On VOD: A Killer Inside Your Home

The video-on-demand splash of the week and weekend, just when you'd thought everyone forgot all about noir-novel master Jim Thompson: The remake of The Killer Inside Me is in theaters and on demand starting tomorrow. But Jane Campion, Martin Scorsese, Oliver Stone, Paul Thomas Anderson and a few others might argue their own VOD cases as well...

The Killer Inside Me (IFC on Demand)

Thompson's first-person bad-boy lesson in the costs and rewards of corpse-strewn, battered-dame sociopathy, first published in 1952, gets the film treatment it's always needed (the 1976 version starring Stacy Keach had only Thompson's rank-smelling source well to recommend it). Director Michael Winterbottom makes one and sometimes two films a year, and they are each radically unique -- thundering Hardy filmization (Jude), gritty topical war-zone drama (Welcome to Sarajevo), comedic biopic (24 Hour Party People), semi-doc refugee odyssey (In This World), hardcore-porn realism (9 Songs), introverted dystopian sci-fi (Code 46), meta-movie farce (Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story), and so on, relentlessly. One thing about Winterbottom you know for sure: He has his finger on our pulse, and his films always feel like they're made not for the present moment but for 10 minutes from now, when the world is just a little bit riskier. His take on Thompson's paperback classic, starring Jessica Alba, Kate Hudson and Casey Affleck as a small-Texas-town sheriff with a boyish puss and an itch for bloodletting, is savage and high on mid-century pulp fumes.

Bright Star (Starz On Demand)

Jane Campion's costume-drama portrait of the love affair between spoiled deb Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish) and penniless poet John Keats (Ben Whishaw) takes potentially ho-hum historical fluff-stuff (like The Young Victoria, incidentally also on demand from Amazon) and by way of unpredictable visuals and obsessive attention to emotional crisis peaks makes it breathless stampede viewing, and unarguably the most resonant romance made anywhere since Brokeback Mountain. Cornish is eye glue, but the whole stew is so savory you wish Campion would remake the last 20 dull period sagas and do them right.

Meadowoods (Vudu)

Scott Philips's micro-budgeted Washington State indie is yet another mock-doc-POV thriller, but this time it's a modern retelling of the Leopold-Loeb killing -- a trio of disenfranchised teens in a dull town decide to pointless kill someone, and record it. The trick to films like this is conviction; Cloverfield failed, but _Blair Witch, [Rec] and Meadowoods click.

Alice (New Video/iTunes)

Jan Svankmajer's 1988 masterpiece may be the definitive surrealist-Czech-puppetry film, and is by far the most resonant version of the Lewis Carroll tale. In the world of "personal" animated films, Svankmajer is the spiritual granddad to the Quay Brothers, and is still the only living filmmaker who would think that Lewis Carroll's white rabbit should literally butter the insides of his pocket watch (in revolting close-up), and who still proclaims himself a "militant surrealist." This film is, in its way, even more discombobulating than the original stories.

Shutter Island (Amazon)

Just ignore the looming twist ending, and go with the hyper-Val Lewton atmospherics.

Punch-Drunk Love (Starz On Demand)

Paul Thomas Anderson's 2002 Adam Sandler whatzit was the first hint that this hot indie tyro wasn't just going to spin his Boogie Nights/Magnolia wheels, remaking large tapestries of Philip Seymour Hoffman-starring human frailty over and over again. We couldn't have predicted the sonic boom of There Will Be Blood, but this ferociously strange romantic comedy, easily the most interesting thing Sandler has ever done, gave us delighted pause. Just don't try to second-guess it.

W. (The Movie Channel On Demand)

Oliver Stone didn't intend this timely interrogatory biopic to be a satire (despite the most brilliantly funny poster tagline of the last decade: "A Life Misunderestimated"). But that's kind of what he got, especially when it's late and maybe you're high and you get a gander at Richard Dreyfuss's snarling Dick Cheney or Thandie Newton doing Condoleeza Rice (remember her?) as if she were a Team America puppet after a stroke. Then it's a riot.