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If you’re ever tempted to think that the banjo is an instrument good only for backwoods pickin’ parties by Deliverance types who make their shoes out of tree bark, remember Bela Fleck, who’s done more than anybody to demonstrate conclusively that his chosen instrument is worthy of a virtuoso’s hands. For the past twenty years, he’s cultivated a diverse sound that incorporates bluegrass, jazz, and classical into his innovative picking style. While he branches out for collaborations like his April disc with bassist Edgar Meyer, Music for Two, Fleck is best known for the work with his Flecktones, who join him on this acoustic tour. Singer/songwriter Keller Williams opens on Monday, bluegrass quartet Yonder Mountain String Band on Tuesday. 13000 Zoo Blvd., Apple Valley; 952-431-9500; mnzoo.org

Using deadpan realism to mask a deep sense of the absurd, Jim Jarmusch has a mindset unmatched by any other American director (though, as we’ve noted, he’s got a spiritual twin in Finland’s Aki Kaurismaki). Indeed, despite his dryness, he’s awfully quick with the razor-sharp left-field gag: the aging gangster who abruptly launches into a Flavor Flav rap, or the hired killer who carries around a teddy bear. This series gathers six Jarmusch films, starting with 1986’s Down By Law, casting Tom Waits and Roberto Benigni as prisoners on the lam, and winding up with our favorite, the hip-hop Zen noir Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. Also in the series on Mondays and Tuesdays: Fishing With John, a droll documentary series originally made for the Independent Film Channel, in which host and longtime Jarmusch actor John Lurie goes out trolling for carp with hipster musicians and actors like Waits, Dennis Hopper, and Willem Dafoe. It’s like John Candy’s old SCTV sketch “The Fishin’ Musician” brought to life.

With the exception of 1990’s Goodfellas, the five films in this set are among the more obscure of Martin Scorsese’s works – though in its day, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore did spark the wildly popular spinoff sitcom that made “kiss my grits” the “shizzle my nizzle” of 1976. But in the case of the beetle-browed director, “lesser-known” doesn’t mean lesser, and the DVD extras included here set our hearts racing – all five films come with making-of documentaries and newly recorded audio commentaries by Scorsese, who’s a walking library of cinema. (On Goodfellas, we’re also treated to an audio track featuring Henry Hill, the ex-gangster whose life the film is based on, and an FBI agent.) Also included in this collection: the paranoiac satire After Hours, a Kafkaesque journey through New York’s nightclub scene; and two of Scorsese’s earliest: his first pairing with Robert De Niro, Mean Streets; and the student film that put him on the map, Who’s That Knocking At My Door? Available August 17

Five of the very best examples of 1940s-era crime thrillers. There’s too much here to praise in the space we have at hand, so let’s concentrate on three examples of great acting. First: Out of the Past’s Robert Mitchum, in a career-defining performance, trying to escape his ties to gangster Kirk Douglas. Second: Sterling Hayden in The Asphalt Jungle. He inhabited the skin of a street-tough thug so well that actors should have stopped playing thugs after that. And we can’t help but be loquacious about Dick Powell in 1944’s Murder My Sweet. This movie was unjustly overshadowed by a fellow Raymond Chandler adaptation two years later, Humphrey Bogart’s The Big Sleep. Powell may not have Bogey’s iconic stature, but he brings a warmth to the role of Phil Marlowe that’s closer to Chandler’s character as written – and it’s also the performance Chandler himself liked best. As for The Set Up and Gun Crazy, which round out the set – suffice it to say that they ain’t slouches either. Available now

We get the impression that this all-star smackdown from beyond the stars is shooting for the quality level of the cheesier of its two battlin’ sci-fi franchises – namely Predator, the movie that gave us the Ventura credo, “I ain’t got time to bleed.” But for a late-summer fix of lasers and monsters and stuff blown to smithereens, this one’s your best bet.

Let’s steal a riff from Spy, shall we? Here’s the equation for Open Water: Two divers stranded mid-ocean + lo-fi camerawork + huge film-festival buzz / Blair Witch Project x Captain Quint’s USS Indianapolis speech in Jaws = scaring the living heck out of us. You might have seen the unnerving trailer before Fahrenheit 9/11, the other big indie film this year featuring lurking, predatory sharks as villains.
(612) 825-6006; www.landmarktheatres.com

It’s tempting to join the grumbling about the staggering genius that is Dave Eggers. But we welcome one of the latest products from his literary empire, out August 10, in part because it contains a piece by Twin Citizen and sometime Rake contributor Keith Pille. Pille’s work, along with many other pieces in this compendiumÑparodies, riddles, fake talk-show transcripts, previews, reviews (of daydreams, of the writer’s beard), and many lists (“Good Westerns,” “Not Porn,” “Words That Would Make Nice Names for Babies,” “If It Weren’t for Their Unsuitable Meanings”) – originally appeared on mcsweeneys.net (which we would like to point out is currently publishing a “Daily Reason to Dispatch Bush”). Also nicely timed to the release of Darkness is How We Are Hungry (out August 9), a new collection of short stories from Eggers himself, the critically acclaimed writer-cum-graphic designer-publisher-editor-teacher-biographer-activist-founder-of-a-nonprofit-writing-center-for-young-folks. (Have we left anything out?) Honestly, it’s too taxing to mount an anti-Eggers argument. We’ll just stand back, with one foot in the awe camp.

Odell’s childhood in small-town Mississippi and participation in the Civil Rights movement gave him a full well of memories to draw upon for his debut novel. A View From Delphi opens with Hazel Ishee, the young daughter of a white Mississippi farmer, seeing a photograph of herself for the first time and discovering that she is ugly, sickly, and poor. She dedicates herself to living a life more beautiful, and the plot churns through the hideous, bitterly ironic, and, yes, somehow also beautiful social turmoil of the South in the sixties.
870 Grand Ave., St. Paul; 651-646-2665;
www.boundtoberead.com

Every unhappy family is unique, Leo Tolstoy reminds us, which might be one reason for the rich vein of stories about children coping with a broken home, including this highly praised first novel. Lychack, whom you might have heard on This American Life, frankly admits that the nine-year-old protagonist of Wasp Eater is autobiographical in spirit. Writing this book was his way of trying to get to know an unknowable and long-disappeared father. If this is novel-as-therapy, though, it’s a finely wrought example.
Available August 9

Tara had it all: She was young, beautiful, married to one of the smartest, richest men in America. Now she finds herself divorced and middle-aged. In The Tree Bride, Indian expatriate Mukherjee picks up Tara’s story where she left off in Desirable Daughters. As Tara dives into the story of her ancestor, the Tree Bride of Mishtigunj, the tale evolves as both a history lesson in British colonial rule in India and the journey of one woman trying to make sense of her life. Available August 4