On VOD: Dark Dark Dark Dark Dark Dark Dark

Things are going to hell in the Gulf, in Central Asia, in Greece, in North Korea and on the "me plus the couch equals bliss" on-demand channels. As with the news, the best you can do is gaze upon the badness, send in your modest payment, and, as Bono once sang, thank God it's them instead of you.

9 (Universal on Demand)

Shane Acker's dire post-holocaustic animation is a dazzling downer, set on an Earth so poisoned only self-maintaining machines survive with those semi-cute little canvas-people gizmos -- who are essentially helpless vermin in the wasteland.

Workingman's Death (Doc Alliance)

This 2005 doc is a symphonic portrait of some of the ugliest and most dangerous shit-work on the globe, from the Indonesian sulphur haulers working on the belly of an active volcano vividly jaundiced with chemicals, to the appallingly surreal sequence set in an open-air Nigerian slaughterhouse. (Imagine your favorite Francis Bacon scene times a thousand, with lakes of blood.) The final major sequence watches laborers in Pakistan gamble with their underpaid lives by cutting up gargantuan decommissioned freighters for scrap on the banks of the Arabian Sea. Narration is unnecessary, but John Zorn's pensive electro-score ramps up the disquiet.

Funny Games (Cinetic FilmBuff)

Michael Haneke's 1997 original, and if it remains the most questionable of his films, that's because it actively attempts to make us feel bad for watching the savage dramatics that unfold in a hostage-taken lake house. Will it work on you?

Eyes without a Face (Criterion)

Georges Franju's famous mad-doctor thriller sealed the deal on 1960 being a transgressively feel-crummy year (piled on top of Psycho, Peeping Tom, L'Avventura and La Dolce Vita). Today, though, face transplants are increasingly common -- this is a horror film about what happens when it's done many years too early.

Scanners (Flix on Demand)

David Cronenberg's 1981 telekinetic bedtime story is, like most of his earlier films, a gray and chilly nightmare in which Canada is an overcast endsville and the human body is plagued by anxieties and mysterious assaults the way roadkill is plagued by flies. Pining for a remake, preferably by DC himself.

Daybreakers (Vudu) This 2009 sci-fi/vampire actioneer is full of gloomy-cool, and resorts to scrambling action far too often, but it's got a potent and nasty concept: bloodsuckers have taken over the Earth (note the fang toothbrush ads, the vampire news, the nocturnal police) only to find their food supply - humans - to be near the edge of extinction. No vampire power games or sex play. It doesn't get much more depressing than that, especially with Ethan Hawke cashing his paycheck as the inexpressive, smokes-too-much vampire-who-wants-to-go-straight.

Battle in Seattle (Encore on Demand)

It was inevitable that the real-life public brouhaha surrounding the WTO rounds in 1999 would be transformed into a movie. This 2007 semi-indie, choked with lefty stars and taking a righteous brickbat to the suits, is an earnest affair, of course, but what's best about it is what's troubling: how little of the carnage we saw in the (corporate-owned) media, and how little we remember already today. The full-on protest combat and rioting and astonishing police brutality of the first two days of the conference are portrayed in blood-pressure-spiking detail, both in reenactments (edited for maximum breathlessness) and in archival news footage, much of which were never seen on national news outlets. Once Charlize Theron's pregnant sweetie catches an offhand billy club stab to the belly and begins spitting blood in the tear-gas haze, the film reaches a shrill and vital decibel level of outrage.

The Face You Deserve (The Auteurs/Mubi)

As in, what you get by the time you're 30. But this 2004 Portuguese fantasia is actually an embraceable, buoyant lark, a remedy in dark times. Here, a convalescing teacher is surrounded and nurtured by seven varying versions of himself, revisiting the past and evoking I'm Not There as much as Fellini's 8½.