THIS HAS BEEN sort of a breakthrough year for Guy Maddin, the truly esoteric Canadian filmmaker – has anyone before so fetishized the technical awkwardness of the "part-talkie" era? – whose The Saddest Music in the World delighted and/or baffled a much larger audience than he's used to. But in many respects, the comparatively minuscule, barely feature-length Cowards Bend the Knee (made prior to Music) is superior to that starry minor hit. Indeed, it's possibly Maddin's best work to date, alongside his debut, Tales from the Gimli Hospital, and astonishing short "The Heart of the World." In Cowards, the director himself plays one "Guy Maddin," contented member of the Winnipeg Maroons hockey team. His celebration of victory with the guys (champagne and showerheads and full-frontal god-knows-what-else all duly spurting) is overshadowed, however, by news that his girlfriend is "in trouble." What should an upstanding puckhead do? Take her forthwith to the local hair salon-bordello-illegal abortion clinic, of course. Worse, he gallivants off with a new squeeze while his g.f. is dying from a botched op. Shameless vamp Meta (Melissa Dionisio) seduces him "upon a pile of hockey gloves," scheming to manipulate Maddin's participation in a vengeance campaign against her spouse-icidal mother. Transplanted "evil" hands, ghosts, a surprising locker-room instance of soap dropping, serial stranglings, a Hockey Wax Museum (whose figures require daily spoon-feeding), and way more sexual content than usual make this Maddin's Thundercrack! The berserk, often hilarious Grand Guignol Canadiana is in black-and-white, and silent but for the scratchiest 78 rpm recordings of lachrymose classical themes that could be found. Just as cinematically frenetic, yet with more narrative and less exhausting, as Saddest Music, these 64 minutes provide a pure buzz. Its "cofeature" is the 15-minute latest from the Brothers Quay (though they now bill themselves as the Quay Brothers). "The Phantom Museum" is a typically enigmatic mix of live action and stop-motion animation that plays like an abstract compression of their own disappointing feature stab at a larger audience, 1995's Institute Benjamenta. See Rep Clock for show times. (Dennis Harvey)