Laughing all the way this weekend

Feeling the yuletide blues? The American Cinematheque’s Screwball Comedy Holidays festival at the Aero Theatre is a guaranteed cure.

The yuks begin Friday with two splendiferously funny W.C. Fields’ comedies from 1934: “The Old Fashioned Way,” in which Fields plays the leader of a threadbare theatrical troupe, and “You’re Telling Me,” in which he is a failed inventor.

Saturday’s snappy lineup features the frenetic farce “My Man Godfrey” (1936), starring Carole Lombard and William Powell in their Oscar-nominated performances as a scatterbrained rich girl and her butler, and “His Girl Friday,” Howard Hawks’ rapid-paced 1940 remake of “The Front Page,” with the inimitable Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant.

Two Preston Sturges classics are set for Sunday evening: 1944’s “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek,” starring Betty Hutton as a small-town party girl who marries a soldier while she’s drunk, only to discover she barely remembers the nuptials and is pregnant. And Barbara Stanwyck, Henry Fonda and Charles Coburn star in the 1941 delight “The Lady Eve,” about a card shark-con woman who marries a clueless ale heir.

Cool hand Paul

The Cinematheque’s Egyptian Theatre will celebrate Paul Newman, who died in September, with a six-film retrospective starting Friday. First up is 1967’s “Cool Hand Luke,” for which Newman won an Oscar as a free spirit sentenced to a chain gang for a minor offense, along with the rarely seen 1970 drama “WUSA,” in which he plays a boozy DJ looking for a job in New Orleans.

Saturday brings the 1977 hit hockey comedy “Slap Shot,” plus the fun 1966 detective thriller “Harper.” And rounding out the festival Sunday is 1982’s “The Verdict,” Sidney Lumet’s gripping tale of redemption with Newman in an Oscar-nominated performance as an attorney on the skids, and the 1971 family drama “Sometimes a Great Notion.” www.americancinematheque.com

Berkeley at Beverly

The New Beverly Cinema has a double bill of two bawdy and downright surreal 1933 Busby Berkeley musicals, “42nd Street” and “Gold Diggers of 1933,” tonight to Saturday. www.newbevcinema.com

An alt-holiday

If your holiday spirit skews to the avant-garde, the Silent Movie Theatre is throwing a “Mondo Xmas” tonight that includes verite footage of department store Santas, cartoons and even aborted holiday specials. The piece de resistance is a screening of “Christmas Evil,” directed by Lewis Jackson, which John Waters has proclaimed “the greatest Christmas movie ever.” www.silentmovietheatre.com

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susan.king@latimes.com