‘Cold Comfort Farm’

This 1996 release is a celebrated parody of Gothic romance and solemn rural fiction. Its self-confident heroine Flora Poste (Kate Beckinsale, pictured) fancies herself a potential novelist, stating blithely that by the time she’s 50, “I would like to write a novel as good as ‘Persuasion.’ ” To that end, she decides to live with one of her many rural relatives, the Starkadders of Sussex, to experience more of life, under the ferocious domination of her great-aunt Ada (Sheila Burrell) (Cinemax Wednesday at 7 a.m.).