Baseball season may be winding its way down, while football season is winding up, but to GreenCine this time of year means Quality Movie Season, both in theaters and in living rooms. With a fine slate of films to look forward to this autumn, and many more coming out on disc and Video-on-Demand every week, we feel it's our job to keep you on top of things. Consider the Dispatch part of your back to (film) school kit.

As a sort of followup to his recent interview with D.A. Pennebaker, David D'Arcy speaks with another giant of the American documentary, Albert Maysles. With his late brother, David, Maysles has made some essentials of the genre - Salesman, Gimme Shelter, Grey Gardens - but remains hard at work: he's currently working on several films all at once.

"God bless Hitchcock. He never won an Oscar and never gave us a second of boredom," Alex de la Iglesia has said. No one would ever accuse the Spanish director of boring an audience. In his latest film, El Crimen Ferpecto (The Perfect Crime), he hits again on a striking mix of violence and comedy. Jonathan Marlow asks him where all those outrageous ideas come from.

The GreenCine Daily, our award-winning film blog, has been covering so many film festivals lately we barely have time to write this blurb before we have to put up another festival recap! Add to that some fall previews, and many more hot links, and you've got your reading cut out for you.

Video-on-Demand: Stray Dogs (1993).

Stray Dogs, adapted by director Catherine Crouch from Julie Jensen's play of the same name, is a character-driven period piece that serves as a showcase for fine acting. Set in 1958 Appalachia, the film is a Southern gothic tale about the last night of a bad marriage. Guinevere Turner, star and co-writer of Go Fish, stars. "Don't mistake Stray Dogs for a work of feminist agit-prop. Crouch's sympathies are magnificently even-handed," says Gay Today. "Her instinctive humanism displays an appreciation for the psychological effects of this core illusion on all of her characters. It mirrors the way audience enjoyment of the Southern Gothic films took very personal forms. People empathize with Stanley, Blanche, and Stella in different ways; there are plenty of seats on that streetcar named desire. Crouch has a more expansive, inquiring vision. She's the artist as stray dog." The script occasionally lets the actors down with some clunky parts, but it's a strong dramatic tale nonetheless. You can watch Stray Dogs now or any time you wish, via GreenCine's constantly expanding Video-on-Demand service.

GreenCine Staff Pick of the Week: Out of the Past (1947).

Remade not too terribly as Against All Odds, there's still only one Out of the Past, one of the finest and most quotable film noir ever. Robert Mitchum, in full-on cigarette-and eyes-drooping mode, stars as a man trying to separate himself from his past life as a private eye, to start afresh with the girl next door (Virginia Huston) - only to get sucked back into it all again. Kirk Douglas is absolutely electrifying as the mobster who'd hired him to track down a dame (Jane Greer), who ends up playing them both like saps; she's "awfully cold around the heart." Jacques Tourneur's moody, almost gothic direction and the varied locations - Eastern Sierra spots, in and out of diners, gas stations, cabins, forests and gloomy Tahoe mansions, plus equally atmospheric forays to Mexico and the shadows of San Francisco - heighten the feeling of melancholy doom (the film was originally titled "Build My Gallows High," the title of the Daniel Manwaring novel it's based on, and a line uttered memorably by Mitchum). But it's the tart dialogue, by Manwaring and an uncredited Frank Fenton and James M. Cain, that leaves the most indelible impression. The script zings and the one-liners ricochet like wayward bullets. "You're like a leaf that the wind blows from one gutter to another," Mitchum tells Greer at one point. "My feelings? About ten years ago, I hid them somewhere and haven't been able to find them," says the bitter Douglas. Out of the Past is truly quintessential noir, and will hit you like a slap in the face. And you'll like it. -- Tamara Lees

This week's new DVD releases are a wacky, some would say slightly disturbed bunch, and we like it. Read on, before they get ornery:

Palindromes (2004). "Palindromes takes what could have been simply a gimmick of a plot device - having a series of actors portray the same character - and turns it into something more revelatory," wrote Craig Phillips in the introduction to his interview with director Todd Solondz. "As with all his films, the film's fated to divide audiences and critics, for its seemingly nihilistic world view and bleak humor, and, of course, for making us all feel wholly uncomfortable.... He cares, he just has a funny way of showing it."

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005). Radio, TV, records, the stage, comics, even a computer game. Douglas Adams's massively popular riff on the end of the world has been with us for literally decades in practically every form imaginable except, oddly, a movie. It finally arrived to open this year's strange summer season and met with a mixed reception. But the New York Times's Manohla Dargis found it "hugely likable," noting that the filmmakers "have held onto a genuine sense of childlike wonder, which works as a nice corrective to what might otherwise come across as an overabundance of hip." And don't forget your towel.

Nobody Knows (2004). "Prime movie-of-the-week material," notes Filmbrain. "Four children, ranging in age from five to twelve, are left to fend for themselves in a Tokyo apartment after their mother abandons them. A thousand and one dire films could easily have been made from this premise, yet Koreeda manages to avoid every possible cliché and pitfall (and there are many) in his take on events that actually did occur back in 1988.... Nobody Knows isn't always an easy film to watch - as the seasons go by and the conditions worsen (the film was shot chronologically), it becomes increasingly uncomfortable to passively observe the inevitable downward spiral. Still, it's one that shouldn't be missed."

Head-On (2004). Before Head-On went on to win the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, David Hudson called it "an exhilarating return to what even [the director] calls the 'Fatih Akin film'... This is one of the most alive and lively films in Competition, thanks evidently to Akin's semi-improvisational approach and thanks most definitely to the two leads, Birol Ünel as Cahit and newcomer Sibel Kekilli, who plays a girl from a conservative Turkish family in Hamburg. She wants out, she wants sex, she wants to get high, to do what she wants whenever she wants... Cahit's situation: Depressed and depressing and yet in a ferociously amusing way. Until he rams his car into a wall. At the hospital, he meets Sibil; she's just slashed her wrists. And she has an idea: If he marries her, she'll clean his place and stay out of his way and her family will leave her alone. A marriage of convenience for both, in other words. They'll live their own lives and most certainly will not fall in love. Well. Yes, it happens, but it's the journey, not the destination (which isn't as predictable as it might seem at first) that makes this a favorite with press who hooted and cheered as Akin and his cast entered the press conference."

Though she lives in Paris now, the roots of Margarethe von Trotta's career are deeply embedded in the New German Cinema of the 70s and 80s. She acted in a few Fassbinder films and eventually married Volker Schlöndorff, with whom she co-directed The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum (and they would eventually divorce). She broke out on her own with The Second Awakening of Christa Klages, "an acutely observed reflection on her favorite theme: the powerful (and often mysterious) psychic bond among women," as Scott Tobias has written for the AV Club. Two other von Trotta films are out today as well: Sisters, or the Balance of Happiness (1981), which Janet Maslin in the New York Times called "a quietly accomplished film, and often a very good one, skillful in its examination of both the separateness and the similarity of these two women"; and Sheer Madness (1983), which is an intriguing record of its era.

Rock School (2005). Richard Linklater has said he'd never heard of Paul Green when he made School of Rock and we're giving him the benefit of the doubt. But Green, for better and worse, is the real McCoy, a guy who actually runs a school in which he teaches kids to, you know, rock. But he's not quite as sweet or cuddly as Jack Black and the result here, as Manohla Dargis put it in the New York Times, is an "alternately hilarious and alarming documentary."

Schizo (2004). The movie takes place in rural Kazakhstan, and by rural, I mean very rural," wrote Opus at Twitch when he caught it at the Toronto Film Festival last year. "Houses dot vast fields, which are littered with the remains of electrical towers, empty warehouses, and other dwellings. The people who live in this place are a curious mix of European, Asian and Middle Eastern nationalities, and it's this mixture of cultures, in addition to the stunning landscape, that kept me intrigued, sometimes even more so than the actual storyline.... It's somewhat hard to place what, exactly, Schizo is. Is it a coming-of-age story, a crime thriller, a dark comedy, what? It's all of those things, and yet its subtlety means it's none of them as well."

Fingersmith (2005). "I heartily recommend this film to anyone who loves lesbian romances or BBC costume dramas (or both)," writes LSteele. "The acting is excellent, featuring Imelda Staunton as well as the two up-and-coming leads, Elaine Cassidy and Sally Hawkins. It's not surprising that the 2005 BBC adaptation is so good, considering it's based on an excellent novel by Sarah Waters (of Tipping the Velvet fame). Rent this along with Tipping, and have a compare-and-contrast Victorian lesbian costume-drama extravaganza!"

One Missed Call (2004). "God I love Takashi Miike," writes Jeremy Knox at Film Threat. "One Missed Call plays like a good cover song. It's not just a repetition of the previous tune. It reminds you why you liked the original in the first place and makes you rediscover it. Simply put, if you liked Ringu, if you liked The Eye, if you liked Ju-On, then you will like this movie."

New Anime:

Otogi Zoshi. Volume 4: Modern History (2005). "Although it sports numerous intense action sequences, Otogi Zoshi is not exclusively an action series," writes the Anime News Network. "The character design, which emphasizes the long hairstyles typical of the time period, is gorgeous. Sumptuous costuming highlights the designs, easily ranking the series among the best in recent memory in both categories."

For a complete list of all of this week's new releases, go here.

Congratulations to the winners of the The Transporter: Special Edition / Futurama: Monster Robot Maniac Fun Collection trivia contest: brinavee, kinsugi and JMendez (the answer was Taiwan). We'll announce more contest winners in this space next week. Meanwhile, check back Friday for our next trivia contest giveaway, for Project Grizzly - which would make an interesting companion piece to Werner Herzog's recent Grizzly Man doc.

The member list of the week is in honor of the disaster-stricken Big Easy: Cure for the New Orleans Blues, from ZenBones.

Thanks to all who came to our screening of Finger Man last week. We hope you enjoyed seeing that unheralded little film noir as much as we did. The next GreenCine-sponsored screening will be on October 5, as we present Youssef Chahine's masterpiece Cairo Station (1958). The director, in a rare acting role, stars as a crippled newspaper dealer who falls in love with a lovely lemonade seller. She, however, is only interested in another man, thus setting the stage for a series of hopeless actions and terrible consequences. Banned for more than a decade in Egypt after its initial release! At the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. More details to appear in this space in forthcoming weeks.