Hollywood vs. Hitler (Fri., May 23, 8 p.m., $6, Moore College of Art & Design, 20th and Race sts., 215-568-4515, x4099, www.voicenet.com/~jschwart) On a slow weekend for repertory film, Secret Cinema weighs in with this compendium of Hollywood anti-Nazi propaganda movies. For cinema historians, the highlight might be The Strange Death of Adolf Hitler (1943), a curious- sounding yarn about a Viennese official who’s surgically altered to look like Hitler, then plans to murder him and take over his identity. Like star Ludwig Donath, writers Fritz Kortner and Joe May had fled careers in the German film industry -- May directed several of Fritz Lang’s earliest scripts -- while actress Gale Sondergaard, who plays Donath’s wife, would later be blacklisted along with her husband, Hebert Biberman, one of the Hollywood 10.

The rest of the bill features more intentional grabs for laughs, from That Nazty Nuisance, a 45-minute featurette from the studios of Hal Roach (The Little Rascals) to I’ll Never Heil Again, starring those masters of political punditry, The Three Stooges. Chances are, there’s no The Great Dictator waiting in the wings, but hopefully also no Black Hawk Down.

Barton Fink/Miller’s Crossing ($19.98 DVD each) About Friggin' Time Dept.: For those who've been wondering when Joel and Ethan Coen's two greatest movies would finally arrive on DVD, the answer is: not a moment too soon. The trailer for the Coens' upcoming Intolerable Cruelty, in theaters right this second, makes that contemporary romantic comedy, on which the Coens are only the two most recent of seven credited writers, look like nothing short of a train wreck -- not only don't I want to see it, I'm afraid to see it. Two of the most distinctive comic filmmakers of our time and they can't do better than swishy hairdresser jokes? What's next, Legally Blonde 3?

Apart from praying that Cruelty is just an interesting movie that Universal's doing its level best to make look like a marketable piece of crap, the best fans can do is savor the twin highlights of the Coens' art. (Save it, Fargo fans.) Though extras are minimal -- inconsequential extended scenes on Fink, cursory interviews on Miller's -- the movies speak ever so gloriously for themselves. For a long time I couldn't decide which of the two was infinitesimally closer to perfection, but as the years have gone by, Miller's has come to seem the superior film. The luxuriously appointed gangster yarn (in an interview, cinematographer Barry Sonnenfeld says they set out to make "a handsome movie") simultaneously reinvents the genre while tapping its deepest reservoirs. Even The Godfather accepts the codes of masculinity and duty as inherent to the running of "the business," but the Coens view them as constructs, to be slipped on like the fedoras that figure so prominently in the movie's iconography (and the movie's original poster, a far more memorable image than Fox's gloomy box art). The gay love triangle -- between Steve Buscemi, JE Freeman and John Turturro's deliciously amoral bookie -- only literalizes the homosexual tension that hangs so thick in The Maltese Falcon. The mostly deeply sad -- and, really, the deepest -- of all the Coens' movies, Miller's Crossing is as close as I've ever seen to a flawless film: After around a dozen viewings, I've found exactly two shots I'd quarrel with. Anyone who buys the line that the Coens are inhuman style merchants should be chained to a sofa and forced to watch this movie until they admit their mistake.

Following the generally ignored Miller's, Barton Fink made up for it by taking an unprecedented triple crown at Cannes: best film, best director and best actor. (Not only unprecedented, but never-to-be-repeated: Subsequent rule changes made it impossible for the jury to bestow more than two awards on the same movie.) There's little to quarrel with: The Coens' existential-writer's-block drama, inspired by a bout of same during the writing of Miller's Crossing, is even denser, more allusively rich. Every time through, I discover more ways in which the movie's iconography plays out. (This time, it was the shot of gooey wallpaper glue on Barton's hand, which suggests exactly how self-directed his talents really are.) The Coens cannily subvert Barton's supposed artistic breakthrough (listen carefully to his screenplay and you'll hear dialogue repeated from the opening scene), but their attempt to avoid attaching value to their characters' work undercuts the poignancy of the washed-up novelist-turned-screenwriter played by John Mahoney and obviously inspired by William Faulkner, with a touch of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The plight of brilliant but under-recognized writers like Faulkner and Fitzgerald, who both drank themselves silly in Hollywood while frittering away their talents, is too tragic for the cursory treatment it's given here; through no fault of Mahoney's, his character falls through the gap between a screwball caricature and someone we might genuinely care about. Still, it's a minor flaw in a movie whose virtues are major. Michael Lerner, Tony Shalhoub and even the estimable John Goodman have never been better.

Comedian ($29.99 DVD) Poor Jerry Seinfeld. First, he retires the standup material he’s been building for decades and has to build an act from scratch in front of audiences whose tolerance for experimentation from a known quantity only goes so far. And even then, he’s only the second-most-interesting character in the documentary about the experience. Watching a star of Seinfeld’s magnitude still sweat it out backstage has its fascinations, of course, but they pale beside the figure of Orny Adams, the would-be up-and-comer who plays Eve to Seinfeld’s Margo. Manifestly unlikeable, doggedly ambitious and not particularly funny, Adams (no relation, thankfully) seems to succeed in spite of himself. Backstage at the comedy festival where he’s just gotten a major break, Adams listens impatiently while a well-meaning fellow comic advises him to enjoy the success; Adams nods impatiently, waits until he’s left the room, then yells at his manager (who, in an apparent coincidence, is also Seinfeld’s), "You let him talk to me like that?" Of course, it’s easy to be gracious when you’re on top, which Comedian’s makers never quite get around to admitting, but then Orny Adams isn’t the film’s executive producer. Oddly, and no doubt due to intense negotiations, Comedian shows us little of Seinfeld’s act in progress as he builds it up on stage; the film’s most compelling non-Orny scenes are those which simply show Seinfeld’s ongoing attachment to the smell, taste and feel of late-night comedy clubs, one which peers like Chris Rock, Collin Quinn and Mario Joyner clearly aren’t immune to either. When Rock shows up positively bursting with news of the amazing two-and-a-half-hour Bill Cosby show he’s just seen, you can feel Seinfeld swelling with two emotions you might not expect: awe and envy.