Stolen
(Thu., Sept. 22, 7 p.m., $7, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542)
It sounds like the opening scene of a movie: Two men dressed as Boston police officers talk their way into a museum in the wee hours of St. Patrick's Day, overpower the guards, and make off with the largest haul in modern history. Rebecca Dreyfus' doc doesn't pick up the trail until 10 years after the 1990 theft from Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, but the treasure hunt still has plenty of twists left. Real life may have deprived Dreyfus of the perfect ending — to date, none of the 35 paintings has been recovered — but the search turns up fascinating characters every way you look. Heading the list is professional art detective Harold Smith, a veteran recovery specialist permanently scarred by skin cancer brought on by a carcinogenic skin remedy. With his bandaged hands, prosthetic nose, eye patch and bowler hat, he's like a character out of Raymond Chandler, except no noir dick ever had such boundless enthusiasm.

Trailed by Dreyfus and cameraman Albert Maysles, Smith's investigation leads down all kinds of colorful blind alleys, circling around Irish mobsters, the IRA, convicted art thieves, and best of all, an art thief-turned-informant who calls himself "Turbocharger." Turbo, as he prefers to be called, might have stepped out of The Long Good Friday and into real life; he's like Bob Hoskins with an M.F.A. The movie loses some steam when it detours from a history of Johannes Vermeer's The Concert, the most valuable of the stolen paintings, into an art history lesson on Vermeer's overall significance; when you've got a gumshoe as charismatic as Smith on the case, the audience doesn't need to be convinced that his investigation is worth pursuing. Dreyfus will be present at this one-off screening.

Edvard Munch + Four by Peter Watkins
(Fri., Sept. 23 — Sun., Sept. 25, International House)
A highlight of International House's 2003 Watkins retrospective, this masterful portrait of the Norwegian Expressionist painter returns in a restored 35mm print along with four previously unscreened Watkins films. Edvard Munch, which combines improvised acting with narratorial art criticism, is quite simply the greatest movie ever made about the artistic process. Given the feeble competition, that's almost too faint a compliment. Say instead that Watkins' deft intermarriage of art and history could change the way you see both.

Although largely lacking the radical politics that characterize Watkins' explicitly radical oeuvre, Munch brings the same understanding of the link between history, politics and the self. As Munch's canvases grow darker and more frenzied, the narrator points to ongoing traumas in Munch's life as well as the contemporaneous births of Hitler and Goering. As in his most recent work, La Commune (Paris, 1871), Watkins restages historical conflicts with nonactors, rendering old debates — in this case, over the validity of Munch's decidedly unpretty art — with stunning immediacy. When Munch scrapes away at the canvas, Watkins amplifies the sound to a low rumble. It's as if his palette knife has struck bone.

Saturday evening's program fills valuable gaps for the Watkins faithful (as ever a small group, but adding surprising numbers in recent years). Filmed in 1969, The Gladiators, also known as The Peace Game, is clearly a transitional work, a step towards the incendiary Punishment Park (due on DVD in November). The setting is Sweden, home to the "peace games" that the world's nations have staged as an outlet for their bellicose urges. While commanders from unfriendly nations eat pasta and discuss strategy, groups of men compete for elusive, and possibly illusory, goals, their imminent deaths flawlessly forecast by a complex computer manned by disinterested guards. In a telling twist, it's not the long-haired French saboteur who poses the greatest threat to "the machine" — his resistance is anticipated and even helpful — but an act of simple kindness that jeopardizes the game's integral antagonism. "Basic humanity, that's all that's wrong with that boy," says a disapproving general.

Preceded by two early shorts, Forgotten Faces and The Diary of an Unknown Soldier, Gladiators shows Watkins' progression towards relinquishing scripted satire for onscreen happenings, staging socially resonant events and watching as they unfold. Filmed three years after Munch, Evening Land (screening Sunday) is essentially a speculative documentary, a what-if that feels like a right-now. When a Danish shipbuilders union refuses to build submarines that could carry nuclear missiles for foreign armies, the resulting call for a general strike throws the socialist country into disarray. As European foreign ministers converge on Copenhagen for a summit that, rumor has it, will lay the groundwork for a common European army (one of the movie's few wrong guesses), the police and military crack down on legal dissent, spurred by the terrorist kidnapping of a government official. Suddenly, the kidnappers quip in a taped communiqué, "Everything seems to be related to the safety of the state," a phrase with chilling resonance in the "war on terror" United States. In essence, Evening Land ventures that even the most leftist state is one chain of events away from a right-wing takeover. If only he'd make a movie about how the left can take back.

Extras
(premieres Sun., Sept. 25, 10:30 p.m., HBO)
To answer the obvious question first: It's not as good as The Office. Ricky Gervais' eagerly awaited follow-up to the canonized cringefest works in the same it-hurts-so-it's-funny vein, but its well-trod showbiz milieu doesn't yield the same untapped riches. Andy Milliman (Gervais), a struggling actor fruitlessly campaigning for a snatch of dialogue, might share David Brent's self-delusion, but he's not a monster, just a hapless schlub. Instead, he's a witness to the monstrousness of others, particularly the celebrity guest stars (Ben Stiller, Kate Winslet and Patrick Stewart among them) who enliven Extras' six episodes. The joke, in essence, is that the longer we watch Andy try to break into show business, the less it seems worth breaking into. The main discovery here is Gervais' co-star Ashley Jensen, a furiously dim Scot whose mild ambitions (mostly sleeping with men) form a fine contrast to Andy's loftier dreams.

No Direction Home
(Mon.-Tue., Sept. 26-27, 9 p.m., WHYY-TV; $29.99 DVD)
It's worth watching Martin Scorsese's three-and-a-half-hour Dylan doc just to hear a childhood friend refer to its subject as "Robert." Dylan has been walled off by self-made mystique for so long that the least of humanizing details comes as a minor shock. Dylan stole valuable folk records from a collector? He swiped Dave van Ronk's arrangement of "House of the Rising Sun"? He chews with his mouth open? Priceless.

Although interviewer Michael Borofsky gets a few nuggets from the man himself, No Direction Home's best insights come from those who bobbed in his wake, especially Joan Baez, no longer a prissy folk goddess but a salty, blessedly foul-mouthed raconteur. Breaking out a flawless imitation of Dylan's nasal drawl, she recalls his response to her request for lyrical clarification: "I don't know where it fucking comes from. I don't know what the fuck it's about."

Although he's mellowed a bit in 40 years, Dylan isn't much more forthcoming these days, which leaves No Direction Home well below the threshold of revelation. Of course, it's studded with stunning performances, from a nervous 1962 appearance on the Steve Allen Show through Dylan's triumph at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, followed by his catcalled electric debut the following year (you can barely hear the songs above the booing) and his 1966 tour of Britain with The Hawks, who would soon become The Band. But the generous excerpts from Dont Look Back, Eat the Document and Murray Lerner's Festival mostly make you wish you were watching them instead. Paramount's DVD includes uncut versions of several excerpted performances.

Misc. Picks:
Secret Cinema's "Hopeful Visions: The Optimistic Future of World's Fairs and Theme Parks" includes a vintage Disneyland featurette and Willard van Dyke's view of "The Shape of Films to Come," which integrates work by Stan Vanderbeek and Ed Emshwiller (Fri., 8 p.m., Moore College of Art and Design). The best of the Florida Experimental Film Festival (FLEX) flickers at Space 1026 (Sat., 8 p.m., www.smallchangescreenings.com). Belgrade-born documentarian Goran Radovanovic hosts an evening of bleak comic documentaries at International House (Tue., 7 p.m.). Rev up for next week's NAMAC conference with "What Price Media Consolidation?" a free symposium at Drexel's Mandell Theater (Wed., 2 p.m., register at rsvp.rudman@drexel.edu or 215-895-0352). David Lynch drops by Penn's Harrison Auditorium to discuss "Consciousness, Creativity and the Brain," and no doubt stump for Transcendental Meditation (Wed., 7 p.m.).