"You talkin' to me?" has to be the most repeated movie quote of all time, although "Make my day" and "We're not in Kansas anymore" might be close seconds. Actually, those last two might also fit comfortably in Martin Scorsese's masterpiece Taxi Driver (1976), screening all week in a newly restored version at the Brattle.

People Parade

Every age gets the gumshoe it deserves, and for some reason we were fortunate to have one-eyed Peter Falk's Lt. Frank Columbo, disheveled, negligible, passive aggressive, and inescapable in the eponymous TV series that broadcast, after a pilot episode directed by Steven Spielberg, in one form or another for 32 years (1971-2003).

Far from being a source of escapism, the best science fiction instead offers a perspective on the problems of our times. Such is the case with Joss Whedon's Serenity (2005), the feature film based on the cult-favorite TV show set on an outlaw cargo ship in a 26th century that has at least as much bad shit going on as the present.

What to watch on a weekend that offers midnight showings of Rubber, Serenity, and Jason Weiner's Hobo With A Shotgun? No beating around the bush with the latter; the title tells it exactly the way it is, with Rutger Hauer unforgettable and unwashed as the lethal bum. Sometimes hilarious, other times weirdly touching, always violent as hell - of the three midnight options, this one just might be the best.

The puns about this film may be getting tiresome, but if you can spare a couple of hours you might find that Quentin Dupieux's Rubber (2010) will jack up some excitement. You might say its tale of a mute, telepathic, murderous automobile tire treads familiar ground, recalling John Carpenter's Christine and Steven Spielberg's Duel

Doug Block cast an uncompromising but compassionate eye on his parents a few years back with the highly praised documentary 51 Birch Street. Now he flips to the opposite generation, profiling his only daughter, Lucy, in The Kids Grow Up, a look back at her life as she is about to go to college. It regards this universal experience with a poignant personal insight, and Block himself will be on hand to discuss it when the film screens as part of The DocYard series at the Brattle Theatre at 40 Brattle St, Cambridge | Monday, June 20 @ 8 pm | $7.

Henry Thoreau said of the song of the wood thrush: "Whenever a man hears it, he is young and Nature is in her spring; Whenever he hears it, it is a new world and a free country, and the gates of heaven are not shut against him." For some reason, Provincetown is full of these birds, appropriately so given the film festival's avowed intent to present "filmmaking on the edge."

If you're tired of the spiffed-up, romanticized tough guy in Casablanca you might want to balance your image of Humphrey Bogart with his bandy-legged, deluded scalawag in John Huston's The Treasure Of The Sierra Madre (1948), the best Hollywood depiction of greed since, well, Greed (1924). It's the old story of gold coming between friends, with John's dad Walter winning an Oscar as a wise old coot and the great Alfonso Bedoya as Gold Hat, the bandito who utters the immortal words: "Badges? We don't need no badges! I don't have to show you any stinking badges!" It's at the Brattle Theater 40 Brattle St, Cambridge| Sat, June 18-Sun, June 19 @ 12:30 pm | $7.

What is it about these Cambridge guys? You'd think the university that matriculated John Milton would not produce such funny alumni as Peter Cook, John Cleese, Sascha Baron Cohen and now Richard Ayoade, who has already established himself in the UK as a standup comic and a star of such shows as "The IT Crowd."

His debut film "Submarine," based on a novel by Joe Dunthorne (opens today) is a mordantly comic coming of age story about a pale, introverted, and fatally bright schoolboy named Oliver who with premature world-weariness confronts the inevitable initiation into the eternal verities of sex, death, disillusionment, and peer bullying.

Woody Allen has a little fun with one of the great filmmakers of all time in his new film Midnight in Paris by having him look confused when Owen Wilson suggests to him the plot of what would eventually be his film The Exterminating Angel (1962). But the real Luis Buñuel knew his way around a surreal concept, as can be seen in the films opening the retrospective Bunuel: The End And the Beginning

If 3D was meant for anything, it was for photographing a blood-dripping machete wielded by a maniac wearing a hockey mask. Long before there was Avatar, schlockmeister Steve Miner added depth to bad boy Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th Part III 3D (1982) the old fashioned way - with ugly cardboard glasses.

In addition to an outstanding film festival, Seattle offers a very cool museum combining two of the obsessions of its founder, local Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen: science fiction and rock and roll. I visited the Experience Music Project/Science Fiction Museum (EMP/SFM) with YH and fellow FIPRESCI juror, stalwart Gideon Kouts of Paris.

As politicians take aim once again at all the advances made in women's rights over the past four decades, it might be worth a look back at some of those women who pioneered the cause. Lynn Hershman Leeson's Women Art Revolution chronicles how feminist artists took issue with the male domination of culture and politics in the '70s and set in motion what some consider the most significant art movement of the period.