Bird (TMC Sunday at 12:30 a.m.): Director...

Bird (TMC Sunday at 12:30 a.m.): Director Clint Eastwood takes a hard story--the short, sad life of jazz revolutionary Charlie Parker (Forrest Whitaker) and neither flinches from the dark nor ignores the light; this 1988 film gives Parker a fitting elegy.

Bad Lieutenant (Cinemax Wednesday at 2:50 a.m.) is Abel Ferrara’s corrosive 1992 study of a coked-out cop (Harvey Keitel, at his peak) transfixed by a nun who refuses to identify her rapists because she’s forgiven them.

Straight Time (Thursday Bravo at 10:30 a.m.), a riveting 1987 film starring Dustin Hoffman, is a dramatic and unsentimental social document with rare insights about the habitual criminal and the system that makes him inevitable.