On Demand: Indie Insurgency

Ultra-indies (and Noah Baumbach) dominate the week on-demand -- all the better to feed your inner malcontent, opt out of the "event" movie business, and keep it cheap and at home...

Daddy Longlegs (IFC On Demand)

Josh and Benny Safdie's micro-movie began as a memory project about the brothers' father, who must've been a real piece of work. Here, an almost sociopathically irresponsible, childish and impulse-control-impaired Manhattan scrabbler (Ron Bronstein, director of the notorious Frownland) gets custody of his two young sons and lets things spiral hellaciously out of control. Harrowing and shot on the street, without a spec of artifice.

Made in China (IFC On Demand)

Judith Krant's fresh-out-of-the-festival-oven comedy tracks a Texan inventor traversing modern China (as he looks to mass manufacture his "amusing domestic hygiene product"), which is also how the filmmakers made their film -- on the fly, under the radar of the Chinese authorities. Bubbling with culture-clash personality, the movie's been a big festival hit, and just a few years ago would've gotten serious screen time. On-demand video is the new indie market, and it should count as an official "release."

Greenberg (Universal On Demand)

Baumbach's latest, and a litmus test if there ever was one for your tolerance/attraction to his special brand of neurotic confrontationalism. Me, I still love Kicking and Screaming, and I don't mean the soccer-Dad comedy.

The Treatment (FilmBuff Cinetec)

Based on Daniel Menaker's novel, this small 2006 New York rom-com is full of backbeats and unpredictable bounce, following a neurotic prep school English teacher (Chris Eigeman) as he meets and tries to court a sweet and wealthy widow (Famke Janssen), and, more importantly, do psychological battle with his analyst (Ian Holm), an Argentine sadist who claims to be "the last great Freudian" and whose therapy methods quietly range from the surreal to the hostile. Documentarian Oren Rudavsky's first fiction film isn't about comic concept -- the idiosyncratic characters are so resistant to formula it's as if they were each scripted by a different writer, sitting in a different room. And it's always a pleasure to see Eigeman, neglected vet of Baumbach and Whit Stillman, back in action.

George A. Romero's Survival of the Dead (Vudu)

A contradiction in terms for a title is only the beginning of the wrestling match with this latest zombie installment. Romero has quarantined his post-apocalyptic scenario to Plum Island, Delaware, an odd bucolic horse-farm haven where two Irish-accented patriarchs exercise their lifelong Hatfield-McCoy feud over what to do with the zombies (kill them or try to treat them humanely and when that doesn't work, then kill them). A brace of mercenary Marines looking for sanctuary wander into the fray, and there's time for you to wonder, when exactly did zombies cease being scary and instead became a fun way to kill and dismember without guilt?

Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (New Video)

Directed by Canadian filmmakers Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick, this epic documentary brought Chomsky to the mainstream, where he has occupied the extreme rational left of political reasoning ever since. If you think you've got a bead on the power relationships at work on history and the political present, prepare to be retaught. Chin-deep in instantly recalled facts, figures, quotes and body counts, Chomsky may be the last unbuyable man in America, and it's apparent deep into the film that the he rarely gets challenged in the mainstream media because no one, in terms of erudition, can touch him with a 10-foot pole.