Punch-Drunk Loveis a profoundly strange romantic comedy

Punch-Drunk Love is a profoundly strange romantic comedy and is arguably Sandler’s most complex and best work to date.

Adam Sandler in scene from the film Punch-Drunk Love.

Among the most auspicious and subsequently revered directorial debuts in movie history is French filmmaker Francois Truffaut’s 1959 coming-of-age drama The 400 Blows (Sunday, 5.20pm, World Movies). Pointedly autobiographical, it tells of the young Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Leaud), who is let down at every turn by his parents, teachers and other well-meaning adults. After a series of turbulent adventures (including stealing Citizen Kane lobby cards from a cinema), he is sent to a youth centre, where his fate is unclear.

Although they’d been famous before this, the Marx Brothers are perhaps best remembered for the fast-paced, subversive and altogether delightful 1935 screwball comedy farce A Night at the Opera (Monday, 2.20am, TCM). Groucho, Chico and Harpo become involved with a rich dowager (their perpetual foil, Margaret Dumont) and theatrical shenanigans. This is the movie with the famous stateroom scene, in which Groucho welcomes an absurd number of people into an absurdly small space. Though their onscreen act flailed soon after this, the movie remains as classic a comedy as Hollywood has produced.

Moving from black and white to colour, comedy looked very different by the time writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson forged an unlikely alliance with Adam Sandler to make the profoundly strange 2002 romantic comedy Punch-Drunk Love (Thursday, 3pm, Romance). He plays the owner of a Los Angeles novelty items business whose budding relationship with Emily Watson is threatened by a phone sex scam involving Utah mattress king Philip Seymour Hoffman. Every bit as offbeat as it sounds, the film is also an antidote to the vast number of more complacent romantic comedies. And in some corners, this remains Sandler’s most complex and best work to date.

The Thriller Movies channel is hosting an ongoing Shyamalanathon, showcasing the work of talented yet increasingly rudderless director M. Night Shyamalan. The two best entries are his one unqualified triumph, the 1999 supernatural thriller The Sixth Sense (Saturday, 8.30pm), and the far less well regarded but nevertheless worthwhile 2008 end-of-days saga The Happening (Monday, 8.30pm).

The former stars Bruce Willis as the mysterious child psychologist attempting to counsel troubled youngster Haley Joel Osment (“I see dead people”) and the latter, a guilty pleasure to be sure but a must for genre fans, features Mark Wahlberg as the leader of a group trying to escape an invisible airborne virus that causes people to commit suicide.

The first film to be produced in East Timor, the moving 2013 drama Beatriz’s War (Saturday, 2pm, World Movies), charts the 24-year unrest there and is co-directed Bety Reis and Luigi Acquisto.

The 400 Blows (PG) 4 stars

Sunday, 5.20pm, World Movies (430)

A Night at the Opera (G) 4 stars

Monday, 2.20am, TCM (428)

Punch-Drunk Love (M) 3.5 stars

Thursday, 3pm, Romance (408)