Nicolas Cage stars as an MIT astrophysics professor whose beliefs about the universe are shaken in Knowing.

SUMMIT ENTERTAINMENT / Vince Valitutti

In Knowing (Summit, $26.99), Nicolas Cage stars as an MIT astrophysics professor who believes that stuff happens randomly in the universe.

So when his son brings home a letter with a string of seemingly random numbers on it, written 50 years before by a young girl and recently unearthed from a time capsule, he believes the writing is gibberish. But a random happenstance allows him to recognize that a group of those numbers — 09112001 — corresponds to Sept. 11 and soon realizes that major disasters — both natural and unnatural — of the past 50 years have been predicted in this letter. This revelation shakes his lack of belief, and he sets out to find out about the girl who wrote the letter after another of the predictions comes true. Questions of God and the possibilities of others in the universe get played out against a backdrop of doom in the film which poses intriguing questions.

On the radio

Garrison Keillor, who gained nationwide fame for his long-running A Prairie Home Companion radio show and the raft of offbeat characters he created for it in the fictional town of Lake Woebegon, Minn., has the spotlight shone on him by documentary filmmaker Peter Rosen in Garrison Keillor: The Man on the Radio in the Red Shoes (Docurama, $26.95).

Rosen followed Keillor for several months in 2005, from his Minnesota home to his New York City apartment to local rhubarb festivals and to personal appearances in the rain in hopes of uncovering the man behind the radio myth. Although Rosen’s film is entertaining, low key and as folksy as Keillor himself is, one winds up with the sense that either he is “on” all the time playing the Garrison Keillor that people have come to expect him to be or that he really has become his own radio character. Either way he’s a delight and something of an enigma: an easygoing multi-millionaire who revels in church picnics and rhubarb festivals as much as he loves the excitement and stimulation of living part time in Manhattan.

Fans of Keillor’s program on National Public Radio will enjoy the backstage look at how the show is put together. At other times, we see him at his typewriter, musing over some new outlandish tale that he will spin on the radio.

Keillor views America as a place where kindness is alive and well. It may not be a place that really exists, but clearly Keillor and most of his listeners would wish it to be so. And that’s clearly part of his attraction.

Also this week

A young woman tries to break a paranormal curse so she can get rid of the ghost that’s plaguing her in The Unborn (Universal, $29.98); terrorists kidnap a man and try to get him to confess to crimes he knows nothing of by cutting off his fingers one at a time in Five Fingers (Lionsgate, $26.98); children with psychic abilities escape from a secret government program and set out to take down the agency that has been using them as weapons in the sci-fi thriller Push (Summit, $26.99); a troubled man trying to go straight is caught in a war between crime families in the hip-hop action film A Day in the Life (Lionsgate, $19.98); a woman tries to revive her long abandoned comedy career in Applause for Miss E (Image, $14.98); Billy Ray Cyrus stars as the onetime leader of a high school band who tries to revive his youthful career in Flying By (MTI, $19.95); Shirley MacLaine stars as a fabled fashion designer in Coco Chanel (Screen Media, $24.98); Brown grad Leelee Sobieski joins Danny Glover and Steve Zahn for a scary ride on the direct-to-DVD Night Train (NEW, $24.98).

From TV

Vying for a return spot on your home screen are: Reno 911!: The Complete Sixth Season — Uncensored! (Paramount, $26.99) Third Watch: The Complete Second Season (Warner, $59.98); Petticoat Junction: The Official Second Season (CBS/Paramount, $42.99); Parker Lewis Can’t Lose: The Complete First Season (Shout! Factory, $49.99); Doctor Who: The Rescue/The Romans (BBC, $34.98); Doctor Who: Attack of the Cybermen (BBC, $24.98); Ruby: A Journey to Lose the First 100 Pounds (Lionsgate, $14.98).

For children

Leave them laughing with: Bedtime With Elmo (Genius, $14.93); Animated Family Adventures (Image, $14.98).

Documentary

Grab your space suit and explore the nuts and bolts behind America’s lunar landings in the six-part Moon Machines (Image, $24.98).

Sports

Watch the biggest hockey comeback story of the year in The Pittsburgh Penguins 2009 Stanley Cup Champions (Warner, $24.98).

Collections

The Universal Backlot Series includes the films Lonely Are the Brave, with Kirk Douglas as a cowboy who doesn’t fit in with life in modern America; Gary Cooper, Ray Milland and Robert Preston as three brothers in the French Foreign Legion battling angry Arabs in Beau Geste; The Trail of the Lonesome Pine, starring Henry Fonda and Fred MacMurray in a 1936 romantic drama notable for being the first Technicolor film to be shot mostly outdoors; and Jon Hall as a man seeking revenge in old Arabia for the murder of his father and the loss of his crown in Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. Each film sells for $19.98.

The first six animated Peanuts TV specials — first aired between 1965 and 1969 — have been packaged together in the two-disc set Peanuts 1960s Collection (Warner, $29.98).

More B-movie howlers get skewered in space in Mystery Science Theater 3000: Volume XV (Shout! Factory, $59.99) featuring the classics The Robot Vs. The Aztec Mummy, The Girl in Lovers Lane, Zombie Nightmare and Racket Girls.

Two new adaptations of Agatha Christie mysteries featuring her favorite detective, Hercule Poirot — Mrs. McGinty’s Dead and Cat Among Pigeons — have been put together in Agatha Christie’s Poirot: The Movie Collection, Set 4 (Acorn, $49.99).

With Journal Wire Reports

mjanuson@projo.com