Soon the suburban multiplexes will get a big fat hit of director David Gordon Green when his Seth Rogen stoner comedy "Pineapple Express" unspools in late summer (the trailer is a red-band riot), so we snobby indie kids had better get used to sharing his storytelling gifts with the unwashed masses. Green and longtime producer Lisa Muskat (an ‘89 U of R graduate) will be in town to preview his other 2008 film, "Snow Angels," an intricate ensemble piece about lonely people dealing with the presence and absence of love. And like much of Green's oeuvre, unblinking in its truths, what he wants you to see is sometimes painful to watch.

Set in a grey chill decidedly more north than Green's usual Dixie haunts, the entangled threads of "Snow Angels" unravel in flashback after distant gunshots interrupt the cacophony of marching-band practice. That's where we first meet Arthur (up-and-comer Michael Angarano), whose timid infatuation with his equally smitten classmate (Juno's charming BFF Olivia Thirlby) takes a back seat to the front-row one he's got to the dissolution of his parents' marriage. Common denominator Arthur works at a restaurant with Annie (Kate Beckinsale, finally making a smart choice), his former babysitter on whom he's clearly still crushing, and it's Annie's story that gives sad wings to "Snow Angels."

Currently wallowing in a joyless affair with her friend's husband (the underrated Nicky Katt), Annie's marriage has also come undone, though shared custody of their young daughter still necessitates contact with Glenn, played by the indispensable Sam Rockwell. Glenn says grace in the food court and seems like a good soul at first blush, but his lost laugh and desperate eagerness help us understand where the high-school sweethearts may have gone wrong. Based on a novel by Stewart O'Nan, "Snow Angels" nonetheless unfolds like Green's previous films, with realistic exchanges, subtly ferocious performances (Amy Sedaris excels at playing a normal human being), and details that are slow to reveal, all captured by cinematographer Tim Orr's eye for bleak, everyday splendor.

Hot on the heels of "Snow Angels" I finally got to see last year's breathtaking "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford," another film in which Sam Rockwell, holding his own against a larger-than-life Brad Pitt and an astonishing Casey Affleck, channels a relatively decent man gone dark. The way he commands attention is so sly, and while he'll probably never be a romantic lead, he's carved out an indelible niche for himself among today's character actors. Glenn's sharp trajectory in "Snow Angels" as a weak person trying to gain ultimate power is fully believable, and though they say truth is beauty, it can get awfully ugly.

Documentary filmmaking: it's the new therapy! In recent years we've witnessed Doug Block learning more than he ever wanted to about his seemingly ordinary parents in "51 Birch Street," while "Tarnation" allowed Jonathan Caouette to explore both his Oedipal leanings as well as his own thriving narcissism. Nathaniel Kahn and Jenny Abel worked through their famous-daddy issues in, respectively, "My Architect" and "Abel Raises Cain," and next on the couch is Oscar-nominated filmmaker Immy Humes, who delves into the life of her father, author/activist H.L. Humes, in the aloof yet fascinating "Doc."

So nicknamed because of smarts that got him into MIT at 16, Doc cofounded the literary magazine "The Paris Review" in 1953 and followed that with a pair of acclaimed novels (now back in print) before what would much later be diagnosed as mental illness took hold and sent him in pursuit of myriad windmills. Immy uses a trove of images and archival footage to illustrate her father's cultural impact, speaking to now-gone contemporaries like Timothy Leary, George Plimpton, and Norman Mailer, who describes Doc as "more vain, more intellectually arrogant than I was at that time."

Immy, of course, also touches upon Doc's lasting effect on the women and children in his life, as her absent father - by turns inventor, filmmaker, massage therapist, and long-winded campus guru - descended into a paranoia that the coda of "Doc" proves, in a way both satisfying and scary, was not entirely unfounded. 

Snow Angels

(R), directed by visiting guest artist David Gordon Green

Screens Thursday at the Dryden

Doc

(NR), directed by visiting guest artist Immy Humes

Screens Saturday at the Dryden