On VOD: Winning the Other World Cup

On demand this week: just another full-frontal ground-division attack of international cinema, coming from all directions and in all degrees of pulpitude, just in case you've thought lately the southern and eastern hemispheres were made of nothing but bad news...

Ashes of Time Redux (Vudu)

Wong Kar-wai's 1994 martial arts epic -- his only genre entry, and made at the same time as Chungking Express -- is a Hong Kong fighting-myth carnival, produced in the days before Crouching Tiger digital fixes but nevertheless as strange and exciting as a perverse dream. Wong's style -- equal parts camera crank, urban drugginess, New Wavey l'amour fou and abbreviated rock 'n roll ADHD -- is now part of our global slipstream, but here it is in sprawling original form, flitting between six of Hong Kong's biggest stars (including Brigitte Lin, Leslie Cheung, Maggie Cheung, and both Tony Leungs) and limning out a classic wuxia pian tale of frontier woe and bloodshed. It took Wong years to put the film together, only to have it manhandled and ill-distributed to the world's Chinatowns. This "Redux" edition, released in 2008, repaired the film to a definitive and coherent standard form after scores of different edited and misedited versions floated around in theaters and on video.

The Herd (Mubi/The Auteurs)

This little-seen Turkish film from 1979, flintily laying out a hard-bitten shepherd-peasant tale of feuding and disaster, was written by Yilmaz Guney -- another troubled auteur. A famous star and filmmaker, Guney actually spent of the 1970s in jail as a leftist, getting arrested multiple times on trumped-up charges and writing screenplays like this one behind bars. In 1981, he escaped, expatriated to France and accepted an award at Cannes for Yol (1983).

Lorna's Silence (Starz on Demand)

Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne's 2008 film is yet another heartbeat-hotel delivery system for tense modern angst, shot as if by an invisible documentary crew breathing down the necks of Europe's most unfortunate forgotten people. Narrative info -- like who exactly the plain, boyish Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) is, where she's from, why she's married to clingy, emaciated junkie Jeremie Renier, and why she's conspiring to bump him off -- comes in stingy amounts, making us lean forward in our seats. We're thrown into the deep end, and in time we learn to swim.

The Sky Crawlers (Vudu)

Mamoru Ghost in the Shell Oshii's 2008 anime is a swooning, retro-futurist portrait of a nostalgic dystopia sustained by perpetual air war (with breathtaking "aerial" combat footage), inhabited by soulless android fighter pilots who don't know they're not human. The most soulful anime in years.

It Should Have Been Nice After That (Doc Alliance)

German documentarian Karin Jurschick has one of those life stories from which filmmakers are born: In 1973 her mother committed suicide, and her father continued to live in their apartment afterwards, leaving it unchanged for decades. Jurschick, not having seen her father since, reconnects with him in 1997 as she approaches 40, and studies him with her camera for two years, making this prickly, interrogatory film.

District 9 (Starz on Demand)

This Oscar-nominated sci-fi rip-snorter is as ubiquitous as a South African alien-invasion parable about apartheid is ever going to be. But if you missed it, it's up this week at Starz.

Flesh + Blood (Starz on Demand)

After emigrated to the U.S. but before becoming the guy that gave us Robocop, Paul Verhoeven made this rabid bull-ox of a movie, a sword-thwacking medieval adventure saga that has Rutger Hauer, also fresh from the Netherlands, taking revenge on a moneyed lord and kidnapping his bethrothed virgin (but not for long) Jennifer Jason Leigh. It's not in the least tasteful -- just like history, kinda -- and that makes it rather unforgettable.