One of my favorite filmmakers, Bruce Conner, died the other day. His work won him "avant-garde" classification, and while that seems right, since he was experimenting on his own movie island, it keeps - and has always kept - his films at a misleading distance from ready access. Stock footage and original and found film were the raw materials for his collages, and they probably kept him from getting his due as a seminal artist. His bewitching blend of archival material (what did Conner film; what did he find?) is used, most famously in 1958's "A Movie," not simply to tell stories but to critique culture while worrying your conscience.

Like Andy Warhol, Conner was a pop-art polymath, having, for example, made his own deconstruction of Marilyn Monroe (1974's "Marilyn Times Five") and sculpted, sketched, and inkblotted, too. His early pieces were kaleidoscopic assemblages of found material that put him closer to Robert Rauschenberg's combines and straddled the line between chic and junk. Seeing them was like visiting some decomposing thrift shop, and his self-photograms were surreal phantasmagorias. One of the happiest things he ever did was filming Toni Basil dancing to her song "Breakaway" in 1966.

But Conner was probably never ambitious enough to become a brand, an industry, or an icon. He didn't have Warhol's star quality. He didn't want it. He gathered his creative strength during the atomic age at the early height of the Cold War and during the early apex of television advertising, and he was active in 1960s countercultural San Francisco. So on the one hand his films were playful (cool: found footage!) but his mood often headed into an exhilarating combustion of awfulness: they erupted with these apocalyptic orgies. Even by the time he was working with David Byrne and Terry Riley and making films out of Devo songs, he was still giving us nuclear TV nightmares.

Conner was using the movies not as a medium of entertainment or escape but a tool for kaleidoscopic critique, and being ahead of his time it took forever for the culture to catch up with his perceptions, his suspicions, his fears, and, even then, it never truly did. He died still ahead of his time.

Meandering through a Dallas suburb, Richard Linklater’s characters are vaguely connected by circumstance rather than plot. As the title suggests, they are slackers. None seem to work or have anything of particular importance to be doing as the film simply runs along like a slow motion relay where the focus of attention baton is passed along. What motivates you to care enough to sit through all 97 minutes is that these slackers are quirky, amusing and interesting.
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The Boston French Film Festival begins at the MFA -- your chance to see all the fine, frisky, provocative French films our few remaining arthouses don't have room or inclination to show. Wesley breaks down the offerings; do yourself a favor and go to a few.

Otherwise, what to see this weekend? The hordes will be watching Eddie Murphy employ his sizable physical-comedy talents to no discernible purpose in "Meet Dave" or they'll be donning the 3D specs for "Journey to the Center of the Earth,"a formulaic Saturday matinee adventure with or without the T. Rex drool in your face.

You, engaged and informed pop moviegoer that you are, will spend your ducats on "Hellboy II: The Golden Army" (photo above), knowing that director Guillermo del Toro is a visionary who's not afraid to be a geeky comics fanboy. The movie's funnier than "Meet Dave," more 3D than "Journey," and it whips "Hancock"'s butt.

A delicate art-house movie it ain't, though. Come to think of it, neither is "My Winnipeg," Guy Maddin's tour through the subterranean Freudian underchambers of his Manitoba home town. It's another black-and-white camp horror-comedy fantasia from the director of "The Saddest Music in the World." but more personal than before. Film noir fanatics need to check out Ann Savage (photos from then and now, below) as the hero's mother: 63 years ago, the lady played one of the great anti-heroines in the movies in the pulpy B-flick classic "Detour." Welcome back, Ann -- you haven't mellowed a bit.

If you're up for a good if familiar coming-of-age-in-the-city story, or you miss 1994 in a big way, or you want to see Josh from Nickelodeon's "Drake and Josh" have sex with the best friend from "Juno," or you just want to revel in another grand, off-kilter Ben Kingsley performance, I'm here to tell you The Wackness" is your film.

Speaking of surprisingly twisted old movies, "Leave Her to Heaven" (1946) is at the Harvard Film Archive tonight at 7 pm. Gorgeous Technicolor, beautiful homes, and spooky Gene Tierney (in photo below) letting her crippled brother-in-law drown so she won't have to share him with husband Cornel Wilde. And that's just the half of it. Did Glenn Close study this movie before making "Fatal Attraction"? Like the dialogue says, there's only one thing wrong with Ellen -- she just loves too much. The Archive's Joseph Losey series starts on Saturday.

And speaking of demented classic noirs, "Gun Crazy" plays the Brattle Saturday morning as part of the "Elements of Cinema" series, and I do believe my Pulitzer-winning colleague Mark Feeney will be on hand to dissect the film in his usual calm but freakishly lucid manner.