‘Germinal’

Claude Berri’s magnificent 1993 film of Emile Zola’s novel cuts right to the movies’ power of rendering human misery with images of surpassing grandeur and meaning. Pictures don’t get much bleaker than this 158-minute epic saga of the grinding existence of 19th-century French coal miners--but they don’t get much more beautiful either. Gerard Depardieu (pictured) plays a miner whose family suffers terrible consequences when it becomes involved in a strike (Bravo Monday at 8 a.m., 5 and 10:35 p.m.).