Let us have a moment of silence for the late, beloved Adrienne Shelly, above. Okay, now go see "Waitress," her last movie as director and actor, and a goofy, bittersweet treasure.

In general, the arthouses are probably your best bet for new releases this weekend: "Away From Her" at the Harvard Square and "Waitress," "Red Road," and "Stephanie Daley" all at the Kendall -- all good, nervy movies. I'll spare you my rant about the Kendall hogging the good stuff while other area indie houses starve. Let's instead just note the overwhelming number of women directors (respectively Sarah Polley, Shelly, Andrea Arnold, and Hilary Brougher) and tremendous roster of strong female performances, from Julie Christie in "Away From Her" to Tilda Swinton and -- surprise -- Amber Tamblyn in "Stephanie Daley."

Also worth seeing are the smart zombies-in-London sequel "28 Weeks Later" and "Zoo," arguably the first documentary on the subject of bestiality and definitely the most artistic. Reviews have been fairly rapturous and Wesley likes it a lot; I'm in the minority, I guess, that thinks the film aesthetizes the meaning out of its subject in an effort to be poetic. But, hey, if you have the stomach and "Seabiscuit" was too tame for you, go right ahead; you can't argue that Robinson Devor doesn't know how to direct a movie.

The studio pickings are pretty dire this weekend: "The Ex," with Zach Braff, and "Georgia Rule," with Jane Fonda, Lindsay Lohan, and Felicity Huffman. Haven't seen the former but the latter is just painfully bad, a new low for all three actresses. I'm imagining the look on the faces of parents all over America who take their tweeners to see the new Lohan movie and get a plot involving incest and oral sex. (Yikes! What's in the next theater over, kids? Something called "Zoo"? That sounds cute.)

In the rep houses and elsewhere: The Boston Gay and Lesbian Film/Video Festival kicks in at the MFA; the Globe's Erin Meister breaks the offerings down.

Real, honest-to-goodness grindhouse movies at the Brattle, including a solid John Carpenter/Kurt Russell double bill tonight: "Escape from New York" (1981) and the much-reviled-but-actually-frickin'-awesome 1982 remake of "The Thing". On Sunday, they chase the stink out with a few Laurence Olivier classics.

The Harvard Film Archive is dark Friday and Saturday but comes back strong on Sunday with a rare screening of 1964's "The Pumpkin Eater," with a script by Harold Pinter and what is probably Anne Bancroft's single best performance, as a wife and mother going around the bend from husband Peter Finch's cheating ways. Grab this one.

Finally, if you've always wanted to meet director Paul Mazursky ("An Unmarried Woman," "Down and Out in Beverly Hills," "Moscow on the Hudson") and feel like heading out to Brandeis on Sunday, the National Center for Jewish Film will be playing his travelogue documentary "Yippee: A Journey to Jewish Joy." The director will be in attendance. What, they couldn't program it on a double bill with "The Pickle"?

Reader Derry Ledoux of Cohasset -- see? local audience -- responded to my previous post with a long, thoughtful email about the changes cinema's undergoing and our duty to keep pace. Some excerpts:

"It's the DVD thatÂ’s changing everything. Critics really need to stop and take notice that today people are building film collections rather than libraries of books. In the past your business may have been limited to the going-out crowd but times are changing...

Your business embraces far more than whatÂ’s new. Technology has just opened the past. Criterion is planning to release an edition of TarkovskyÂ’s film "My Name is Ivan," or as it is also known "IvanÂ’s Childhood." So what are you planning to do? Old films need reviewing too... What makes you think that I wouldnÂ’t be interested in the ideas and the people that have been shaping cinema over the past century?... ThereÂ’s an enormous amount of work before you: the development of a market with all its nuances. The DVD player has made every home a theatre with different tastes. Where do you start?"

Excellent point: The wall between the theatrical experience and the home experience -- and thus between new films and the vast back catalogue -- has dissolved. Big media, by contrast, still plays the new-release game because the studios still need theatrical to plant the seed. More and more, a movie's appearance in theaters functions as an ad for the eventual DVD release, and that's necessary. Case in point: One of the best movies I've seen this year so far is "Longford," a British true-crime-and-punishment story starring Jim Broadbent and Samantha Morton (and Andy "Gollum" Serkis as a most evil man). It was released in England last year and only played on HBO here; it'll be on DVD soon. If it had come out on the big screen, there'd be Oscar talk, and rightfully so. But because it was on TV only, you probably haven't heard of it. It's our job to let you know about it, but theatrical movies still get the most attention from readers -- if nothing else, they act as a filter that helps make sense of an unending barrage of media.

We cover DVD at the Globe, obviously. Our Sunday Home Entertainment page features the writing of the estimable Tom Russo, as well as Wesley, myself, and others. That's the pattern most papers follow, and you could argue it marginalizes the format that has become the mainstream. (Indeed, why does the Boston.com arts page not have a dedicated, searchable DVD section?) The Times, by contrast, has Dave Kehr, easily the best working critic covering DVD, and his must-read weekly column and blog point the way toward the big picture Ledoux writes about.

A primary reason most film critics don't cover the DVD world in proper depth is that there just aren't enough hours in the day. Not that I'm complaining, but I have my hands full seeing new releases (400 or so a year for me and Wesley and Janice Page to divvy up), writing reviews, and keeping up this blog. (Oh, and the wife and kids. Fact is, movie critics should never have families -- they just get in the way of watching that Rohmer boxed set in one sitting. On the plus side, they keep us from being snotty pasty-boys with no lives.)

Most of us have the same time-crunch issue. Except Tony Scott at the Times, who I'm convinced has a clone (or two) stuck in a closet with a word processor.

Still, Derry, you're on to something. The daily paper is one thing, but it behooves a critic's website -- whether it's a personal blog or an official corporate site -- to make not just an entire body of criticism as porous and accessible as possible, but the entire history of cinema. Because that's what's available to be seen and that's increasingly how people are seeing it.