(Thu.-Fri., Jan. 24-25, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542, www.ihousephilly.org)

Born to a "lower working class" family in Boston, Albert and David Maysles helped redefine documentary filmmaking — or, as they called it, "direct cinema" — with an unobtrusive and sympathetic style that as often as not focuses on "ordinary people" going about their daily lives. Salesman (1968), which will be shown in a restored 35mm print on Thursday at 8 p.m. as part of I-House’s mini-retrospective, is a landmark in American cinema, one that caused confusion as much as it won acclaim. (Pauline Kael, universally wrong-headed when it came to documentaries, made the baseless accusation that the Maysles had hired actors to play the Bostonian Bible salesmen at the heart of their movie.) Drawing on the Maysles’ profound understanding of America’s working poor, Salesman is as much about the Florida housewives who take the salesmen’s calls as the salesmen themselves. While they’re undoubtedly fascinated with the process of selling, it’s no surprise the Maysles chose to focus on the least successful salesman in the group, since it’s his ambivalence about his chosen profession that provides the movie’s moral center. Salesman doesn’t have quite the organic feel of masterpieces like Gimme Shelter or Grey Gardens; it feels on some levels like a movie made to make a point, when the human drama would more than suffice.

Gimme Shelter, showing Friday at 8 p.m., is pure drama, though it’s such an astonishingly powerful movie that it’s hard to resist attaching metaphorical meaning to it. The story of The Rolling Stones’ disastrous 1969 concert at San Francisco’s Altamont Speedway, where a black man was stabbed to death by Hells’ Angels while the Stones played on obliviously, it’s often regarded as the crucial document of the concert that put the nail in the coffin of ’60s idealism.

As an added treat, Friday night’s program will open with the rarely seen What’s Happening! The Beatles in America, an off-the-cuff document of the Fab Four’s 1964 Stateside visit. A clear inspiration for Richard Lester’s A Hard Day’s Night, What’s Happening! (to be shown in the Maysles’ extended cut) lacks the structural sophistication of their mature work, but it’s a unique view of the band as close to off-camera as they ever got. Even better, Albert Maysles will be on hand to introduce the movies himself. Don’t miss a rare opportunity to hear from one of America’s greatest filmmakers.

Salesman/Grey Gardens

After you’ve whetted your appetite, supplement your Maysles education with these excellent Criterion Collection DVDs. Grey Gardens, perhaps the Maysles’ greatest achievement, is the story of Edith and Little Edie Beale, a once-wealthy mother and daughter (they’re Bouviers by blood) who live in a collapsing East Hampton summer home. Like Tennessee Williams come to life — it’s no surprise the movie’s been a touchstone for gay artists like Todd Oldham (who offers a testimonial on the DVD) and Rufus Wainwright (who copped the title for a song on his last CD) — the movie is suffused with the odor of privilege gone to pot, especially in the Beales’ dreamy recollections of the lives that might have been. Then as now, it’s been accused of "exploiting" its subjects, supposedly too demented or unstable to understand the nature of the movie being made. But Grey Gardens is brilliantly self-aware, including just enough reminders of the Beales’ gentleman callers that you’re consistently conscious of the Maysles’ presence without it being a distraction. On the disc’s commentary, one of the movie’s four directors (the Maysles were the first to consistently give their editors directing credit) calls the movie "a Rorschach blot," which seems like a fair assessment: The filmmaking’s open-ended enough that you’ve got ample room to make your own decisions, which might be one of the keys to its brilliance.

Salesman’s commentary is particularly moving, as Albert recalls how the movie’s main character reminds him of his father, "a man who might have been good at some job, but was clearly in the wrong profession." Far more effectively than directors who merely clutter their soundtrack with first-person observations, the Maysles have always been profoundly personal filmmakers, while at the same time never letting their own personalities overwhelm their subjects.

How’s Your News?

Proof of the Maysles’ technical brilliance might further be provided by this undoubtedly well-meaning but ultimately flat documentary. Directed by author and McSweeney’s guitar-smasher Arthur Bradford, How’s Your News? follows a group of five disabled "reporters" across the country as they conduct their own brand of unscripted man-on-the-street interviews. You can see the humor that led South Park’s Matt Stone and Trey Parker to help bankroll the project: Ronnie Simonsen, who has cerebral palsy, is a TV junkie who asks everyone they meet if they’ve heard of his hero, Medical Center’s Chad Everett. But it’s hard to see the point in sending a man who can’t speak intelligibly out to do "interviews," or parking a man with spastic cerebral palsy in the middle of a Venice Beach boardwalk with a hidden camera and a cardboard sign reading, "Talk to me." It’s quite probable the experience of making the film was good for everyone involved — they got a free cross-country trip out of it, if nothing else — but Bradford skimps so much on context that it’s hard for us to even understand what’s going on. (It takes an hour for it to come out that the subjects all went to the same camp.) Whatever his respect for them as people, Bradford never manages to turn his subjects into characters. We’re stuck on the outside looking in.

Vengo

(Sat.-Sun., Jan. 26-27, Thu.-Fri., Jan. 31-Feb. 1, 7:30 p.m.; Feb. 2, 9:15 p.m.; Feb. 3, 7:30 p.m., Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-569-9700, www.princemusictheater.org)

Tony Gatlif is known for mixing fiction with elements of documentary: Features like Latcho Drom and Gadjo Dilo are as much concert movies and ethnographic documents as narratives, detailing Gatlif’s ongoing love affair with every variety of Romany music. Vengo, his latest feature, unfortunately gets the balance wrong. There’s so much music — in this case, the Gypsy-flavored flamenco of southern Spain — and so little plot that it often seems like we’re merely killing time until the next song. The tale of inter-familial bloodshed and vengeance is so thinly sketched that it might as well not exist; even though I watched the movie by myself, I kept wanting to turn to the person next to me and ask what was supposed to be going on. Vengo’s soundtrack album, featuring artists like Tomatito, Sheikh Ahmad Al Tuni, La Caita and La Paquera de Jerez, is a delight. Unfortunately, as a movie, Vengo makes a great CD.