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Like a lot of people, I watched the first few episodes of AMC's "Hell on Wheels," Joe and Tony Gayton’s drama about the building of the transcontinental railroad, and then checked out. It wasn't awful, but a lot of it was weak, and even in its better moments it seemed not to have found its tone yet. The pilot and the next couple of episodes seemed stranded between grubby naturalism and slick, empty mythmaking. In one scene, the show would feel like a wannabe "McCabe and Mrs. Miller" or "Deadwood" muddy and lyrical and depressive. In another it would echo Sergio Leone or early Clint Eastwood ("High Plains Drifter" and "The Outlaw Josey Wales" especially). Yet another scene would feel anachronistic, glossy, and weightless. When I finally did catch up after the New Year, what I saw made me wish I'd been watching the show in real time. "Hell on Wheels" didn't turn into a great drama, but it settled into a distinctive groove, growing more relaxed and confident by the week, dealing with painful historical subjects and unique personal crises that most TV, even Western-themed TV, often ignores, and indulging in some of the most deliriously cinematic montages this side of "Breaking Bad." Some scenes and moments were flat-out amazing — so unlike anything else on TV that they made me want to forgive or forget the just-okay dialogue and production design and hit-and-miss performances.

At first glance, the title of "Three Popular Films by Jean-Pierre Gorin" looks like a joke. If Jean-Pierre Gorin, a Frenchman who moved to San Diego to teach at UCSD in the ‘70s, is known in the U.S. at all, it’s because he collaborated with Jean-Luc Godard as a member of the Dziga Vertov Group. However, except for Tout Va Bien and Letter to Jane, most of the Dziga Vertov Group’s work is now difficult to see. Eclipse’s 3-DVD set of Gorin’s California-made documentaries, completed between 1980 and 1992, rescues them from oblivion. They’ve rarely been screened theatrically in the U.S. in the twenty years since the most recent one, "My Crasy Life," was made, apart from a 2010 retrospective at New York’s Migrating Forms festival.

Cult films have always remained one of the more enigmatic areas in Cinema Studies. There doesn't seem to be a distinct aesthetic that all cult films follow. Films that have been deemed cult-worthy come from any genre, country or time period. They are not limited to the independent or the underground, either. More often than not, cult films come from Hollywood's fly-by-night flops that end up in the bargain bin only to be fished out by eager or unsuspecting viewers. Since most cult films evade any common elements, any critical investigation on the subject quickly falls apart. The only definitive thread in this phenomenon is the fanatical devotion of its audience. Like any cult, the uncompromising worship among their marginal fan bases are what set these films apart from the rest.