PERSONAL VELOCITY ★★

(Showtime on Comcast) Writer-director Rebecca Miller (daughter of playwright Arthur) has adapted three of her stories into an over-directed experience encapsulating everything wrong with “indie film” as a market category. Kyra Sedgwick, Parker Posey, and Fairuza Balk all do fine work as the women in crisis, but Miller’s choice to retain most of her prose as voice-over narration ends up oppressing the characters far more than anything in their observed lives. (R; runs through Sept. 11)

SIMON BIRCH ★★★

(Showtime on Comcast) John Irving distanced himself from this free adaptation of his 1989 novel, “A Prayer for Owen Meaney,” but if you give it a chance, it’ll get to you. Simplified but generous in spirit, it portrays the sustaining friendship between two 12-year-old outcasts: a diminutive boy (embodied with dry-eyed keenness by Ian Michael Smith) and an out-of-wedlock classmate (Joseph Mazzello) sustained by the love of his mother (radiantly played by Ashley Judd). (PG; runs through Sept. 11)

THE FLINTSTONES ★★

(Comcast Free Movies) Big-screen version of the animated TV series about Neanderthal suburbia plays like a tease for the Bedrock theme park. John Goodman (Fred), Elizabeth Perkins (Wilma), Rick Moranis (Barney), and Rosie O’Donnell (Betty) soldier on, but can’t hide the fact that the 32 writers who worked on this script somehow failed to turn one in. Some special effects are cute (Dino, for instance), and Bedrock’s split-level caves, lobster lawnmowers, and pigosaurus garbage disposals are fun to look at — but 32 times nothing is still nothing. (PG; runs through
Oct. 10)