Ty's movie picks for Friday, January 30

More new releases trudging across the tundra only to melt into a soggy mess on the screen. "New in Town" is formula corporate-meanie-mellowed-by-country-rubes comedy, leavened by some fairly deft Renee Zellweger slapstick and the rubbery density of its faux-"Fargo" accents (Siobhan Fallon Hogan, I'm talking to you.) Wesley has mostly rude things to say about "Taken," the Liam Neeson kidnapping drama, and the horror movie "The Uninvited." As for "Donkey Punch," I'll let Wes sum it up: "The Real World: Death Yacht."

So your best bets are to catch up on your Oscar contenders, get your early Diane Lane freak on by Tivo-ing "Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains" tonight on Turner, or, even better, head over to the Harvard Film Archive tonight (Friday) or tomorrow to meet director and creatively conflicted Calvinist Paul Schrader. He's in town to kick off the HFA series "The Style of Loneliness - a Paul Schrader Retrospective". Tonight's a rare chance to catch his gorgeous 1985 ode to the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, "Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters." (One of those chapters, of course, concerns the author's public seppuku after trying to overthrow the government in 1970; other pieces of this dreamlike but dangerous film consist of recreations of several Mishima novels.) Ken Ogata (in photo above) stars, Philip Glass scores.

Saturday at 7, Schrader appears with two other little-seen and quite essential movies. "Light Sleeper" (1991) features Willem Dafoe as a Manhattan drug dealer having a midlife meltdown; it's closer to Dostoevsky than an action flick and echoes of Schrader's script for "Taxi Driver" well up in odd places. Great cast, too: Susan Sarandon, Victor Garber, and a young, briefly-seen Sam Rockwell. Following that is "Blue Collar," Schrader's 1978 drama/caper-film about life on the auto-factory line and easily Richard Pryor's best dramatic role. It's also one of the more honest depictions of working-class life to come out of Hollywood and it plays more caustically than ever in these days of Detroit blues.