Derailroaded, which Josh Rubin and Jeremy Lubin named after a Fischer song and worked on for years as a labor of love, both with and without an often-troubled Fischer’s cooperation, considers whether Zappa insensitively opened a Pandora’s box without understanding the consequences, but it also shows that Fischer’s wild music and good humor — when he was in the right mood — was pretty infectious on those who encountered him.  

It’s rare when a film achieves absolute perfection. And such hyperbole shouldn’t be thrown around lightly, but Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench deserves the praise. A low-budget affair shot on grainy, black-and-white 16mm, Guy and Madeline has a simple plot: Boy loves girl. Boy gets bored and leaves girl for another. Girl moves on with her life. Boy realizes the error of his ways and tries to find the love he spurned.  

Somewhere’s simple setup centers on Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), a self-involved movie star suffering from an existential malaise. Marco lives at Chateau Marmont (the height of Hollywood decadence) and spends his listless days falling in and out of bed with women when not promoting his latest movie.  

The year is 1348. The bubonic plague is ravaging Britain, striking hundreds of thousands dead and leaving even more suffering in its slow, painful grip. What’s causing this pestilence? An official explanation comes from the Church, who decrees that it is God’s punishment. Mankind has sinned. A divergent line of thought grows, though. Evil is behind this destruction. And it must be stopped — in God’s name.  

Adapted from a stage play by David Lindsay-Abaire, who also penned the script, Rabbit Hole follows a couple (Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart) eight months after the tragic death of their 4-year-old son. The grief threatens to destroy their marriage.  

At first glance, Mike Leigh’s Topsy-Turvy seems the oddball amongst the work of a filmmaker best known for the raw explorations of contemporary lower- and middle-class British life in Life Is Sweet, Secrets and Lies, Naked, Happy-Go-Lucky and more. A period piece set in Victorian London, the film looks at the often contentious relationship between Gilbert and Sullivan and the creation of their musical, The Mikado.  

From the opening credits of Enter the Void, which pulse like strobes at an all-night rave, through the ambiguous ending, Gaspar Noe pummels his "drugs are bad" thesis with subtlety of a jackhammer. Of course, subtlety is not in the director’s vocabulary.  

Is terrorism funny? Are Islamic jihadists bent on destroying Western culture a laugh-riot? Not normally, but in British filmmaker and writer Christopher Morris’ Four Lions, they are dangerously hysterical. The black comedy follows a group of inept, wannabe terrorists who are determined to find glory as suicide bombers.  

The French Ministry of Labor bestows the title, Le Meilleur Ouvrier de France, on the top craftsmen in France. Textile designers, photographers, woodworkers, masons, graphic artists, florists and beyond can all strive for the honor. Kings of Pastry explores pastry chefs as they strive for this honor.  

China’s coming maelstrom of cultural tension is a central theme in Chinese/Canadian filmmaker Lixin Fan’s Last Train Home, a gritty, verite-style documentary about a family struggling to adapt to its country’s evolving, increasingly globalized economy. Lixin fixes his narrative (and inquisitive hand-held camera) on a married couple, Changhua and Suqin Zhang, onetime rural farmers who have worked grueling garment factory jobs far away from home for nearly the whole of their 17-year-old daughter Qin’s life.  

The Magician (originally released as The Face) is an unjustly overlooked Ingmar Bergman film, sandwiched between cinema monoliths The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries and early-’60s classics The Virgin Spring and Through a Glass Darkly. It’s as vibrant as any work in his oeuvre — an odd mix of drama, bedroom farce and horror deep with critical, religious and existential symbolisms.  

Middletown, a 1982 PBS documentary series about everyday life in Middle America has had a troubled history. Produced by Peter Davis, it was meant as a return to the searing, revelatory, verite-style reality television that PBS pioneered with 1973’s An American Family.  

Matt Reeves' remake of Swedish filmmaker Tomas Alfredson's atmospheric vampire thriller — both of which are based on John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel 'Let the Right One In' — is not as restrained or as poetic as its predecessor, but Let Me In's nuanced take on the genre generates unexpected empathy for its central duo in near equal measure.  

Oliver Stone’s Wall Street is entirely of its time: a note-perfect portrait of 1980s superficiality and money-lust appropriately channeled through a world where wealth and class can be bought and sold daily. It made a true star of Michael Douglas, who delivered an iconic performance as Gordon Gekko, the cold-hearted, crazy-rich corporate raider who takes a young trader under his wings.  

Pedro Gonzalez-Rubio’s verite-styled familial drama is an aspirational observance of three generations of males living at one with nature in the Caribbean’s coastal solitude of Banco Chinchorro, Mexico’s largest coral reef.