Difficult to typify or classify, the films of Brad Anderson continue to draw critical buzz but not always a big audience. His most recent, the highly praised and rather dark The Machinist, did little to change that pattern, but is due for a new appreciation upon its DVD release. In Brad Anderson: "The real horror is within," the director looks back on his work to this point, and to the future, including a rumored Crazies remake, in an engaging chat with Alison Veneto.

The GreenCine Daily continues along its merry way with links to critical looks at upcoming summer films, big and small - Spielberg, Miyazaki, Batman Begins, and so on - along with festival reports, online viewing tips, and more. Go make our award-winning film blog a part of your balanced breakfast every day.

Video-on-Demand: Water Margin: True Colors of Heroes (1993).

Water Margin: True Colors of Heroes (a.k.a. All Men Are Brothers: Blood of the Leopard) is a remake of the Shaw Brothers original epic Water Margin, and adapted from a portion of the Chinese literary classic "Outlaws of the Marsh," wisely narrowing focus to a few main protagonists and villains. With the plot not the thing here, and the theme - brotherhood conquers all - fairly obvious, it's the acting (Tony Leung and Wai Lam star), spectacular stunts, sparkling costumes, catchy music and, of course, the action, that makes it fun. "The action is quite good," extolled HKFlix, "using enough wire work to make things interesting without going too over the top, and the actors do well - especially Elvis Tsui, who puts in a career-best performance (one that garnered him a Best Actor nomination for the Hong Kong Film Awards) and puts [the film] above the usual wuxia fare." Watch True Colors of Heroes anytime you want via GreenCine's Video-on-Demand service.

GreenCine Staff Pick of the Week: Touching the Game: The Story of the Cape Cod Baseball League (2004).

Baseball season, of course, is in full swing, and if you're like me, you may have a love-hate relationship with the game as it stands today: free agency makes it hard to get too attached to any player on your favorite team, the steroids controversy, egos, injuries... and yet we stick by it. For a beautiful glimpse of baseball as it could or should be (and on the day of the annual amateur draft), the documentary Touching the Game: The Story of the Cape Cod Baseball League goes right down the heart of the plate in a portrayal of a minor league. One of the film's most interesting insights is on the adjustment these fresh from college players have to make to using wooden bats (versus the aluminum bats used in the NCAA). But as much as the film is about baseball - and there is plenty of footage and fine interviews with recognizable baseball talent who camp up though the Cape Cod league - the film is also tribute to the perservence of the players, who work odd jobs to support themselves (this is a long way from George Steinbrenner when it comes to salaries), and to the dedicated fans. It's also a winning peek into small town American life. But mostly it's about baseball, and a treat for fans yearning to care about it again.-- Tamara Lees

Fine directors in touch with their dark sides highlight this week's new DVD releases:

The Machinist (2004). It'd be a shame if this film becomes known only as the one for which Christian Bale lost so much weight it's scary. Not only is Bale, whom we'll be seeing this summer looking a lot healthier even if he is hovering over Gotham City in a black mask and tights, becoming one of the most daring actors working, but, as noted in the aforementioned interview with him, director Brad Anderson has also clearly decided he won't be gliding on the accolades he's garnered for his previous work, including the innovative Session 9. This one is, as Stephen Holden put it in the New York Times, "an expertly manipulated exercise in psychological horror."

The Agronomist (2003). Jonathan Demme surely has one of the most intriguingly spotty records around. His hand seems most confident when he turns to the documentary; see, for example, Stop Making Sense, a strong contender for the best feature-length record of a musical performance ever made. With The Agronomist, Demme, having been fascinated by Haiti for years, is once again on solid ground. At the doc's center is Jean Dominique, founder of Radio Haiti-Inter, "a scourge to the successive waves of corrupt politicians that have for decades ravaged that much-oppressed island," as Peter Brunette put it in his review for indieWIRE. "Dominique's fierce love of liberty and his deep sympathy for the plight of his poor countrymen come across very strongly indeed, with or without the details. The original music, by Haiti's Wyclif Jean, offers surprise after surprise."

Untold Scandal (2003). Maybe you've seen Dangerous Liaisons and maybe you've seen Valmont and maybe you've even seen Roger Vadim's take or the French mini-series, but you've never seen Chodleros de Laclos's classic novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses dressed up quite like this. Director E J-Yong sets the story during the Chosun Dynasty of 18th-century Korea. It works. The film is as sexy and engaging as any previous adaptation.

Under the Flag of the Rising Sun (2004). "One of [Kinji] Fukasaku's angriest and most explicit explorations of his great theme: postwar trauma and warp-speed transformations in Japanese society," wrote Dennis Lim in the Village Voice.

"Imaginary Heroes (2004) is a queer-eyed valentine to Sigourney Weaver," writes Keith Uhlich in Slant. "Writer-director Dan Harris (co-author of X-Men 2, that downright odd, rainbow-colored ode to ostracized superheroes) is lucky to have Weaver and he knows it... Movies, perhaps more than any art, can cast profound, epiphanic illumination on our personal histories, and Weaver's performance - clearly a cinematic paean to a mythologically perfect lioness - captures something of every mother's deep-felt agony and ecstasy, that gnawing, loving need to protect their children, at whatever cost, from any and all of life's inevitable hurts."

Dead Ringers (1988). This creepily profound masterwork represents nothing less than some of the best work ever done by director David Cronenberg, currently riding another wave of critical appreciation following the premiere of his A History of Violence in Cannes this year, Jeremy Irons, who plays both twin gynecologists Beverly and Elliot Mantle, and Geneviève Bujold as their mutual love interest. One of our humble editors' favorite films of all time.

"The hoodwink-picture genre doesn't have a whole lot of peaks to choose from, but Nightmare Alley (1947) is one of the few," wrote Elvis Mitchell in the New York Times. And J. Hoberman wrote in the Village Voice, "This 1947 account of an archetypal American's rise and fall is neither a great movie nor even a classic noir but it has a great ambition to be daring and, once seen, is not easily forgotten." More noir new to disc: The Street With No Name (1948), and Sam Fuller's House of Bamboo (1955).

Orwell Rolls in His Grave (2004). "A marvel of passionate succinctness," wrote Variety, "Robert Kane Pappas's docu critically examines the Fourth Estate, once the bastion of American democracy. Docu asks, 'Could a media system, controlled by a few global corporations with the ability to overwhelm all competing voices, be able to turn lies into truth?'" Interviewees include Michael Moore, naturally, but also the iconoclastic British journalist Greg Palast and Nation contributor Mark Crispin Miller.

New Anime:

Gantz, Volume 5. "Altogether..." wrote Battie hesitantly of the first volume, "not only weird and depraved, but often disgusting, too. And tons of gore. But at the same time, there is a morbid part of me that wants to see more. It helps that the story line is interesting."

Go forth and multiply. Queues are most effective when they are filled with a fair number of discs; we suggest having a minimum of ten times the number of slots you have, i.e., forty if you're on the four-out plan. There are plenty of ways to populate your queue, including looking at our lists of titles coming soon, member lists (which you can look at chronologically, alphabetically or by average rating) and editorial top lists, by browsing through primers and our active discussion boards, among other ways, so queue away! And if you need to watch something right now, take a gander at our rapidly expanding Video-on-Demand offerings.

Just a reminder: The finalists in the GreenCine Online Film Festival, presented by DivX, are up and available for download in secure DivX format through June 26. Watch. Rate. Repeat. Spread the word. We also recommend reading our DivX FAQ.

Congratulations to the winners of several recent GreenCine Trivia Contests: winners of the Appleseed contest were kinsugi, BJLouie and Vi3wer (the answer was The Boom Boom Satellites); winners of the Bob Newhart Show contest were RHorsman and stookey (the answer was Tom Poston); and the winners of the Frank Sinatra contest were solar66 and lulufaye (the answer was Rocky Graziano). Meanwhile, our next trivia contest giveaway is now up on the GreenCine home page: X-Files Mythology: Abudction, which will be followed by a nifty film noir collection contest on Friday. Try 'em both!

Thanks to all who tooned in to our Animated Exposure screening last week, introduced by Microcinema International curator/founder Joel S. Bachar, at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center. Our next YBC screening will be on July 6, when we present the Documentary Grand Prize winner of that there GreenCine Online Film Festival. More details to come!