Like many Americans, I often feel the funkiness rising up inside me. It sometimes needs purging. There’s no better opportunity than the one provided tonight at Maysles Cinema, screening Soul Power, a terrific concert documentary filmed in Africa. (It also plays tomorrow night and Wednesday at 7:30pm.) The movie captures legends like James Brown and B.B. King at the peak of their substantial gifts. Backstage: a playful Muhammad Ali, serenly confident of his soon-to-be-mythic victory over George Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle.

Team Film’s all about the specialty theaters this weekend. Film Forum is the place to be for our two five-star picks, Claire Denis’s recent 35 Shots of Rum (her latest, White Material, screens in this year’s New York Film Festival) and John Huston’s blue-collar boxing classic Fat City (1972). The Museum of Modern Art is where you’ll find our four-star selection, Harmony and Me, starring indie-rocker Justin Rice. And for a retro fix, head on over to the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Juliette Binoche tribute, where you should be certain to catch Damage (1992) and Flight of the Red Balloon (2007).

The second season of the essential and eclectic 92YTribeca series Queer/Art/Film—curated by filmmaker Ira Sachs (The Delta, Forty Shades of Blue, Married Life) and BUTT magazine contributing editor Adam Baran—begins this evening at 7:30 pm with a screening of the 1948 British noir So Evil My Love. It stars Ray Milland as a sensuous cad who works his wily charms on a widow played by Ann Todd. The great Geraldine Fitzgerald is a featured player, and it was this bit of casting that first attracted the attention of drag performer Everett Quinton, who will introduce the movie.

Tonight at 6:50 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music you can see one of the first movies to emerge from Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute. El Norte (1983) follows two immigrants, a brother and a sister, on their perilous journey north from Guatemala to the United States. Getting there is only half the film. Once they’ve crossed over, a whole new set of challenges arise. The screenplay, which director Gregory Nava cowrote with Anna Thomas, was nominated for an Oscar.

Tonight, Film Forum wraps up its Monday series “Mason Most Noir,” with several screenings of Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. It’s a nutball Technicolor love story photographed by the great Jack Cardiff (cinematographer on such varied productions as The Red Shoes, Rope and Rambo: First Blood Part II) and starring James Mason and Ava Gardner. Plot takes a backseat to sensation, and there’s no better way to experience it than with this newly restored 35mm print.

If the gloomy skies and misty weather keep you indoors this weekend, but you still want to satisfy your cinemagoing appetite, be sure and check out this page, where our own Joshua Rothkopf is filing dispatches from the Toronto International Film Festival. There are sure to be some titles that’ll soon see release stateside, so it’s good preparation. Should you decide to venture out, we’re most keen on the documentary The Painter Sam Francis, which is now playing at Anthology Film Archives. We’re more mixed, though still pretty positive, on Joe Berlinger’s Big Oil documentary, Crude (at IFC Center), and Shane Acker’s postapocalyptic animated feature, 9 (in wide release). And for a bat-shit-crazy fix, you could do worse than Gamer, the latest from Crank series auteurs Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor.

Jacques Tati is one of cinema’s great comic performers. Tonight at 8pm at the Museum of Modern Art, you can catch his officially sanctioned masterpiece Mon Oncle (1958). Winner of a special Jury Prize at Cannes, recognized by the New York Film Critics Circle and awarded the Best Foreign Film Oscar, the movie marks Tati’s second go-round as the bumbling, pipe-smoking Monsieur Hulot. This time out the character navigates a changing, increasingly modernized suburban landscape, which is at tremendous odds with his quaintly old-world upbringing. It’s not a critique so much as a generous, all-encompassing compare-contrast: Tati never uses comedy to thumb his nose, but to uncover the humanity lurking within his rigorously composed frames. The end of Mon Oncle—in which Hulot’s relatives send him off to find a full-time, “respectable” job—segues beautifully into Tati’s next effort, the astonishing Play Time (1967), which was sadly not greeted with this film’s commercial and critical hosannas.

You know what I’m not doing this weekend? Laboring. At all. I mean, perhaps I might lift a stein of lemon-laden Weisse beer to my lips, or hoist a skewered shrimp mouthward. But that’s pushing it. Movies are perfect in this regard: no work, total satisfaction. Here at Team Film, we’ve picked five great labor-related films for your personal pleasure. Watch characters toil onscreen and laugh at them. I could also refer you to Film Forum’s booking of Carol Reed’s IRA noir, Odd Man Out, or Anthology’s Liverpool, both excellent options. But I simply don’t want to think that hard. I suggest heading to BAM and seeing all three superstylish thrillers by Italian horror maestro Dario Argento. Trust me on this. They’ll have an effect directly on your bowels and glands, not that pesky brain of yours. And because Monday’s a holiday, go check out Fellini’s Amarcord at MoMA. Lovely. Try not to think about Tuesday.

It makes a perverse kind of sense that the Lauren Bacall vehicle The Fan is playing twice this evening at Clearview Chelsea. It’s an aging-diva campfest that courts a predominantly gay audience, yet also blatantly (and often hilariously) insults them. Sally Ross (Bacall) is a fading starlet who takes on the lead role in a Broadway musical—the brilliantly titled Never Say Never—to resuscitate her career. Trouble is, she has an obsessive, closet-case fan, Douglas Breen (Michael Biehn), who’s writing her increasingly threatening letters and starting to infiltrate her circle. None of this stops Sally from readying her gay-gay-gay comeback: Take special note of the rehearsal scene in which she “sings” the immortal refrain, “No energy crisis/My professional advice is/Get off your huh!/And!/Go!” Douglas, meanwhile, is becoming more and more handy with a straight razor (one of his practice kills is more offensive in its homo baiting-cum-bashing than the entirety of the William Friedkin debacle Cruising). But really, who wouldn’t want to slit Sally’s throat after her mangling of this catchy Marvin Hamlisch tune:

There’s fun postapocalyptic cinema (The Road Warrior) in which the future feels like one big S&M party, and then there’s the depressing kind (Testament; bring a box of tissues), which makes us realize that radiation poisoning might not be so hot. Rarer than both types, though, is the what-if movie that pushes its viewers toward the darker reaches of humankind’s desperation. What would civilization do to survive? Lock itself in a bubble of nostalgia? Spiral into shame and nihilism? A Boy and His Dog (1975) is that kind of gem. Don Johnson (a decade before Miami Vice) stars as a sex-obsessed teen wandering the nuke-ruined wasteland with his telepathic dog. But the real heroes are writer-provocateur Harlan Ellison and actor-turned-director L.Q. Jones, whose onscreen work with Sam Peckinpah in The Wild Bunch hints at the anarchy in full flourish here. See a 35mm print tonight at the Film Society of Lincoln Center at 9pm.

One of the best Hurricane Katrina documentaries, Trouble the Water, screens at 7pm this evening at Bluestockings bookstore, in honor of its release on DVD. Codirectors Carl Deal and Tia Lessin will be on hand to discuss how they came to tell the story of aspiring New Orleans rap artist Kimberly Rivers Roberts, whose first-person footage of the storm fills the doc’s early portions. After this harrowing beginning, Deal and Lessin follow Roberts and her family as they navigate the tangled bureaucratic “support system” set up in Katrina’s wake. She eventually decides to leave the only home she’s ever known, but this presents its own share of disappointments and challenges. Important issues of race and class are engaged with, though Deal and Lessin show there are no easy answers to be had. It’s all one can do—and it has to be enough—to simply survive.

We’re not calling you Ichabod Crane or nothing, but you’d be out of your skull if you missed Film Forum’s brief engagement of Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman. It’s quiet and contemplative, just as you prefer your Monday nights to be. Heady drama? Sure. A thinker? Most definitely. No need to scamper like a headless chicken, either; it plays several times tonight, at 4:30, 6:15, 8 and 10pm. Head out now! [Ed: Please stop.]

Hollywood, it’s often said, had a very good 1939. Consider this handful of releases: Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Gunga Din, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Ninotchka. (Not a G-Force among them.) But honestly, this critic would trade all of those classics for Howard Hawks’s unpretentious masterpiece, Only Angels Have Wings, released in May of that stellar year. When critics use the term Hawksian to describe the kind of stoic professionalism that marks the director’s work, they really mean this movie—a terrific tropical-flyer adventure that’s also a deceptively profound statement on mortality. Sexy and adult, the film doesn’t feel seven decades old. It screens tonight at BAM as part of its tribute to Cary Grant, at 6:50 and 9:30pm.

What’s so wonderful about Mike Leigh’s recent Happy-Go-Lucky—screening tonight at 7pm at the Museum of Modern Art—is its multifaceted exploration of the lead character, Poppy (Sally Hawkins). Like the film’s intentionally misleading title, a good many people have taken her bubbliness at face value, not recognizing that it masks as complicated a soul as any in the Leigh canon. Poppy’s carefree approach to life shapes how we view her in the varied situations she’s placed in. She’s empathetic and endearing when dealing with a troubled child at her elementary-school day job, passive-aggressively grating when visiting her family and almost too sure of herself when interacting with a mentally unstable homeless man (Stanley Townsend). The heart of the film, though, is the scenes between Poppy and Scott (Eddie Marsan), a gloomy driving instructor who challenges her every giggly whim. Their interactions ultimately reveal the cracks in Poppy’s facade—by the final fade-out we see her perpetual happiness for both its genuineness and its fraudulence. It’s one of Leigh’s best. Don’t miss it!

Who are these men? If you have to ask, then you listen to way too much dance music. This weekend brings us the awesome guitar master class It Might Get Loud, starring Jack White, the Edge and Jimmy Page. Even if you don’t play six-string (or Guitar Hero), you’ll have a blast with this documentary, from the maker of An Inconvenient Truth. The geek squad, meanwhile, will be heading off to see District 9—and they will be pleased. But if you want unfussy heroics, check out They Were Expendable at Anthology on Saturday at 4:45pm. You’ve never seen a quieter WWII movie, nor a John Wayne performance this sensitive.

You may think you know catty NYC media people. But until you see Alexander Mackendrick’s seedy 1957 drama, starring a truly vicious Burt Lancaster as Machiavellian gossip columnist J.J. Hunsecker, you truly haven’t seen the worst (or best) of them. The price is right for tonight’s 8:30pm screening at Summer on the Hudson: free. Get there early for good tush placement. Match me, Sidney!

A movie that continues to grow in stature among those who cherish serious acting, Brokeback Mountain deserves to be seen (or reseen) tonight, outside of the bubble of Oscar hype or morbidity. It’s almost a blessing that the film even got made. Rumor has it we should thank Naomi Watts for encouraging her then-boyfriend, Heath Ledger, to meet with director Ang Lee. As the decade draws to a close, expect this movie to stand high among its more lasting achievements. It screens tonight at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of their tribute to Lee, at 6:30pm.

It’s not the best time for new releases. No movie received more than three stars in this past week’s issue, which isn’t to say that there’s nothing interesting or pleasurable in Cold Souls, Julie & Julia or Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania. Regardless, you might want to make this a repertory weekend. Anthology Film Archives has a wide selection of ’70s grit programmed by grindhouser William Lustig (word is John Flynn’s The Outfit is particularly noteworthy). The Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Cary Grant program continues through the weekend (Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, The Talk of the Town and Suspicion are on the bill), and IFC Center has midnight showings, Friday and Saturday, of the Coen brothers’ insane Barton Fink and David Lynch’s also-not-so-normal Eraserhead. And hey, there’s always Landmark Sunshine’s midnight showings of cigar chomper John Milius’s ode to ’80s conservatism, Red Dawn. Wolverines!!!

Boaz Rein-Buskila has been having this same dream for years: a pack of rabid mutts, all bright yellow eyes and bared teeth, barking under a window. It goes back to the former Israeli soldier’s time in Beirut during the 1982 Lebanon War, where he served with filmmaker Ari Folman. “Don’t these things haunt you?” Rein-Buskila asks his comrade. “That’s not stored in my system,” the director replies, though that’s technically not true; the bad memories are there, they just need to brought to the surface. Part documentary and part free-form exorcism, Folman’s Oscar-nominated journey through his—and his country’s—checkered past explores the psychic trauma inflicted on both sides of the Arab-Israeli conflict. That each of the incidents is rendered in animation that appears to have been lifted from an old, out-of-sync Johnny Quest episode makes it all the more surreal and hallucinatory. If you missed this 2008 ciritical favorite, you owe to it yourself to check it out tonight at Socrates Sculpture Park; the outdoor screening starts at sundown.

Hot Blood could have staked its place in cinema history for its ad copy alone: “Jane Russell shakes her tambourines and drives Cornel wild!” proclaimed the trailer for Nicholas Ray’s widescreen whatsit. Is it a tale of two Gypsies in love? A bawdy, bursting ode to outsiders? An abrasive avant-garde musical? It’s all this and more, as shown by the scene in which Wilde’s “hot blooded” Stephano Torino proves his romantic mettle by violently dancing a rival out an apartment window onto a sprawling city backlot. This is widely viewed as a lesser entry in the Ray oeuvre, so it’s due for reappraisal. You can catch it any of three times today at Film Forum (2:55, 6:30 or 10:05pm).