Movie Spotlight

The British comedy lives, even though in the 1990 A Shock to the System (ABC Monday at 9 p.m.), it lives in suburban New York. The movie has the same charm as the classic Alec Guinness comedies, even though it is too pokily paced. Like those films, it stars a consummate professional at the peak of his comedic flair. As a marketing executive who turns murderous when he’s passed up for promotion, Michael Caine has such a chuckling rapport with the audience that we smile in collusion the first time he speaks.

Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky’s A Life Apart: Hasidism in America (KCET Tuesday at 10 p.m.) takes us into the world of Jews whose lives are lived in worship of God and are guided by the dictates of the Torah. What the film conveys so effectively is that in return for such strict observance of religion, the Hasidim are rewarded by a warm, strong sense of community and family life that most of us can only regard with longing and envy. The price, however, is of a conformity so severe that the Hasidim cannot attend mainstream colleges and universities and therefore enter the classic professions, such as medicine and law, so traditionally pursued by other Jews. Daum and Rudavsky give us a good, if incomplete, overview of Hasidism, which flowered in Eastern Europe in the 18th century as a response to the joylessness of Orthodox Judaism. The Hasidim, we learn, decided that God exists in all things and that love of him can be expressed in every act of daily life.

The actors in Tombstone (Fox Wednesday at 8 p.m.) playing bad guys and good guys and in-between guys spit very convincingly. They also slouch well and reach for their pistols with aplomb. So much for authenticity. Just about everything else in this aggressively overlong 1993 western about the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Ariz., in 1879, seems posed. Val Kilmer’s Doc Holliday is classic camp performance, his Southern drawl sounds like a languorous cross between early Brando and Mr. Blackwell. Kurt Russell fares somewhat better as Wyatt Earp.

Between his low-budget, high-praise “Clerks” and last year’s delightful “Chasing Amy” New Jersey filmmaker Kevin Smith stumbled with his Mallrats (KABC Saturday at 9 p.m.), a misfired tale of kids who hang out at a suburban mall. Among the 1995 film’s many young actors: a 10th-billed Ban Affleck.