Highlights from this week's new DVD releases, a short but sweet list:

With Junebug, "director Phil Morrison upends the cliché premise that all liberals are good and tolerant and that all conservatives are rigid and bad," wrote Steve Ramos as he compiled a 2005 top ten list for the Cincinnati CityBeat. "In a country defined by Red and Blue states, Junebug reminds us that tolerance goes both ways." And there's a lot of buzz for Amy Adams nabbing at least a nomination for her performance, if not a full head-to-golden-toe Oscar.

But if Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room doesn't get you all riled up, not much will. In Alex Gibney's film, we see that Enron chairman Kenneth Lay and CEO Jeff Skilling, taking advantage of their ties to the White House, were selling essentially nothing, at a mighty steep price. A price to be paid eventually, of course, by the tens of thousands of employees who saw their futures evaporate into the very thin air Enron actually considered buying and selling at one point. An imperfect but very engaging doc that should be required viewing for all.

Also:
Lord of War, of which writer and director Andrew Niccol told Sean Axmaker in a GreenCine interview, "I was always just interested in arms trafficking because there is so much attention on drug trafficking, but this is so much more devastating"; Gendernauts (Monika Treut's doc "might have been called 'Sexual Ambiguity in San Francisco'," suggests A.O. Scott in the New York Times); Industrial Strength Keaton collects lots and lots and lots of Buster Keaton, including the shorts The Playhouse (1921; with a new score from The Paragon Ragtime Orchestra), and Character Studies (mid-1920s; featuring cameos by Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, and more); Space Ameoba (1971), by Inoshiro Honda, is "the cornerstone of and largely responsible for the creation of Japanese fantasy cinema (or at least its pop culture equivalent)," writes the Sci-Fi, Horror and Fantasy Film Review of what is now, of course, a party flick, "made on a real penny-pinching budget."

New Anime:
Samurai Champloo Volume 7 (2005). "There are few anime series that fulfulls all three elements of anime (art, music and story) in such a way that makes it great," writes razornails. "This is one of those series."

To see a complete list of all this week's releases, drop by our new releases page. You can also go forward to see what titles are coming soon, and step back with the new releases archive.

You may have already noticed a theme in this newsletter. Yep, Sundance 2006 launches this Thursday, and that's a perfect time to check out GreenCine's newly updated "Most Valuable Indies" list, now in vitamin-fortified Member List format! Browse through both our main picks and the worthy honorable mention list for ideas on some of the best films American independent cinema has to offer. We've added a few titles since the list's previous incarnation, including the recently-arrived-on-DVD Spanking the Monkey. Meanwhile, we've also given a similar facelift and update to our Best Documentaries list, which reaches back as far as 1919 and extends as recently as this past year.

Speaking of Sundance and docs, for a more in-depth exploration of the world of documentaries, check out our doc films primer, by filmmaker Mark Kitchell.

Coming this week: A lengthy, fascinating interview with actor L.Q. Jones, veteran of many a Sam Peckinpah Western.

Our award-winning blog, GreenCine Daily, will help you sort through all the Sundance-related coverage over the next week, with an eye, too, on the less-heralded Slamdance and some of the others that mark this fest-laden time of year.

Squawk! Congratulations to these lucky winners of GreenCine's Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill trivia contest: IronS, Pstemp and Daliawood (the answer was...Conner was a conure). We'll announce more winners in this space soon. Meanwhile, keep checking GreenCine and the Dispatch for more trivial announcements. Uh, we mean, trivia-related announcements.

The member list of the week: AcmeFilmCompany's Thinking Person's Science Fiction. "The directors of these movies never underestimated their viewer's intellect."

GreenCine's next screening at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts will be on February 1, as we proudly present the criminally under-seen caper classic, Le Clan des Siciliens ( The Sicilian Clan; 1969). The film is the only motion picture to feature all three heavyweights from French tough-guy cinema -- Jean Gabin, Alain Delon and Lino Ventura.

The Sicilian Clan, by Henri Verneuil (118 min., 16mm, French with English subtitles)
Wednesday, February 1, 7:30pm.
$7/$5 GreenCine and YBCA Members, Students, Seniors.