I’m pretty sure “Ong-Bak” is a Thai phrase meaning “righteous ninja acrobat who drop-kicks evil atheists while on fire.” “Ninja” is my idiomatic translation; the exact martial art celebrated in this funky little action flick is called Muay Thai, a cross between gymnastics, kung-fu, break dancing, and a wild death-from-above elbow plummet onto other people’s skulls.

Its practitioner is Tony Jaa (Ting), a small man with phat technique, and if you ask the people promoting the movie in America what “Ong-Bak” means, they’d probably say “meet the coolest Asian ass-kicker since Jet Li!” They’re not entirely wrong.

A monster hit in Thailand, “Ong-Bak” derives from the Chinese tradition of populist martial-art fables in which a noble young man must use his spiritually inflected fighting skills to defend the conservative values of his village against corrupt, self-serving, materialistic city folk. It’s an enjoyably old-school affair, full of broad types, storybook dialogue, and rabble-rousing comeuppance.

That its ideology is ultimately less concerned with folk empowerment than Hollywood-style pow doesn’t detract from the considerable pleasure to be had watching Mr. Jaa triple-flip off vegetable carts and body-blow the bad guys at a hundred miles an hour.

The movie opens with a ritual contest. Scrambling through the arms of a vast, sprawling, limb-twisted octopus of a tree, the young men of a prosperous village compete to capture a flag tied in the uppermost branches. Many fallen challengers and squirrel maneuvers later, Ting descends with the prize, which he festoons around the benevolent shoulders of Ong-Bak, the statue of the village deity.

After midnight, once the village is asleep, a Bangkok thug named Don (Wannakit Siriput) creeps into the temple, severs the head of Ong-Bak, and scurries back to Khon Tuan (Sukhaaw Phongwilai), artifact snatching kingpin of the big-city baddies. On waking to a dried up well and wilting crops, the teary-eyed villagers dispatch Ting to reclaim their idol. He tracks down his cousin George (Petchtai Wongkamlao), a former villager turned grifter, now known as “Dirty Balls.” Together with pluckish sidekick Muay Lek (Pumwaree Yodkamol), they take on the usual assortment of henchmen, punks, and a bloodthirsty imperialist Australian.

The latter is encountered in a Thai Fight Club that serves as Khon Tuan’s headquarters. Through a series of inevitable misunderstandings, Ting enters the ring, and basically steps into a round of “Mortal Kombat.” After disposing of the Australian, the reluctant Thai faces off with an Afroed Asian jackrabbit whose signature move is a lethal blur of ankles. Next up is the burly prop dude, who doesn’t so much fight as violently rearrange furniture in Ting’s general direction.

With its progression of “levels” and specific skill sets to overcome, the Fight Club sequence is a very close, very exciting analogue to a video game. Ting even has a kind of “power move” familiar to gamers, a wind-up-and-release lunge of the body’s bluntest parts (elbows, knees, shoulders). The essential complaint with such convergence of movie mise-enscene with video-game play is the emptying out of moral and narrative values from the image, leaving only the shell of spectacle. So what?

Subtext is nice – we film critics make our living obsessing over it – but action movies are made to excite. Ganging up on a movie’s “video-game aesthetics” is a lazy way to scapegoat a bad movie’s deficiencies. I suspect most knee-jerk critics have never actually played a video game, and so dismiss what they can be, at their best: spatially coherent, kinetically beautiful, richly participatory forms of entertainment. An avant-garde masterpiece based on the aesthetics of “The Sims” is entirely conceivable, and aren’t the mazelike steadycam loops of “Elephant” more than a little bit PacManish?

In its best action sequence, “Ong-Bak” duplicates the functionality of a DVD. Pursued by a flock of gangsters, Ting, Dirty Balls, and Muay Lek flee through a back-alley obstacle course of food stalls, construction projects, and loitering children. This is the big showpiece for Ting’s eye-popping displays of agility, and every time he somersaults over this, or trampolines over that, the movie rewinds the stunt as many as three times, from different angles.

Show-offy, yes, but exactly what the audience has come to see. If the stunts in “Ong-Bak” weren’t so good, the gimmick would seem obnoxious. Director Prachya Pinkaew knows what thrills, and his giddy repetitions are more than justified: They’re a gift to the audience.

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“Inside Deep Throat” is the story of a cheesy 1972 skin flick about a woman who achieves sexual fulfillment though a naughty coincidence: Due to a convenient anatomical fluke, the movie’s star, Linda Lovelace, is only able to satisfy herself by practicing the eponymous talent. I’d say there’s more than enough material right there for a lavish documentary released by a major Hollywood studio.

Made for $25,000 and eventually grossing around $600 million, “Deep Throat” was the most profitable movie ever made. It also led to one of the most important censorship trials in American history. As a result, everyone from Jack Nicholson to Jackie O to your friendly neighborhood grandmother was lining up to see for themselves. “Deep Throat” opened the Pandora’s Box of mainstream porn.

Documentary filmmakers Randy Barbato and Fenton Bailey (“The Eyes of Tammy Faye”) have wrangled up the wildest herd of talking heads in recent memory. Weighing on the phenomenon are Dick Cavett, Wes Craven, Erica Jong, Alan Dershowitz, Norman Mailer, Camille Paglia, and Gore Vidal, along with the inevitable Dr. Ruth, Larry Flint, and Hugh Hefner.

Much of the “Deep Throat” crew is also on hand, including its affable director Gerard Maniano and male star Harry Reems. The tragic figure is Lovelace, whose evolution from girlnext-store to porn celebrity to antiporn crusader is a sad and cautionary tale of a woman who was happy as long as someone told her what to do, according to Mr. Maniano.

As filmmaking, “Inside” is slick, glib, and tricked-out to the digital max, so eager-to-please and A-B-C simple it plays like a porn doc made for children. Up with free speech and all that, but is it really necessary to cue a villainous theme every time anti-porn zealot Charles Keating comes onscreen?

Nevertheless, the “Deep Throat” story is a fascinating one, cutting as it does across the sexual, cultural, and political landscape of the 1970s. We learn, for instance, that the judge who deemed the movie obscene not only didn’t know where the clitoris was, he didn’t know what it was.

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One of the loveliest, most exclusive neighborhoods in San Francisco, the steep inclines of Telegraph Hill provide a dreamlike oasis of lush vegetation, impossibly romantic walkways, and stunning bay views. They are also, in the only-in-San-Francisco tradition, home to a flock of wild parrots.

The birds are cared for by Mark Bittner, a classic San Francisco dharma bum who migrated to the city with no greater ambition than to just, like, live, man, and maybe sing some poetry. After many years of homelessness and blissful aimlessness, he found his true calling as the Saint Francis of Telegraph Hill.

If, like me, you’ve ever called San Francisco home, “The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill” will remind you of the city’s magic.

What To See This Week

Poison (Museum of the Moving Image) Todd Haynes’s tripartite riff on genre, Genet, and gay identity is a “momentous film” that could “scarcely be more relevant” per the Village Voice’s Dennis Lim, who introduces this landmark of the New Queer Cinema as part of the museum’s “Breaking Boundaries” program.

Film Comment Selects (Walter Reade Theater) See everything, but if you must be picky, try “Los Meurtos,” or “The Ister,” or “Izo,” or the Samuel Fuller double bill or… Just see everything.

The Shining (Sunshine Cinema) One of the all-time haunted-house classics, Stanley Kubrick’s malice carpet ride is also the most terrifying movie ever made about writer’s block.