¿Quien es mas macho? ¡Montalban es mas macho!

Some of this weekend's worthwhile cinematic happenings around New York:

--Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is what happens when an ostensibly guilty pleasure grows teeth and bites back at an entire culture's low expectations. After Robert Wise's Star Trek: The Motion Picture squandered the cult momentum the TV franchise acquired during its four-year NBC run, nobody could have possibly thought that the cosmopolitan crew of the Starship Enterprise (multi-ethnic and, we recently learned, gay-friendly) would bounce back so dramatically with one of the darker mainstream science fiction films of the '80s. I mean, irony of ironies: How wicked is Ricardo Montalban? How pissed is William Shatner? How hot is Kirstie Alley? And for a whole generation that has probably never witnessed the film in a theater, the Sunshine is bringing all the squirmy treachery (e.g. Chekov, meet bug) to NYC as this weekend's midnight feature. I am the furthest thing from a Trekkie, but I cannot recommend this one too highly.

--The Reeler told you a few months ago about Kevin Frech's fascinating documentary Bowery Dish, which screened for one all-too-brief evening at the Pioneer Theater. But now that the Pioneer has shuffled all of October's leftover zombies out the door, it is bringing Dish back tonight at 7 for a much-deserved encore. Frech revitalizes the shopworn subject of gentrification by studying the ways upscale restaurants and bars have sprouted along the historically shabby Bowery over the last decade. His investigation yields a smart, funny and poignant survey of a community at odds with both its future and its past--a fine-tuned microcosm of the city that gave it such turbulent life.

--Oscar-winning director Sydney Pollack is getting into the documentary business with Sketches of Frank Gehry, which he will preview and discuss tonight at 8 at the Apple Store in SoHo. As always, visitors are promised plenty of wonkery (Pollack is expected to detail Sketches' blend of digital video and Super 16mm, which always leads to some orgy of jargon and Final Cut Pro demos), but your reward is the chance to ask basically whatever you want about some pretty great films: Tootsie and Three Days of the Condor are at the top of my list (and probably everybody else's, admittedly). Feel free to ask him where The Interpreter went wrong, if you like, even though he will probably pull out his hammy Eyes Wide Shut persona, point at the computer and say something like, "We did it on a PC." Or maybe he will blame New York and threaten to move. Anyone's guess, really.