Now available at the more eclectic magazine racks near you is the March/April edition of The Believer. Of special interest to cinephiles, this is the idiosyncratic semi-monthly's "2008 Film Issue."

The Believer covers pop culture, the arts, politics, and other coffee-shop topics with the casual, creative hip-smarts and the anti-cynical enthusiasms it shares with its genetic test-tube mate, McSweeney's. The 2008 Film Issue includes an interview with director Todd Haynes (I'm Not There), Nick Hornby's "Stuff I've Been Watching," Chuck Klosterman on road movies, Michael Atkinson on "the small, secret, overlooked components of movies and movie love," Werner Herzog in conversation with Errol Morris (reprinted in full on the website), and Erik Lundegaard's "dietary throw-down between recent moneymakers and Variety's top-ten box-office hits of March 19, 1958." (Says Lundegaard, "One of the most virulent opinions about movies I've encountered as a critic -- particularly online, where everyone's a critic -- is that popularity is somehow indicative of quality.")

Plus, like barista art dolloped on top of our grande latte, bundled with the magazine is a DVD containing a 49-minute excerpt from The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, the two-hour documentary by Sophie Fiennes (sister to Ralph and Joseph, and former apprentice to filmmaker Peter Greenaway). The controversial and exhilaratingly high-minded Guide comes scripted and presented by Slavoj Zizek, the flamboyant Slovenian philosopher, psychoanalyst, and "wild man of theory" who's all the rage these days. "Cinema is the ultimate pervert art," he says. "It doesn't give you what you desire. It tells you how to desire."

The Believer's notes on the film describe it as "Zizek's web of psychoanalytic theories on the nature of movies, desire, and fantasy." It gives this "shaggy showboat" a place to lift the hood off various movies to poke around at the "symbolic order" inside them.

"But the choice between the blue and the red pill." he expounds over a clip from The Matrix, "is not really a choice between illusion and reality. Of course Matrix is a machine for fictions, but these are fictions which already structure our reality: if you take away from our reality the symbolic fictions that regulate it, you lose reality itself. I want a third pill. So what is the third pill? Definitely not some kind of transcendental pill which enables a fake fast-food religious experience, but a pill that would enable me to perceive not the reality behind the illusion -- but the reality in illusion itself."

Like the wild-eyed college prof you end up talking about at parties for the next 20 years, Zizek is sometimes enlightening and sometimes nutty -- not that the two are always mutually exclusive -- as he uses examples from movies as diverse as Hitchcock's The Birds and Psycho, Lynch's Mulholland Dr. and Blue Velvet (Zizek's a big Lynch fan), Coppola's The Conversation, and Chaplin's The Great Dictator to expose the hidden language he says is written into our cinema. It's a language that shapes filmmakers and audiences at least as much as filmmakers and audiences shape the movies.

Do the Marx Brothers and Norman Bates' mother's house really embody Freud's Id, Ego, and Supergo? When our intellectually playful host is this engaging and passionate, it doesn't really matter as long as our own thinking about movies gets a gentle kick up to a more thoughtful, if occasionally rather nutty, new place.

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