Address Unknown Kim Ki-Duk, South Korea. There's a scene in this film where somebody holds a bully's arm behind his back so he can take his five lumps. But the kid giving the lumps, a favorite victim of the bully, goes absolutely nuts on the guy. As an American, I came into this film set among poor villagers ringing a US military base in South Korea ready and willing to take some just lumps. But the director went absolutely psycho, reminding me of a Bolshevik movie about the czars or the Church. Somewhere in here was a powerful, poignant story: Korean wives and children of G.I.s long gone, the very different set of dominos which fell in a country America tried to protect from its own northern kin. But like Korea itself, my experience was divided: I was half sympathetic and half bemused by a film that degenerates almost into farce.

Amelie Jean-Pierre Jeunet, France. Amelie of Montmartre is a rare individual, one with the extremely rare gift for seeing all the odd little details that everybody else misses. The purest example of the exercise of her gift in the film titled by her name is when she grabs the arm of a blind man and walks him down the street, noting rapid-fire the peculiar particulars of the locale that even people with eyes to see don't catch. With charming panache, Amelie opens the blind man's eyes. Just as this film does for us, in the hands of a French director, one Jean-Pierre Juenet, who shares Amelie's rare gift.

Baran Majid Majidi, Iran. The Iranian cinematic flowering blooms on. One of the big names in this film renaissance has been director Majid Majidi, whose previous two films (Children of Heaven and The Color of Paradise) enjoyed the highest visibility of Iranian movies in North American distribution. The setting for this new film is a high-rise construction site, where illegal Afghan workers scatter whenever building inspectors show up to warn the owner of the consequences for hiring illegal workers. Majidi continues to direct with solid Fordian competence, but without the mythic sensibilities: his framing, scene building, and storytelling are dependable and true -- though his filmmaking style is not quite as plainspoken as the stories. Indeed, cinematogrpaher Mohammed Davudu once again lights and composes with a matching confidence, one beautiful image after another. The message here would seem to be: if you treat people as decent human beings, they will become decent human beings.

Big Bad Love Arliss Howard, USA. Debra Winger and first-time director husband Arliss Howard team for an unvarnished, unshaven ode to art and life. An artful description of a mangy hound dog might be artful; a mangy hound dog is liable to be disgusting. Too much life and not enough art here for me, though narrated snippets of the Larry Brown stories which inspired film made me want to track down the book.

The Devil's Backbone Guillermo Del Toro, Mexico/Spain. Spielbergian production values wasted on another ghost story that ends in more blood than chills. At a boys' home in Civil War -torn Spain, new student Carlos meets a ghost. If you liked the remake of The Haunting, you'll be satisfied with this.

Focus Neal Slavin, USA. Nobody does alienated frustration better than William H. Macy. In this film, made from Arthur Miller's only novel, Macy plays a Wiley Loman - type personnel director who is forced by various circumstances to identify with his New York City neighbors, the Jews. Set during the war advertised later by some as the American rescue of European Jewry, this film is a caustic reminder that anything America did for the Jews of Europe was an accidental biproduct of a war waged for mostly other reasons. Indeed, on the home front, Father Crichton (a stand-in for real-life anti-semitic Catholic priest, Father John Coughlin), spews the same sort of venom that provoked Seig, Heils across the seas. The ugliness is contrasted with pretty pastel art direction, a backdrop for stage-like dialogue and delivery, and action at times a tad over-the-top, in that the anti-semite sometimes seems offered as an alternative Evil Other. Still, a sharp script, fine acting (by Macy, Laura Dern and David Paymer): one can't say Never Again enough.

My First Mister Christine Lahti, USA. Debut feature by director of Oscar-winning short. A good idea: a misfit teenager, mad at the world of Ashleys and shopping malls, dresses in black, pierces everything and writes poetry about death. There's some nice lines: "Vintage TV rules. What I wouldn't give to live with the Partridge Family. I think Shirley would really get me." But ultimately, things don't connect: the moments of authenticity are too fleeting for a film that starts with the notion of Goth, a particularly unforgiving protest against the falseness of this world. To be sure, there are Goth posers, and they're not the only ones: I had no sense director understands what is right about Goth, rich, even profound about it. In fact, in a sense the main character actually is cured of her Gothness over the course of the story, through her relationship with Albert Brooks' character and an encounter with real death. In general terms, I have no problem with this thematic strategy. But the experience as depicted is about as believable as Brooks' Grecian formula job. Brooks plays the middle aged haberdasher whose sainted patience for her is inspiring, but I prefer HIM in the role of frustrated, alienated, misfit. For the alienation, but without pat answers, Ghost World is much better. For real Goth, check out the Czech film, Wild Flowers.

No Man's Land Director Danis Tanovic experienced the latest war in the Balkans first-hand, and so brings to bear both that eye-witnesses perspective and a Slavic sense of humor. Of the latter, those of you who've seen films like Underground know just what I mean. For the rest of you, the best way to convey the atmosphere might be the word "dangerous": history seems to have pushed Slavic sensibilities to find if not a zone of comfort than one of liveability in territories more pampered types would have declared lost causes long ago. The wit is black and the feel anarchic, but neither so much as to make the film inaccessible to newbies. In fact, No Man's Land is delightfully accessible, and takes us to battlefields where the smoke and debated matters still hang thick in the air, unraveling the conflict only so far as to find tragic humanity on all sides.

Heist David Mamet, USA. A harmless action film Mammetized, which some people like, but Mamet's self- consciously puzzling plots and mannerist dialog are an acquired taste I have yet to acquire. Gene Hackman plays an aging thief who heads a Mission Impossible -style team who operate on the wrong side of the law. As one might expect, the fakery spins us around until we don't know who's who or what's what, though by the time we get to the end, nobody's really surprised. "What will we do next?" asks one character, to which Hackman replies, "That's what everybody wants to know." But for those who look for something more than simply What Happens Next? in films they see, there's not much here.

Runaway Kim Longinotto, Ziba Mir-Hosseini. As in the directors' award-winning earlier film, Divorce, Iranian Style, viewers are given an astonishing and intimate look at family problem-solving under an Islamic regime. Instead of a male judge, the professional functionary here is a female counselor. And unlike the stereotype of an Islamic woman, this counselor is educated, sensible and clearly in charge. The film revolves around her intake desk, where she meets girls and discusses with them the problems that brought them to the shelter, which she then tries to help solve and send them home. Despite the reminder of the oppressiveness of the regime, there is so much in Runaway that gives me hope, not least the fact that it was made in the first place and shown in America. The other thing that gives me hope is the common sense of the Iranian women, who clearly won't put up with this stuff forever.

Waking Life Richard Linklater, USA. One of the buzz films at fest, and for good reason. For starters, the film features an innovative method for turning live action footage into animation. The result is a fluid, rotoscoped motion, that is rendered further into artiface by animators. The colors float in and out of the lines, in a style sometimes reminiscent of 1960s watercolor ad illustration. These unique visuals are combined with a very "live" audio, making for a mix of reality and fantasy unlike anything you've ever seen before. The film is both more and less real then live-action, a mind-bending effect that makes for an oddly refreshing experience.

Wild Flowers F. A. Brabec, Czech Republic. Based on six poems by Czech poet, J.R. Erbin, a sort of Bohemian Baudelaire (the French proto-Decadent and agonized Catholic who put the Poe into poetry). The poems are translated partly into dialogue, but mostly into breathtakingly beautiful images: leaveless trees, black birds, a full moon in a cloudy sky, candles in a church, mist on the water, primal stuff, in what amounts to a Fantasia of Death. Or, a high-art Tales From the Crypt: among the tales is the one about the girl stolen by waterwights on her wedding day, a sequence of amazing underwater ballet; the dead fiance who comes to claim his bride and their subsequent wrestling match for the services of a dead man in a tomb; the Noon-Day Witch, who naughty children might be threatened with being handed over to, and here, one really is. Throughout, a Day of the Dead sort of acceptance of the end as much a part of life as the beginning. A melancholy joy.