On VOD: The Sundance Hit You Never Saw, the Richard Kelly Puzzle You Never Solved

Currently available on demand -- as if risen from the grave around which its own plot revolves -- find a Sundance hit that took almost 14 years to make its appearance to a paying public. And a studio whatsit that may take even longer than that to untangle.

Colin Fitz Lives! (Sundance, other VOD sources)

In 1997 this comedy -- co-starring William H. Macy, and centering on two ill-made security guards (Andy Fowle and Matt McGrath) defending the grave of a dead rock star from hordes of obsessive, suicidal fans -- buzzed around the Utah fest but suffered from low-ball distribution offers that director Robert Bella, after going a quarter of a million in hock, couldn't afford to take. Since then, in the time it takes to raise a baby into annoying early adolescence, it's been a hostage to his debt. An actually spry and gabby slacker farce in the Kevin Smith mode, Bella's debut isn't perfect, but there's plenty of character juice in the mix, and the writing can be razor-sharp. Its rescue has already prompted blogosphere campaigning for more Sundance faves of yore that have slipped through the fingers of an unimaginative distribution industry.

Who Killed Nancy (Cinetic Filmbuff, other VOD sources)

Forensic cinema at its grungiest, as rock historian Alan G. Parker takes apart the police file on the deaths of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, about which there was virtually no investigation. Thankfully, it also deftly paints the history, the place, the music, accurately.

The Box (Cinemax on Demand)

After Donnie Darko, writer/director Richard Kelly has decided to become the New Hollywood whackjob, here taking a painfully simple and moralistic Richard Matheson story (you get a million dollars but someone somewhere will die -- what do you do?) and zooming off to the astral plane. Somewhere after the first hour, you'll have a hard time remembering how this berserker began. At film's end, you won't know anything for sure.

Thief (Cinemax on Demand)

Michael Mann's forgotten 1981 crime thriller has a genuine streetwise flavor and diamond-hard veneer that the '80s were otherwise sorely lacking, and it's still one of Mann's best films. James Caan stars as a jewel thief looking to score once more and get out, but finding instead that everything he wants to escape to -- a woman, marriage, a normal life -- are weapons the mob can use against him. Tuesday Weld, Jim Belushi and Robert Prosky (as the demonic corporate crime lord) co-star.

Bright Leaves (New Video, iTunes, etc.)

If Ross McElwee were a novelist instead of a creative-nonfiction documentarian, he'd be an Oprah's Book Club millionaire. His sympathetic, cogent, witty cinematic voice would make seductive reading. His static love life was the fertile comedy at the core of Sherman's March (1986) and Time Indefinite (1993), and his anxiety as a new parent hot-wires Six O'Clock News (1996). His son Adrian now having passed into full-blown adolescence, this 2003 film has a more relaxed flavor, and its ruminations are the classics of comfortable middle-age: looking backward, family history and the fearsome roll of time. The McElwees were once tobacco magnates, squeezed out by the Dukes ages ago, and so the film takes on that history as well as the tobacco industry and the corpse-strewn culture of American smoking.

The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (New Video, iTunes, etc.)

Judith Erlich and Rock Goldsmith's Oscar-nominated doc should've ideally come out four or six or eight years earlier, when the tale of Ellsberg blowing the whistle on the Johnson administration's lies justifying the Vietnam War might've been actively important in exposing how Bush II did virtually the same thing to get us into Iraq. Well, it probably would've made no difference -- not enough Americans see political documentaries, despite the fact that they're proliferating like mushrooms. Anyway, Ellsberg is still a hero.