wife of 44 years.

No, this is not material rife with comic potential, but sometimes laughter is the only way to cope. In his nuanced second feature Beginners, writer-director Mike Mills recognizes this, collecting a small ensemble of sad, lonely people and finding the humor that arises when other emotions seem intractably out of grasp.

The old man is named Hal Fields, and he’s portrayed, with wry, elegant gallantry, by Christopher Plummer. He is both dead and not dead for most of the picture, thanks to Mills’ nonlinear structure. Hal’s depressed (and depressing) artist son Oliver (Ewan McGregor) tells us in the movie’s earliest stanzas the key facts about his father, namely his belated sexual outing, his sickness and his demise.

But we spend the rest of the picture drifting between Oliver’s present – spent dealing with his father’s postmortem baggage, and shadowed by dad’s clingy Jack Russell – his immediate past with the suddenly out-gay Hal, and his post-World War II childhood, where he watched his parents keep up appearances in a seemingly loveless arrangement.

Plummer is the movie’s most tragic character, and he gives its most authentic performance. “I don’t want to be just theoretically gay,” he tells his son, and his complete immersion into the gay lifestyle – meeting a young boyfriend through a dating service, subscribing to The Advocate, screening The Times of Harvey Milk with a roomful of activists – is convincing in its youthful abandon. Plummer explores this environment with a self-actualizing, hedonistic smile, the way a teenager might when he first discovers his loins.

But Beginners is McGregor’s movie; he’s in nearly every scene, and his listless performance tends to weigh down the proceedings. As in some of his other pictures (Cassandra’s Dream, I Love You Phillip Morris), he’s a blank slate that rarely becomes full, a cipher from an old Bresson film. If this were a movie that warranted inexpressiveness, he would make a model mannequin, but he’s supposed to be a compelling, brooding protagonist discovering love for the first time – in the form of Melanie Laurent’s Anna, an actress he meets at a costume party while dressed, amusingly, as Sigmund Freud. Instead, his work only feels static opposite the vibrancy of Laurent and Plummer.

McGregor’s work is best – and so is Mills’ – when he’s not even on the screen, narrating photographic images of the past, present and future of the characters and the world around them. Here, McGregor’s sterile monotone works, presenting an unforgiving society free of sentimentality (over a monochrome image of a grimy bathroom, he tells us that this is the only place his father could be himself). This is also where Mills most flexes the stylistic muscle he discovered while filming music videos for the likes of Moby, Pulp and Air. These riveting photographic essays, undoubtedly influenced by the flipbook-style films of Chris Marker, suggest an experimental director burrowing through the commercial confines of Indiewood narrative.

And it makes sense that Oliver would deliver information in these distancing, Dadaist diversions. Like the enigmatic, inaccessible drawings he creates and the esoteric graffiti he plasters on public spaces, he’s one of the film’s many victims of ill communication, unable to say what he needs, when he needs and to whom he needs.

The two characters Oliver most talks to – Anna and Arthur, the Jack Russell – both suffer from their own aphasia; the silent Anna has laryngitis when she meets Oliver, and Arthur is a dog (though we can read his funny/heartbreaking thoughts via subtitles in a Woody Allen-like recurring bit). And Hal, of course, went 44 years without saying what he felt. But he proves that it’s never too late to start anew, and to do so with a smile – even in the face of death.

BEGINNERS. Director: Mike Mills; Cast: Ewan McGregor, Christopher Plummer, Melanie Laurent, Goran Visnjic; Distributor: Focus Features; Rating: R; Opens: Friday; Venue: Gateway Theatre in Fort Lauderdale, Coral Gables Art Cinema and Regal South Beach 18.

Is there anything quite like the early films of Todd Haynes?

Before he graduated to star-studded Hollywood casts and respectable HBO miniseries (this year’s Mildred Pierce), Haynes was a provocative enfant terrible whose early experimental films upset narrative status quos and pushed censors’ buttons. His 1987, 43-minute docudrama – for lack of a better designation – was titled Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story, and it told of the Carpenters’ siren’s tragic life using only Barbie dolls, mixing the narrative with a nonfiction study of anorexia. It’s a mesmerizing film, but it’s been banned from circulation for the past 21 years after Richard Carpenter won a copyright-infringement lawsuit against Haynes.

But nothing can stop movie lovers from indulging in his feature-film debut, 1991’s Poison (Zeitgeist, $26.99) -- at least not anymore. The long out-of-print DVD will be reissued June 21 in a plum package in honor of the film’s 20^th anniversary. The remastered transfer includes Criterionesque bonuses such as a recent Sundance Film Festival Q&A, an archival audio commentary track, a short film and some exclusive behind-the-scenes Polaroids, plus a 16-page supplementary booklet.

Like Superstar, the NC-17-rated Poison is bracingly original, a restless howl of rage from a filmmaker set on shattering complacency in both cinema and the “normal” society it usually represents onscreen. It’s an omnibus film comprised of three autonomous, though thematically incestuous, short films that Haynes intercuts.

One of them, titled Hero, is shot in a TV documentary style, a faux-realist expose of a domestic murder on suburban Long Island. Another one, Horror, is filmed like a vintage science-fiction artifact – all canted angles and swelling music, in lo-fi black-and-white – and tells the story of an ambitious scientist who develops leprosy after drinking his untested sex-drive serum. The final piece, Homo, is a graphically gay prison-set tone poem about a sexually repressed thief and another inmate he had known as an adolescent in a juvenile facility.

The more Haynes propels us back and forth from the three stories -- sometimes providing only a minute of screen time in one world before jettisoning it for another – the more Poison begins to develop coherent, transcendent themes beyond the specificities of the movies-within-the-movie. The film was inspired by the writing of Jean Genet, whose intermittently placed, white-on-black quotations speak to an existence of despair, cruelty and panic that all of Haynes’ tortured protagonists share. All of his characters are societal rejects, banished to outsider status thanks to a world that doesn’t understand them or views them as threats.

Only one part of Poison’s triptych is explicitly homosexual, but the others speak to a kind of systemic intolerance that gays, as much as any oppressed minority, could relate, especially in 1991. Horror quickly assumes the form of a ‘50s monster movie, and just as King Kong and his oft-imitated brethren were seen as misunderstood, persecuted Others (a theme that resounds all the way through True Blood today), so too is the scientist, played by Larry Maxwell, whose contagious disease spreads like scarlet letters across his face and everyone he touches. Only this time, the work takes on added gravity when viewed as an allegory about the spread of AIDS, which disproportionately affected the gay community.

Likewise, in Hero, which predates the crime-drama sensationalism of Nancy Grace – not to mention the Columbine massacre and most TV docudramas about school-age psychos -- the student-killer at the heart of the investigation is a quiet, bullied loner. He’s a person who might appear today on Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” YouTube channel.

The “New Queer Cinema” that Haynes was such an integral part of it has advanced so much in 20 years, and the gay lifestyle has become so legitimized in popular culture today that it may be hard to grasp how groundbreaking Poison was. But regardless of the film’s views on sexuality, repression, madness and the nature-versus-nurture debate, it remains an intoxicating experiment, well worth rediscovering for its formal derring-do alone.

DVD Watch: My most anticipated release of June 14 is Nicolas Roeg’s audacious, visually striking adaptation of the Terry Johnson play Insignificance (Criterion, $29.99 Blu-ray, $21.99 DVD), which finds characters resembling Marilyn Monroe, Joseph McCarthy, Joe DiMaggio and Albert Einstein meeting in a hotel room in 1954. If that doesn’t already sound like a party, keep in mind that Gary Busey is part of the cast, joining Theresa Russell, Tony Curtis and Michael Emil. Also on tap for this week are two ‘70s TV movies from the Warner Archive. One of them, a 1974 crime thriller by Richard Thorpe, bears the memorable, if slightly unmarketable title Smile Jenny, You’re Dead ($24.49), and it co-stars a very young Jodie Foster. The other film, Dummy, is a courtroom drama about a deaf-and-dumb man tried for murder ($24.49).

Also of interest June 14 is Murderball director Dana Adam Shapiro’s feature-film debut Monogamy (Oscilloscope, $26.99), a sexy and stylish independent thriller starring Chris Messina and Rashida Jones, two underutilized actors awaiting star vehicles. The film has earned comparisons to sex, lies and videotape and Blow-Up. On the cult front, sexploitation maestro Radley Metzger gets the Blu-ray treatment on two of his vintage features, an extended cut of the Italian-language Camille 2000 (Cult Epics, $34.95) and the sadomasochistic drama The Image (Synapse, $22.49).

More entertaining trash arrives in droves June 21 with the latest in Shout! Factory’s ongoing series of Roger Corman’s Cult Classics. This time it’s the Women in Cages Collection ($13.49), which includes the prison flicks Big Doll House (with Pam Grier), the titular Women in Cages and The Big Bird Cage. Elsewhere, we finally get a home-video release of The Romantic Englishwoman (Kino, $24.49 Blu-ray and $22.49 DVD), a strange late-period work directed by blacklisted filmmaker Joseph Losey and written by Tom Stoppard. Lastly, Criterion reissues one of the grimiest, most authentically dark films noir of all time, Robert Aldrich’s uncompromising Kiss Me Deadly ($27.99 Blu-ray, $19.99 DVD).

On June 28, the clear front-runner for everyone’s attention is The Lord of the Rings Motion Picture Trilogy: Extended Features collection on Blu-ray (New Line, $83.99), which is probably about the only thing that will keep New Line in business for another year. I’m more excited about another box set, The Alan Berliner Collection (Lorber Films, $89.99), which includes five of the rarely seen, rarely discussed experimental documentary filmmaker’s movies: The Family Album, Intimate Stranger, Nobody’s Business, The Sweetest Sound and Wide Awake.

TV Watch: Check out Turner Classic Movies on June 15, when guest programmer Chris Isaak takes over the reins all night. The singer/actor obviously has great taste in cinema: The evening begins at 8 with Charles Laughton’s masterpiece Night of the Hunter and continues with the Anthony Mann psychodrama God’s Little Acre, Elia Kazan’s ahead-of-its-time media satire Face in the Crowd and Orson Welles’ magnificent Touch of Evil, before concluding at 4:30 a.m. with 1956’s A Cry in the Night, a Natalie Wood crime drama that has never been released on home video.

Christmas comes early and wickedly in June 17 when TCM presents Black Christmas, B-movie titan Bob Clark’s ‘70s slasher, at 2:15 a.m., followed by the infamous MST3K favorite Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. Hear it without the snarky commentary, and write your own.

My favorite TCM night of the month, however, has to be Friday, June 24. The evening begins at 8 with Frank Tashlin’s brilliant satire on 1950s America, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? Later on that night, we get two rarely screened ‘80s horror movies: Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond (2 a.m.), about a woman whose inherited hotel was built over an entrance to Hell, and the similarly set Crawlspace (3:45 a.m.), which stars Klaus Kinski in uber-creepy mode. Finally, on June 30, in honor of director Anthony Mann’s birthday, check out a day full of his work, including some pretty rare stuff, such as the musical Sing Your Way Home (7:15 a.m.), the thriller Two O’Clock Courage (12:30 p.m.) and the historical drama The Black Book (3 p.m.).

Neil Simon, in his heyday, used to churn out a Broadway play every season, whether he really had a worthy idea for a play or not.

The same could be said of Woody Allen over the past decade -- from 2000’s Small Time Crooks to last year’s You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger -- he has written and directed a film each year, but they have largely been inconsequential trifles that feel tossed off.

Still, at 75, he remains a workaholic with a film in production or pre-production at all times. And his fans -- a group to which I consider myself a charter member -- live in the hope that he still has a Crimes and Misdemeanors or a Hannah and Her Sisters or even a Purple Rose of Cairo in him. Purple Rose particularly comes to mind, because that melodramatic comedy about the urge to leave one’s world behind for a chance at happiness in an alternate universe is essentially the same theme as in his latest release, Midnight in Paris, the Woodman’s most satisfying film in the past ten years.

Viewers of Allen’s films -- or maybe it is just us critics -- are always in search of autobiographical clues in even his more lightweight screenplays. So when we first meet Gil, a successful Hollywood writer who regrets not having penned a novel of substance, our antennae go up.

Curiously, since it has long been established that Allen can attract any actors he wants, he cast Owen Wilson to play his latest alter ego. And while he is not much of an actor, the fuzzy-headed aging surfer type does a very creditable job, adopting the unmistakable halting cadences that have been Allen’s signature since his stand-up comedy days in the 1960s.

Anyway, Gil is on vacation in Paris with his insufferably spoiled fiancee Inez (Rachel McAdams) -- yes, literature majors, score a point if you recall that Inez is a character in Jean-Paul Sartre’s “hell is other people” classic, No Exit. Gil is the sort of person who, feeling unsatisfied by his present life, yearns for the romance of a past era. And sure enough, while wandering the streets of Paris one night alone, a distant bell chimes midnight and a taxicab out of the 1920s turns the corner and stops at the curb in front of him.

Inside the cab are those celebrated denizens of the Jazz Age, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who implore Gil to join them as they go party-hopping. They introduce him to a somber Ernest Hemingway -- Gil’s literary idol -- who refuses Gil’s request to read and comment on his manuscript, but Papa does pass the tome on to Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) who has encouraging words for Gil.

When he tells Inez of his encounters, she is understandably dismissive, but he seeks out the cab the next night and returns to the ’20s, where he falls for Picasso’s mistress of the moment, the very French Adriana (Marion Cotillard), former lover of Braque and Modigliani.

Allen has a great deal of fun with these icons of the arts, conjuring up Man Ray, Luis Bunuel, T.S. Eliot and Dali (Adrien Brody) among others. As seen through Gil’s imagination, their speech patterns often reflect their work, as Hemingway talks in clipped, intense sentences and Dali talks with a surreal theatricality.

But beyond the fun, Midnight in Paris has a point to make about yearning for past, a message which elevates the film from boulevard comedy to something worth pondering and savoring. It is Allen’s notion that nostalgia is born of a dissatisfaction for life, a need to reach for something better. In the same way that Gil idealizes the ’20s, Adriana thinks that the “golden age’ must be the Belle Epoque of the 1890s. And perhaps, Gil suggests, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec regret not living in the Renaissance.

Like the best of Allen’s work, there is a dark underside to the comedy, though Midnight in Paris is so deft and airy, one can easily enjoy it without dealing with its pessimistic streak. Maybe it is just wishful thinking, but there are signs here that Allen has found his footing again. And who knows -- maybe his golden age is still ahead of him.

MIDNIGHT IN PARIS. Director: Woody Allen; Starring: Owen Wilson, Rachel McAdams, Marion Cotillard, Kurt Fuller, Adrien Brody, Kathy Bates. Distributor: Sony Pictures; Rating: PG-13. Opening this weekend at area theaters.

Andrei Tarkovsky, the Russian New Wave’s most glorified director of rarefied museum pieces, represents, more than any director of his generation, the division between true cinephiles and casual “movie buffs.”

The latter enjoys Fellini, some Godard and even an Antonioni picture or two, but Tarkovsky’s art-house pedigree is so pure – so dismissive of the standard that films be “entertaining” – that it alienates all but the minority set of cinemaniacs whose vacation planning revolves around New York or L.A. retrospectives of Chantal Akerman or Mikio Naruse films.

Tarkovsky’s cinema is as fastidious as it is foreboding, as personal as it is daunting. Watching works as dense as Stalker and The Mirror – films I loved, though I can barely explain why – you get the impression no one besides Tarkovsky can even begin to comprehend them, and that thematic deconstruction is a fool’s errand.

His 1972 Solaris, which just received a Blu-ray and DVD reissue from Criterion ($21.99 to $26.99), is both an affirmation and an exception to the conventional wisdom on Tarkovsky. For a science-fiction film, it’s a deliberate, impenetrable frustration, but compared to the rest of the director’s canon, it’s a breezy flirtation with the accessible.

Marketed as the Russian 2001: A Space Odyssey – the first clue that this is a cerebral genre film, and one that will be dutifully dismissed by some as a pretentious bore – it follows Kris Kelvin (Donatas Banionis), a blocky psychologist dispatched from an Edenic Earth to survey the strange phenomena on board the space station Solaris. There, he finds a skeleton crew of bedraggled scientists, one of whom recently killed himself thanks to the hallucinations prompted by the living, breathing atmosphere of the Solaris Ocean (a murky miasma that looks today not unlike the Gulf Coast after the BP spill).

He’s barely found the restroom until he too falls victim to the hallucinatory milieu, in the form of his clingy dead wife (Natalya Bondarchuk), who manages to regenerate anew, Groundhog Day-style, every time Kelvin tries to banish her.

The glacial alienation of Tarkovsky’s cinema never had a more fitting visual embodiment than the space station, a rickety edifice as functional and unromantic as a hospital. It’s not a vehicle anyone would willingly want to explore the universe’s frontiers – some of the padding on the walls conjures the look of a mental ward, a kind of character diagnosis via set design. The stirring beauty of the earthbound prologue, flashbacks and fantasy cutaways provide some release from the environs, and the station’s inhabitants movingly try to replicate its sensations onboard; a fan hitting streams of hung paper is meant to simulate the susurrus of rustling leaves.

Solaris is about many things – loneliness, spirituality, love’s uncontrollability, the transience of happiness – and it predates more movies than it’s probably given credit for. Its status as a kind of interstellar chamber drama suggests the sci-fi movie Bergman never made, and at various other points, I saw premonitions of A.I., Blade Runner and Inception. In his essay included with this disc, critic Philip Lopate also includes Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Ugetsu and Alphaville. As for Kubrick’s oft-studied space trip, it’s a masterpiece of comparatively sunny tones. The up-to-interpretation final shot of Solaris – arguably the key to the entire picture – is, to me, a cruel, existential, Twilight Zone twist of utter despair, a cosmic joke from a filmmaker many have said had no sense of humor.

DVD Watch: On May 24, the ability to take Charlie Sheen seriously post-Violent-Torpedo-of-Truth is tested, in glorious hi-def, with the Blu-ray edition of Platoon (MGM, $15.49), Oliver Stone’s blunt, visceral study of servicemen in Vietnam. You’ll never again see Sheen give a better performance in a work of such magnitude. This week also saw the Blu-ray release of another tough-guy classic, Papillon (Warner, $22.49) – Franklin J. Schaffner’s well-crafted prison-break pic with Dustin Hoffman and Steve McQueen. The disc extras are scant, but the purchase comes with a 34-page digibook with an essay and photographs.

Elsewhere, actress Samantha Morton, best seen in Lynn Ramsey’s art-house opus Morvern Callar, makes her directorial debut in the heavy drama The Unloved (Oscilloscope Laboratories, $26.99) and experimental filmmaker Chris Marker deconstructs the life and work of Andrei Tarkovsky in the essay film One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevitch (Icarus, $29.98). Last but most definitely not least, fans of Kids in the Hall can finally purchase the complete series of the legendary cult show in one affordable package (A&E, $74.99).

On May 31, the release of the week – if not the year – is Stanley Kubrick: The Essential Collection (Warner, $55.99 or $104.99 for a limited edition Blu-ray set). This box set replaces the out-of-print Stanley Kubrick Collection from 2001, retaining the same eight masterpieces from that set (from Lolita through Eyes Wide Shut) and adding in Spartacus and a boatload of extras. The prospect of seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barry Lyndon in the best video resolution available may finally make me invest in a Blu-ray player. A couple of cult genre films also make the Blu-ray cut this week: Sergio Leone’s operatic spaghetti western Once Upon a Time in the West (Paramount, $15.99) and Dario Argento’s giallo horror film Cat O’ Nine Tails (Blue Underground, $15.99)

On June 7, I’m most excited about a pair of long-awaited, long-unseen classics from the tragic, ridiculously prolific German auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder: 1976’s I Only Want You to Love Me, about a man driven to violence due to a lack of love, and 1978’s Despair, a strange Nazi drama adapted by Tom Stoppard from a Vladimir Nabokov novel (both Olive Films, $22.49 each). This week is also a Western bonanza; the Coen Brothers’ Oscar-nominated adaptation of True Grit arrives (Paramount, $16.99 DVD and $24.99 Blu-ray + DVD combo pack), along with the Blu-ray premieres of Robert Aldrich’s Vera Cruz (MGM, $14.99) and Clint Eastwood’s scorched-earth saga The Outlaw Josey Wales (Warner, $24.99). On June 10, Warner Archive will release Marlowe ($24.49), Paul Bogart’s obscure adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister, with James Garner as the iconic, titular gumshoe.

TV Watch: Turner Classic Movies has been honoring Andrzej Wajda this month, having already screened A Generation and Kanal. Set your DVRs: At 2:15 a.m. May 29, the network will show Ashes and Diamonds, his most acclaimed war film and one of the cinema’s most humanist evocations of a soldier’s grim duty. For the whole night on June 2, get out the popcorn and record your own Mystery Science Theater commentary tracks for an evening of “Drive-In Double Features,” from 1964’s Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster to 1969’s The Valley of Gwangi. At 3 a.m. June 5, TCM will screen G.W. Pabst’s 1931 Kameradschaft, a socially conscious mining drama unavailable on DVD.

Araya (Milestone)

Release date: May 10

Standard list price: $29.95

Milestone Films releases many different kinds of movies, but if the distributor has a signature style, it’s the merger of documentary and fiction – depictions of real life colored, in one way or another, with the aesthetic control of fiction.

I am Cuba, The Exiles, On the Bowery and In This World all fulfill this compelling generic tendency. Araya, the lone feature from Venezuelan cineaste Margot Benacerraf, is only the latest luminous example of this multidisciplinary approach to cinema.

Like few films before or after it, this 1959 movie shatters the boundaries between narrative film, documentary and avant-garde cinema, fitting liberally into any and all of these distinctions. Its compositions rich with painterly elegance – the photographs of Walker Evans come to mind – Araya is a document of the three families living around and working on the titular peninsula in northeastern Venezuela. Benacerraf observes the people’s lives from sunrise to sunset and beyond, as they cut salt from the era’s massive lagoons, sell fish, grow food and make pottery.

And that’s it, really. Though the director films the inhabitants’ routines with a majestic, un-documentarylike, almost certainly storyboarded pattern of gliding, soaring camerawork, there is no story to speak of. Sharing the ethnographic passions of early documentarian Robert Flaherty, Benacerraf allows us to contemplate a culture, illuminating the repetitive lives of people who labor, day and night, for basic necessities.

The beautiful Spanish-language narration is more poetry than prose, lending itself to florid, strangely appropriate sentimentalizing of the action (Shoveling salt will be one character’s “soul memory of childhood”). The sound of the narrator’s words, with their mixture of poetic reiterations of tropes and elliptical reportage, join with the movie’s natural soundscapes, which are borne of the same atmosphere: The metronomic beating of salt is an aural reminder of the repetition of the dwellers’ lives.

The way Bencerraf tells it, the Arayan Peninsula -- itself a living, breathing, heaving organism -- has been untouched by industry and progress for some 450 years. The laborers who live and die on the land are skipping records of sweat and scars, forever enacting the same menial tasks.

It’s no surprise that Stuart Klawans praised the recent 35mm restoration of Araya, calling attention to its “outraged social conscience.” This is a people’s movie, perhaps the ultimate study of a class of peasants in perpetual toil; a similar film could surely be made about the migrant workers who work under slavish conditions to grow our affordable supermarket produce.

But I’m not sure I see the outrage Klawans does, because according to the information we’re given, the workers’ spoils don’t go the pockets of multinational corporations but rather to create self-sufficiency on their cloistered peninsula. The politics of Araya are never more than subtextual and open to interpretation. If anything, Benacerraf sides with the preservation of the hardscrabble lifestyle: When industrial development finally arrives on the land at the end of the film, and we learn that machines may finally usurp the human hand, it’s depicted as a menacing scourge, scored by music that might accompany an enemy’s advance in a war movie. At any rate, there’s no denying the beauty of Benacerraf’s bravura vision, a cinematic tour de force that remains immortal, even if the Arayan Peninsula has, finally, changed.

The Milestone disc is loaded with Criterion-worthy supplements, including Benacerraf’s 22-minute film Reveron, about a Brazilian artist, two TV interviews with the director, a documentary about Benacerraf from 2007 and two audio commentaries.

Something Wild (Criterion)

Release date: May 10

SLP: $20.99

Something Wild is a pretty unserious movie, and a curious choice for Criterion to reissue. But it holds up well nonetheless, feeling hiply postmodern compared to many of its ‘80s contemporaries. Jeff Daniels gives one of his signature performances as Charles, a flustered, straight-laced workaholic who falls under the convincing spell of Melanie Griffith’s impulsive punk and ultimately fights for her love against her secret husband, a convict played with psychotic gusto by Ray Liotta. Director Jonathan Demme knows exactly how over-the-top this source material is, even when it mutates into a bloody thriller, and if you surrender yourself to its whims, it’s a lot of fast-paced fun. The credits are a rogue’s gallery of counterculture hipsters, from John Waters as a used-car salesman to John Sayles as a motorcycle cop to post-punk act The Feelies playing a high-school reunion house band and covering I’m a Believer. The bonus features are scant for a Criterion disc; we just get new interviews with Demme and screenwriter E. Max Frye and an essay by David Thompson.

Such Good Friends (Olive Films)

Release date: May 17

SLP: $22.49

One of the final films by the great Otto Preminger, 1971’s Such Good Friends shares more in common with the films of Mike Nichols and Elaine May (the latter wrote the screenplay under a pseudonym) and even Robert Altman. Dyan Cannon plays Julie Messinger, a mentally unbalanced housewife turned emotionally numb stoic of sarcasm when her prickish, impotent husband’s (Laurence Luckinbill) simple mole-removal surgery goes horribly awry. Such Good Friends is a smorgasbord of sexual depravity and dysfunction, a sobering reminder of free love’s disastrous consequences and a wry reflection on man’s (not woman’s) narcissism and selfishness. A nice addition to the aimless, reckless ’70s cinema ethos.

Ward No. 6 (Kino)

Release date: May 3

SLP: $26.99

Russia’s official entry in the recent Academy Awards, Karen Shakhnazarov’s Ward No. 6 is a strange, willfully obtuse art-house shape-shifter based on a Chekhov short story of the same name. Told with a mixture of pseudo-documentary interviews, flashbacks and ersatz home movies, Ward No. 6 is an existential anti-mystery with no resolution, a puzzle with no clear image even when completed. It concerns a large-foreheaded doctor at an insane asylum who is admitted into the psych ward himself after a series of philosophical conversations with a mania-suffering inmate changes his perspective on life. The source material may be brilliant – it’s Chekhov, after all – but Shakhnazarov’s film is a dry and ponderous exercise in style and theory, and about as unsatisfying as cinema gets. Beware the faint yellow English subtitles, whose transposition over the images is one of the worst I’ve ever seen. Many of the translations are unreadable.