12:08 East of Bucharest (Corneliu Porumboiu, Romania): 61
[Starts off strong in master-shot observational mode, showcasing three distinct and fully lived-in variations on gruff, flailing masculinity. Then, like a worn-out mule, it arrives at what it's decided is its destination -- the rinky-dink TV station -- and refuses to budge. What had originally seemed subtle and expansive abruptly metamorphoses into a semi-comic symposium on revisionist history; while the performances remain sharp and funny, the visual motonony becomes oppressive, and after a while I felt like I was watching The Nasty Girl reconceived as an overextended SNL sketch. Worth seeing, but more on Porumboiu's promise than on its own decidedly limited merits.]

Khadak (Peter Brosens & Jessica Woodworth, Belgium/Germany/The Netherlands): W/O
[Reportedly gets considerably weirder and Matthew Barneyesque after I checked out. I didn't actually leave, just took a nap; the few glimpses I caught when jolted awake by loud noises looked like a Mongolian Pepsi ad, which struck me as slightly preferable to the twee exoticism of the first two reels. Though I do wonder if I would have reacted as cynically were the directors called Peter Khayankhyarvaa and Jessica Dashnyam.]

Requiem (Hans-Christian Schmid, Germany): W/O
[LLALI: Looks like ass, lacks inspiration. You'll be seeing this acronym again.]

Suburban Mayhem (Paul Goldman, Australia): W/O
[Crass, cheerlessly profane black comedy loaded with so many aggressive visual quirks that it sometimes feels like a punk-rock cover of Amélie. "She had a bloke for every letter of the alphabet," someone says of the slutty protagonist, whereupon CUT TO a rapid-fire A-Z montage of boyfriends; another minor character, casually described in conversation as a zombie, gets duplicated onscreen a dozen times, transforming her into a one-woman Romero setpiece. In-your-face direction can be wearisome in the best of circumstances; when the characters are equally shrill and needy, it's migraine time.]

The Lives of Others (Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Germany): 73
[Superior middlebrow political drama, mildly frustrating because it might have been a masterpiece in the hands of a true stylist (I spent much of Retrieval, below, wishing fervently that someone like Fabicki had directed this film); at the very least, it could have used someone less concerned about reaching the dummkopfs. Formal stodginess and needless climactic freeze-frames aside, however, this is a reasonably complex and relentlessly gripping portrait of unsought empathy, as well as the rare crowdpleaser that genuinely earns its optimistic opinion of human nature. As the Stasi operative who finds himself first fascinated by and then unwillingly identifying with the object of his surveillance*, Haneke vet Ulrich Mühe does the finest tremulously blank, expressionistic non-acting since Anthony Hopkins in Remains of the Day.]

* (ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT VIS-À-VIS SUBTLETY, WHICH WON'T MAKE SENSE UNLESS/UNTIL YOU'VE SEEN THE MOVIE: In my dream version of Lives of Others, the Brecht book still vanishes, but we never actually see it again.)

Retrieval (Slawomir Fabicki, Poland): 64
[Familiar gradual-corruption-of-youth tale enlivened by confidently gritty mise-en-scène and superb acting across the board. Fabicki wisely downplays elements that lesser filmmakers would milk for easy pathos -- in particular, the 19-year-old protag's tender romantic relationship with a single mother who looks to be nearly twice his age, which is refreshingly free of any May-December clichés or Freudian bullshit. Nothing terribly special, but if ND/NF could still find even a dozen debut features this promising, I'd be in hog heaven.]

The Art of Crying (Peter Schønau Fog, Denmark): W/O
[Little kid with owlish glasses -- somehow they forgot to give him asthma as well, or maybe he just hadn't yet hit the inhaler when I bolted -- is embarrassed by his milquetoast dad, but brightens considerably when Pop's improvised eulogy at a neighbor's funeral inspires a torrential downpour of grateful tears. You can almost see the lightbulb appear over Junior's head, at which point the EXIT sign over the door burned even brighter.]

The Bothersome Man (Jens Lien, Norway): 56
[Intriguingly bizarre, but only in a superficial, what-the-hell's-going-on-here? sort of way; much like They Came Back from a couple of years ago, it's a free-floating allegory with precious little real-world resonance. Like, why no kids? Because they're anarchic and unpredictable (in which case their absence is just a conceptual convenience), or because yuppies are less likely to have children (not really accurate, since they just tend to have them later in life)? And why does our appealingly hapless hero get on the bus in the first place? Voluntary or involuntary? (Seems like the former, but we get no hint of what he's pursuing and/or fleeing wherever he came from.) For that matter, if this alternate reality is meant to mirror the narcissistic emptiness of contemporary society (Scandinavian or otherwise), as I assume, shouldn't the buses be packed, not all but empty? The whole thing seems pretty half-baked. Held my attention, though.]

HANA (Hirokazu Kore-eda, Japan): 39
[So boring I'm struggling to think of anything non-boring to say about it. And failing. Who or what is HANA, anyway? I still have no idea.]

Brand Upon the Brain! (Guy Maddin, USA/Canada): 51
[For all its mad-silent awesomeness, Cowards Bend the Knee nearly wears out its welcome at just 60 minutes, and the additional half-hour here would likely have proved semi-fatal even were Maddin running on all cylinders. Alas, he isn't: Both the frenzied expressionism and the lurid pseudo-autobiographical melodrama feel rote and warmed over, reflex actions rather than deliberations or wild leaps. Worse, the narrative, usually his strong suit, lurches all over the place -- a problem that he acknowledges with a hilariously self-deprecating intertitle about covering massive structural cracks with a thin layer of paint (the latter represented at this particular screening by a multitude of live distractions, including a mini-orchestra, a chanteuse, a narrator, and three very busy foley artists). Not painful, but a disappointment.]

Stranger Than Fiction (Marc Forster, USA): 51
[Am I the only one who doesn't even think the basic idea is all that clever? As a comic device, it's good for about half a dozen chuckles; as a means of exploring ideas about creativity and stagnation, it suffers from the mother of all ontological pitfalls; and as a Kaufmanesque mindfuck, this dude Zach Helm is not even remotely Charlie Kaufman. Furthermore, I'm still not buying Will Ferrell as anything more than a big broad funnyman -- hate to say it, but he just doesn't have the features to communicate complex emotions. (It's those beady little eyes.) Aims for profound, barely achieves cute.]

/The Host/ (Bong Joon-ho, South Korea): 76
[Still mostly awesome, though Theo's basically right about it being a collection of terrific scenes rather than a terrific film per se. Detail I caught on second viewing: The canister dispensing Agent Yellow is shaped very much like the creature when it's suspended from the bridge at the outset.]

Time (Kim Ki-duk, South Korea): 82
[Shocker of the year. Given Kim's track record and the absurdist premise, I'd steeled myself for something gruesomely outrageous; apart from the clinical opening-credits sequence, however, the expected incisions are almost exclusively psychosexual. Incredibly, the film truly is about time, and Kim's inverted-Vertigo conceit gets at fundamental (and unwelcome) truths about passion that usually require a dispassionate observer -- Pialat, say, or Hong -- to uncover. But as much as I like several of Hong's films, his scrupulously naturalistic approach will just never bulldoze its way through my nervous system the way the first ferry sequence in Time did; the ball they kick back and forth might as well have been my head. Rating could easily climb higher on second viewing, which I've hastily penciled in for Wednesday morning.]

Falkenberg Farewell (Jesper Ganslandt, Sweden/Denmark): W/O
[Almost painfully self-indulgent, even before you discover that all the actors (including Ganslandt) are playing characters named after themselves. Neil Diamond has an early song called "Crunchy Granola Suite"; that title fits what I saw of this murky reminiscence to a T. Might appeal more to those who like to watch really hirsute young men frolic naked outdoors.]

Summer '04 (Stefan Krohmer, Germany): 63
[Misleading rating, though, because this was a strong B+ (> 76) all the way up to its staggeringly misguided epilogue, which flushes 90 minutes' worth of painstaking behavioral nuance right down the toilet. Shame, because otherwise this is one of the finest Bergmanesque chamber dramas I've seen in some time -- acute, incisive, and brilliantly acted. (Hints of Rohmer, too, in the setting, but the sensibility is more forbidding.) Not since the final moments of Twentynine Palms have I witnessed such a heartbreaking act of self-sabotage. What were they thinking?]

The Magic Flute (Kenneth Branagh, UK/France): 48
[C'mon, it's not that bad. Yes, the WWI setting is utterly pointless. Yes, Branagh goes overboard with the low-rent CGI bombast. Yes, the whole affair plays like some ambitious grad student's thesis project. But it's still The Magic Flute, and at least he cast first-rate opera singers (who can also act, albeit in a theatrically stylized fashion) rather than, you know, Alicia Silverstone or whoever the hell.]

All the King's Men (Steven Zaillian, USA): 50
[C'mon, it's not that bad II, now suddenly aka Yes, yes, yes, but. (See above.) Affirmations here include Penn's florid grandstanding (though he has a handful of sly moments, all of them far from the dais), the perfunctory Winslet-Ruffalo subplot (was this in the '49 version? I don't remember it at all, but I guess it must be given the ending), and Zaillian's generally stolid sense of pace and rhythm; I'd also add that we never get more than the vaguest sense of what Stark's well-intentioned sins entail -- the impeachment proceedings come out of nowhere. But: It is intelligent, and it does sometimes spark to life -- witness e.g. the midnight visit to Judge Irwin's house, which feels like something out of Miller's Crossing in language, tone and performance. (Yes, I'm serious. Think Hopkins as Leo, Penn as Johnny Caspar, and Law as Tom.) And don't tell me the image of those two streams of blood flowing on a collision course through the etched gullies of Louisiana's state seal didn't get to you.]

Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog, USA): 53
[Not sure why the advance word on this was so toxic, since it's a perfectly serviceable POW drama -- quite conventional by Herzog's standards, to be sure, and with a lead performance by Christian Bale for which the polite word would be "variable," but hardly a disaster. Predictably, it's at its strongest when Little Dieter & Co. must contend with the elements, and falters most at the beginning and end -- Herzog and civilization simply don't mix. (The weirdly jingoistic epilogue strikes a particularly bum note.) Also, Jeremy Davies needs a twitchectomy, stat.]

Hula Girls (Lee Sang-il, Japan): W/O
[Just because it's based on a true story doesn't mean it's not a tired Full Monty rehash with a dollop of Footloose thrown in.]

I Don't Want to Sleep Alone (Tsai Ming-liang, Taiwan/France/Austria): 45
[Tsai's protracted shots always walk a thin line (blurred by home video, in my experience) between electrifying and enervating. Wish I could put my finger on whatever mysterious quality usually forestalls the question "Why am I still looking at this?"; all I can tell you is that Ingredient 7x takes a powder fairly early here and doesn't resurface until almost the very end, by which point I was too weary to care anymore. It's not just that Tsai's bone-dry sense of humor is nowhere in evidence -- the whole movie seems to suffer from the same vegetative ailment as the "other" Lee Kang-sheng, who's paralyzed and silent but not quite comatose. Lovely ending, admittedly, but it's too little too late.]

For Your Consideration (Christopher Guest, USA): 47
[On the one hand, I'm happy to see Guest abandon the moldy mockumentary format; on the other hand, most of the belly laughs derive from the scenes involving chat-show appearances and EPK interviews. Biggest problem, though, is that Mamet already knocked most of these gags out of the park; I love Ricky Gervais, but his three or four minutes of inane-grin improv here, wringing endless variations on "Can we make it less Jewish?," doesn't pack half the punch of Philip Seymour Hoffman holding his script up against the window (just to write on the back), thereby belatedly revealing that it's actually called The Old Mill. However, the inability of contemporary American audiences to appreciate great screen comedy is a rant for another occasion. Fact is, I tend to enjoy Guest's movies in bits and pieces, and I look forward to seeing some of these scenes again at my friend Chris' annual clip party. This year's excerpt from A Mighty Wind (rating: 50) was a hoot.]

Trapped Ashes (Joe Dante/Ken Russell/Sean Cunningham/Monte Hellman/John Gaeta, USA/Japan/Canada): 44
[Schlock, plain and simple, rendered even schlockier by the largest ensemble of inept Z-grade actors I've seen this side of Skinemax. Of the five segments (including Dante's wraparound, which makes old Corman flicks look like freakin' Mizoguchi), only Hellman's "Stanley's Girlfriend" proves remotely creepy or suspenseful, and even that's largely due to the enduring Kubrick mystique. So why isn't the rating down in the sewer with Southland Tales? Because I can't bring myself to hate a movie that includes bloodsucking vampire tits and a starving fetus who's sharing a womb with a massive tapeworm.]

Bliss (Sheng Zhimin, China): W/O
[This dude has a pretty good eye in my opinion. Let me know when he thinks up something to say, other than "I sure did like Yi Yi."]

My Best Friend (Patrice Leconte, France): 43
[In which we discover that even an actor as superb as Daniel Auteuil can do nothing when handed sitcom material. This would have made a fine episode of "Seinfeld," with George desperate to produce a new friend in order to win a bet with Jerry or Elaine; stretched laboriously to feature length, the scenario becomes as thin and brittle as Auteuil's fake smile. Briefly threatens to swerve into darker territory -- in fact it flirts with turning into Un coeur en hiver II -- but sappiness triumphs.]

Fay Grim (Hal Hartley, USA/Germany): 59
[Hartley's best film didn't seem to demand a sequel, but he's got the germ of a brilliant idea here, with Henry Fool's oft-mentioned but ne'er-revealed eight-volume Confessions reconceived as a geopolitical time bomb written in some kind of impossibly arcane code. In essence, Hartley has airlifted Henry's principal cast into an espionage thriller, with predictably absurdist results. Funny as hell for an hour or so, thanks largely to the ensemble's deft way with Hartley's cheerfully ludicrous dialogue (even more logorrheic than usual -- it's like someone shoved one of his scripts into a blender alongside two fat Tom Clancy potboilers); it ultimately runs out of steam, though, right around the time that Henry himself, who'd previously functioned almost as a kind of offscreen totem, makes a belated personal appearance. Also, canting every single shot does not a visual style entail, even if you alternate between directions. Kinda fun, but he's still spinning his wheels.]

Black Book (Paul Verhoeven, The Netherlands/Germany/UK/Belgium): 60
[Kind of sad that this mildly entertaining and occasionally risqué but fundamentally stodgy WWII melodrama is being acclaimed as Verhoeven's return to form, six years after the critical establishment took a collective dump on his equally diverting (and far more provocative) Hollow Man. Give the punters a shot of instant new star Carice van Houten casually dyeing her pubic hair blonde and they'll willingly overlook the fact that 80% of the movie plays exactly like the Volker Schlöndorff version would have, hitting its genre marks with brisk efficiency and little more. Still, I was enjoying myself thoroughly until it got all überplotty in the endlessly expository final half-hour, with every damn scene offering a new Scooby-Doo-style revelation. (Even the Fallacy of the Talking Killer gets some play, in combination with one of the lamest Winstons* in recent memory.) If only it were leaner and (even) meaner, I could join the chorus of hosannahs.]

* For the uninitiated: A Winston is some bit of business planted early in a film solely to set up a payoff much later. Term coined by Skander Halim in honor of James Gandolfini's "Winston" tattoo in The Mexican, which like Hollow Man is oodles better than its dismal rep.

Still Life (Jia Zhang-Ke, Hong Kong/China): 56
[Formally magnificent, dramatically inert. Ring any bells? Jia kicked off his career with one of recent Asian cinema's most memorable characters, so it's a mystery why he's been content ever since to position stultified zombies before ironically imposing land- and cityscapes. Here, I found myself beginning to actively resent the skeletal narrative for distracting me from Jia's sensational photo album of the Three Gorges region in flux. There are choices made here that are effectively meaningless -- you could digitally replace Zhao Tao (as a woman seeking her husband to ask for a divorce) with shots of Gong Li from The Story of Qiu Ju and it wouldn't change the movie one iota. (Actually, that's not really true: Qiu Ju has a personality.) I opted to skip Dong, Jia's new documentary, shot in tandem in many of the same locations, but now I'm thinking that one sounds more up my alley. And it's shorter, too.]

/Time/ (Kim Ki-duk, South Korea): 82
[Still the same terrific film, conceptually brilliant but not quite as assured as some of Kim's other recent work. (Compare the ratings and you'll see that I value conceptual brilliance considerably more than assurance.) People not to listen to on this one include Lee Walker, who's under the mistaken impression that Kim means to make some kind of pointed statement about the evils of plastic surgery (it's a metaphor, dude), and That Creepy Greek, who insists on reading the entire picture through the distorted lens of what he perceives, correctly or incorrectly, as Kim's latent misogyny. Simply put, Time is about the endless war between passion and familiarity, and our irreconcilable need to find both in the same person. In other words, it's a parable about the root of human unhappiness.]

Exiled (Johnnie To, Hong Kong): 54
[Here's another one folks are raving about, to my intense bafflement. But then I've never cottoned much to To, with the minor exception of the goofy Fulltime Killer; I always flash on Geena Davis spitting out the steak that went through the telepod and saying "It tastes...synthetic." Jeff Goldblum needs to reprogram this dude and teach him about the flesh in my opinion. Anyway, Exiled is exciting enough when the bullets (and soda cans) are flying, but the rest is just hollow posing, and it's hard to be moved by the final image when you still don't have the foggiest idea who any of those people are. I will except Anthony Wong.]

Breaking and Entering (Anthony Minghella, UK): 57
[Damn, I'd forgotten what a superb writer Minghella can be. This is his first wholly original script since Truly Madly Deeply, and several scenes -- especially those involving Jude Law and Robin Wright Penn (the latter, incidentally, does a marvelously subtle Swedish accent) -- approach the lacerating directness of his early stage plays; there may be nobody more incisive when it comes to the travails of long-term romantic relationships. Unfortunately, he also has a squishy streak a mile wide, and it emerges with a vengeance in B&E's risible final act, all but torpedoing everything that came before. And I don't know whether to admire Minghella for attempting to capture the full texture of contemporary London -- urban renewal, Bosnian refugees, a high-functioning autistic child -- or whether to chide him for trying too hard. One thing's for sure, though: Vera Farmiga deserved that Best Actress award. Holy cow.]

Big Bang Love, Juvenile A (Takashi Miike, Japan): 49
[Miike does the cinematic equivalent of black-box experimental theater, or the aggressively formalist short stories McSweeney's favors. And as in many (most?) such efforts, there's an overpowering sense of yeah-but-so-what?; Waz, who liked the film considerably more than I did, correctly notes that Miike's choice to present an interrogation's questions as onscreen text is a "distancing technique," but it's not clear to me why he (Miike -- or Waz, for that matter) felt that distancing was necessary or beneficial in these sequences, as opposed to just playful and gimmicky. (By contrast, the elided questions in David Foster Wallace's serial story "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men" have a clear and unmistakable function.) Interesting but unsatisfying, in short, like almost of all of Miike's films. And yet I'm always stoked for the next one, for some reason.]

The Dog Problem (Scott Caan, USA): 49
[Not a good movie, but it does confirm that Caan has a unique and arresting sensibility, particularly when it comes to dialogue. Like Mamet, he needs actors capable of making his overwritten lines sound at least vaguely naturalistic, and Giovanni Ribisi is no Shawn Hatosy in that regard; son of Sonny is also a wee bit too enamored of his own self-image as a frathouse goofball. And there's just no excuse for a three-minute montage of the titular pooch walking in L.A., set to the entirety of Missing Persons' "Walking in L.A." Disappointment aside, though, I've spent the past two days obsessively quoting this sucker -- Mena Suvari's habit of calling people "bitch" in every single sentence is particularly contagious -- so I'm prepared to chalk it up to sophomore slump and remain hopeful that he'll one day recapture the hopped-up alchemy of Dallas 362. If that doesn't sound appetizing to you, that's your problem, bitch.]

The Fall (Tarsem, India/UK/USA): W/O
[This movie's stupid. And it's "visually astonishing" only in the tiresome, superficial way that perfume ads are "visually astonishing." But the crucial issue, I'm pretty sure, is whether you find the little girl enchanting or irritating in her English-as-a-second-language interpolations -- I felt like I was watching a bad Latka impression.]

The Violin (Francisco Vargas Quevedo, Mexico): W/O
[Zzzzzz. "Pacing is almost too leisurely early on," admits the otherwise glowing Variety review (by the generally reliable Justin Chang), so maybe my impatience cheated me this time. But the first two reels really are just plod plod plod, and before long I began to suspect that the film's admirers are responding primarily to the lead actor's craggy, weatherbeaten face. If it were The Tuba, maybe I stick around.]

Drama/Mex (Gerardo Naranjo, Mexico): 66
[Took me a surprisingly -- you might say refreshingly -- long time to realize this is one of those damn fragile-connection triptychs. Thankfully, it's more or less the anti-Babel: Inevitable intersections among the various characters happen so casually and offhandedly that they're almost dismissable, and Naranjo has zero interest in sensationalism (especially considering that the stories involve infidelity, prostitution and suicide), maintaining the same even-keeled tone throughout and wrapping everything up on a pleasantly inconclusive note. Performances range from sturdy to superb, and while the handheld camerawork is sometimes distractingly unstable, Naranjo and/or his D.P. have the same knack for capturing elegant compositions on the fly as Jean de Segonzac (who seems to have been swallowed whole by "Law and Order"). Title/Retar, however.]

To Get to Heaven First You Have to Die (Djamshed Usmonov, France/Germany/Russia/Switzerland): 62
[Another generally excellent film that goes horribly wrong right at the end, albeit not as dramatically or unexpectedly as Summer '04. Ambles along placidly for a while, but the scene in which Kamal stakes out the factory bus station -- at one point all but submerged in a sea of women heading home for the day -- called Seven Chances to mind, and from that moment on the movie played for me like a weird, depressive post-Soviet version of a Buster Keaton silent, right down to lead actor Khurshed Golibekov's sharp profile, deadpan passivity and synchronized movements. (He rises from his seat in tandem with the movie's villain at one point, and it's such a trademark Keaton move, perfectly timed, that it's hard for me to accept it as coincidence, especially since later on you see him walking precisely in step with the guy, two paces behind.) With that conceit in place, the film sprang to giddy life, and I was even tentatively willing to ignore/tolerate the weird moments that never get explained, most notably the red dress thing. But Usmonov's final destination is so unpalatable and reductive that it wound up eroding much of my accumulated goodwill. Suggested alternative title: SPOILER!.]

When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (Spike Lee, USA): 67
[Scrupulous, affecting, and overlong without becoming tiresome. (I saw the whole thing in one sitting, sans intermission.) I might have liked it even more had Spike not made the mistake of crafting a magnificent montage at the beginning of Act III, which only underlined how thoroughly conventional the film as a whole is; I'd rather he'd made something less comprehensive and more impressionistic. On the other hand, I kind of want to marry Ms. Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, or at least see the unedited footage of her interviews. "If I had any drugs I would be smokin' 'em."]

Taxidermia (György Pálfi, Hungary/Austria/France): W/O
["[L]ike a bigscreen equivalent of children pulling wings off live flies," sez Variety. Yes. "To dismiss his film as merely a freak show is to reduce it," sez fan Jeremy Heilman. I am reducing it. "Pálfi's surreal string of set pieces is too unique to walk away from," Jeremy insists. Don't underestimate me, bitch.]

August Days (Marc Recha)
Bamako (Abderrahmane Sissako)
Belle toujours (Manoel de Oliveira)
Falling (Barbara Albert)
The Journals of Knud Rasmussen (Zacharias Kunuk & Norman Cohn)
Little Children (Todd Field)
Private Fears in Public Places (Alain Resnais)
Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul)
These Girls (Tahani Rached)
Triad Election (Johnnie To)
Woman on the Beach (Hong Sang-soo)

FILMS I WON'T BE SEEING ON ACCOUNT OF I HAVE SEEN THEM ALREADY (AT LEAST IN PART):

Babel (Alejandro González Iñárritu): 54
Buenos Aires 1977 (Israel Adrián Caetano): 50
The Caiman (Nanni Moretti): 47
Climates (Nuri Bilge Ceylan): 57
Colossal Youth (Pedro Costa): 22
Days of Glory (Rachid Bouchareb): 48
Election (Johnnie To): 32
Flanders (Bruno Dumont): 36
The Fountain (Darren Aronofsky): 43
Gambling, Gods and LSD (Peter Mettler): W/O
A Good Year (Ridley Scott): 40
Hamaca Paraguaya (Paz Encina): W/O
In Between Days (So Yong Kim): 68
Jindabyne (Ray Lawrence): 56
La Tourneuse de pages (Denis Dercourt): W/O
Lights in the Dusk (Aki Kaurismäki): 49
Offside (Jafar Panahi): 73
Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo Del Toro): 49
Paris, je t'aime (various): 45
Red Road (Andrea Arnold): 51
Shortbus (John Cameron Mitchell): 46
Sleeping Dogs Lie (Bobcat Goldthwait): 72
Summer Palace (Lou Ye): 42
Ten Canoes (Rolf de Heer): 45
Trance (Teresa Villaverde): W/O
Volver (Pedro Almodóvar): 74
White Palms (Szabolcs Hajdu): W/O
The Wind That Shakes the Barley (Ken Loach): 65