GreenCine's loading up new articles and primers for the holidays and beyond, so keep your eyes on the home page for some new presents under the tree/minorah/Festivus bush. Coming real soon: An interview with David Cronenberg.

Meanwhile, with the year wrapping up and the award season ramping up, it seemed a good time to look back to our coverage of this year's Sundance Film Festival - as a lot of those films have now reached wider audiences and to much acclaim. As the line-up for '06 has just appeared, look to our site now for a tantalizing wrap-up of Sundance '05.

Hot topics on the GreenCine Daily, our award-winning film blog: Early word on Terrence Malick's The New World; are King Kong, The Chronicles of Narnia and Memoirs of a Geisha all racist to one degree or another? Also: European Film Awards, Godard at 75 and how James Fotopoulos is helping to revive work by Samuel Beckett, Eugene Ionesco and Harold Pinter.

Video-on-Demand: The Girl From Monday (2003).

Hal Hartley has referenced Jean Luc-Godard before, but his wry indie sci-fi The Girl From Monday goes full throttle into Godard mode, Hartley's variation on Alphaville by way of Masculin/Feminin. Jump cuts, guerrilla shooting, "naturalistic" overlapping dialogue - French New Wave trademarks, and all on display in Hartley's work. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Sean Axmaker called Monday "a snarky satire of consumerism in the guise of pseudo sci-fi. Imagine 1984 by way of The Man Who Fell to Earth with Hartley's trademark dry humor, deadpan delivery and intellectual word games." The Chicago Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum considers Hartley's first feature in three years to be "flaky, funny, and sexy... Hartley's playful sense of the absurd as he confronts the relation of consumerism to sex is more philosophical than political, less despairing than grimly amused - and more thoughtful as a consequence." You can watch Girl From Monday on Monday, Tuesday or any day of the week, via GreenCine's rapidly expanding Video-on-Demand service.

GreenCine Staff Pigskin Picks of the Week: Friday Night Lights (2004) and The Slaughter Rule (2002).

With football season at its hottest point, playoff races shaping up in the NFL and the college bowl line-up essentially all mapped out, the gridiron game is on our mind. Two recent films about the high school game, Friday Night Lights and The Slaughter Rule, offer up two very different worlds - the unhealthily football-mad Texas, where the high school game is obsessed over with even more intensity than the pro game, and the isolated plains of Montana, where the game is part of a ritual toward manhood (along with fighting and rolling around with older women). The intense Ryan Gosling, in Slaughter Rule, is a long way from his Jewish neo-Nazi in The Believer, giving the young quarterback a raw tenderness, especially in his scenes with the ubiquitous but underrated David Morse - who has one of his meatiest roles yet as the sexually tormented coach.

In the very unsentimental Friday Night Lights, directed with ferocity by Peter Berg and based with veracity on H.G. Bissinger's book, Billy Bob Thornton plays the coach whose life and winning percentage are both under a microscope in a town - Odessa - that has little else to care about (at least according to the film's perspective; surely someone in town doesn't care, but perhaps they are bound and gagged every Friday night). Thornton is mesmerizingly good here, holding the whole film together just as his character holds the weight of the town together. The script, thankfully, only occasionally falls victim to cliche. Interestingly enough, both these films, coming of age stories and slices of small town Americana, as different as they are, remind one of 1972's The Last Picture Show, while The Slaughter Rule's directors (brothers Andrew and Alex Smith) seem influenced by Terrence Malick, too. While their film doesn't have as much dramatic momentum as Friday Night Lights (which has tension built-in around the final football games), it works well as a small-town character study. -- GreenCine Editorial Staff

The weather outside may be frightful, but in here, these picks of today's new DVD releases are fairly delightful:

The Ninth Day (2004). If you've seen Downfall, chances are you asked yourself, Who in the world is that ghoulish fellow playing Goebbels? It's Ulrich Matthes and by now he knows his Nazi-era history. Here, he plays a true-life priest sent to Dachau, where the Nazis popped a brutal moral quandary on him. Volker Schlöndorff (The Tin Drum) directs. "Schlöndorff, born in 1939, kicked off the New German Cinema back in 1966 with his sinister adaptation of Robert Musil's novel Young Törless," David Denby reminds us in the New Yorker. "The German movement has long since declined, but Schlöndorff seems to have survived intact. He has specialized in political films (The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, Circle of Deceit, Legend of Rita) and literary adaptations (of Proust and Günter Grass, among others). Some of his movies have been didactic and heavy-footed, but not The Ninth Day. This film is powerful, concise, fully sustained."

Spanking the Monkey (1994), finally on disc, heralded the debut of a director whose audacity would attract some of Hollywood's (and television's) tip-top stars for future features, none of which would play by the rules: David O. Russell. This one wowed audiences at Sundance to the degree that they bestowed it with the coveted Audience Award (distributors on the prowl care a whole lot more about them than the critics), which is all the more remarkable since the plot turns on one of the last taboos. As Marjorie Baumgarten put it in the Austin Chronicle, the film "ranks as one of the most original 'What I Did on My Summer Vacation' compositions I've ever seen."

Forbidden Games (1952). Depicting the ravages of war through the eyes of children, René Clément's Forbidden Games "is a bittersweet film that shows the devastation of war by touching an emotional cord, without the visual carnage," writes acquarello at Strictly Film School. "Intensely personal, emotionally devastating, and truly unforgettable." The Criterion disc features a collection of new and archival interviews with Clément and actress Brigitte Fossey.

Shoot the Piano Player (1960). "An offbeat crime film that was quiet, romantic, personal and audacious; people weren't sure what to make of it at the time, but its cinematic literacy and cheekiness would inspire future filmmakers (the pulp fiction origins of the story and the inept crooks surely must have inspired Tarantino, among others)," writes Craig Phillips in our French New Wave primer. This new Criterion package is, naturally, bursting with extras. (Bonus disc.)

Fun With Dick and Jane (1977). The remake with Jim Carrey and Téa Leoni will be in theaters just in time for Christmas; meantime, here's the fun original with George Segal and Jane Fonda.

Ladies in Lavender (2004). Maggie Smith and Judi Dench, sisters at last. "Personally, I'd run a mile from Ladies in Lavender if it were the kind of movie its trailer wants us to think it is," wrote Stephanie Zacharek in Salon this spring. "But the movie itself, sensitively but sturdily made, with an ear attuned to the most delicate notes of the story, is the sort of small, independent-minded picture that so much of American indie cinema strives, and often fails, to give us. It's a conventional picture, but it feels so deeply alive that it's practically a novelty."

Berlinguer I Love You (1977). Giuseppe Bertolucci directs a young Roberto Benigni in his debut screen role.

A few new music docs for the retro-leaning audiophile:
New York Dolls: All Dolled Up (2005). Photographer Bob Gruen and his wife Nadya bought a video camera in the early 70s. Stop and think about that a moment. Early 70s. No one had portable video cameras then. But they got one and pointed it at the New York Dolls in New York clubs such as Kenny's Castaways, and Max's Kansas City, and there are also performances caught on tape here from the daring west coast tour. Also out today: Bauhaus: Shadow of Light (1991), in which the British band performs "Bela Lugosi's Dead," Telegram Sam," "Ziggy Stardust" and much more; and Kraftwerk: Minimum-Maximum (1991). Decades ago, a couple of bicycling enthusiasts in the vast industrial regions of what was then West Germany founded what is easily one of the most influential bands in all of pop history: Kraftwerk. Here, they perform such landmark works as "Autobahn," "Radioactivity" and "Trans Europe Express."

As always, if you want to see a complete, more detailed list of all this week's new releases, do drop by our new releases page.

We'll have a flurry of trivia contest winners to announce next week, we promise! Lots of discs are on their way, so check back in this very space next week. Meanwhile, the last trivia contest of the year goes up this Friday, so don't be left out: Where the Sidewalk Ends, the original Kiss of Death and The Dark Corner. What better way to kiss off the year than with three film noir classics?

The member list of the week isn't really by one of our members but it's pretty darned useful: Our David Hudson whipped up a list of critic Joe Leydon's Movies You Must See, which accompanied an interview.

Tomorrow only! GreenCine presents Mau Mau Sex Sex at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, introduced by director Ted Bonnitt and writer Eddie Muller. When GreenCine launched its Video-on-Demand service two years ago, our very first title was this wonderful, unconventional documentary on legendary exploitation film producers Dan Sonney and David F. Friedman. Unlike most bio-pics overwhelmed by clips, the film expertly intermingles their earlier work with candid footage of the gentlemen in their twilight years.

Join us for the fifth anniversary of Mau Mau Sex Sex's release, followed by an extensive Q&A with the filmmakers. Tomorrow, Wednesday, December 7, 7:30pm. $7/$5 GreenCine and YBCA Members, Students, Seniors.