This has been a good week for us fans of Winona Ryder, who’s been absent for screens since her 2002 shoplifting arrest except for a cameo in “The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things” (2004) and her rotoscoped performance as a drug dealer in “A Scanner Darkly.” Now she’s turned in up two segments of “The Ten,” a series of sketches loosely inspired by the Ten Commandment; in the flick’s best, she plays a woman who has steals a ventriloquist’s dummy and has sex with it. Winona has a full-fledged role in Finn Taylor/s “The Darwin Awards,” which just came out on DVD. Most flicks that go straight to DVD (even if they did premiere at the Sundance Film Festival) aren’t worth bothering with, but “The Darwin Awards” is far better than most indie comedies that do get released. Winona plays an acerbic insurance investigator who reluctantly teams up with an uptight ex-SFPD detective (Joseph Fiennes in his best performance since “Shakespeare in Love”) to look into the deaths of people who perish in extremely foolish ways. (Like David Arquette, who straps a surplus military rocket to the back of his convertible.) A very funny movie, well worth a rental.

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