At its core, Adam Elliot’s stop-motion animated opus Mary & Max may well be one of the most despairing mainstream features ever made. That isn’t intended as a criticism of the film, but as an observation; despair is integral to the film’s worldview. In Elliot’s universe – a godless, a-humanist universe of chaos, random violence and meaningless, tragic absurdities – humans create their only real significance via intimate personal connections with one another. The earnestness of one such connection – a marvelous friendship at the center of this story – also gives the movie resounding levels of heart, soul, and hope, that effectively offset the maelstrom of suffering it perceives.

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Sandra Laing, the real-life figure at the center of Anthony Fabian’s social issue drama Skin, made international headlines with an unusual and achingly sad personal story, which Fabian uses as a testament to the emotional, psychological, and sociological fallout of apartheid. The child of white Afrikaner parents, Sandra (portrayed as an adult by Sophie Okonedo) was nevertheless born with brown skin, attributable to some unusual genetic quirk, and thus fell uneasily between the white and black communities of racially segregated South Africa. For Sandra, life became a tumultuous struggle over personal identity and a decades-long quest for belonging. And much of the conflict initially surfaced when Sandra’s parents (played here by Alice Krige and Sam Neill) attempted to buck the color bar by sending their daughter to an all-Afrikaner primary school –- to the horror of racist instructors and administrators.

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Ben Gazzara remains one of the most amiable actors in American movies (to say nothing of his formidable dramatic chops), and he spends the better part of Andrzej Krakowski’s seriocomedy Looking for Palladin proving it. Despite well-publicized health issues (including severe throat cancer) that have robbed the 79-year-old actor of over 40 pounds and severely ravaged his voice, he continues to command the screen with his presence as few of his contemporaries could. His Jack Palladin is a genial and witty ex-Hollywood A-list actor self-exiled to a Guatemalan backwater, and an individual in laid-back command of his own little corner of the world (vaguely recalling one of Gazzara’s prior characterizations, pimp Jack Flowers in Peter Bogdanovich’s Saint Jack).

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Beneath all of its thematic and stylistic variegation, Francis Ford Coppola’s work has generally alternated between two major threads since the outset of his career: tightly knit, intimately observed character studies that enable the writer-director to masterfully peel back layers of ordinary human lives and expose emotional complexities beneath (exemplified by The Rain People, The Conversation, and Rumble Fish, among others) and the director’s epic tendencies that play out broad human conflicts sweepingly, operatically, and to varying degrees of success — think the Godfather films, Apocalypse Now, The Cotton Club.

The most fascinating and impressive quality of the director’s Argentine-set drama Tetro is its willingness to bridge the two forms. This accomplishment merges with thinly veiled autobiographical elements that run throughout the picture, and the film thus suggests both an apotheotic summation of Coppola’s entire oeuvre and a creative renaissance for the filmmaker.

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Some movies declare their sources openly. Director Cédric Klapisch’s seriocomedy Paris falls squarely into this category, aspiring to establish itself as the definitive French version of Robert Altman’s Short Cuts. The similarities are innumerable: multiple crisscrossed substories in an urban landscape that each receive a scant amount of screen time; quirky existential reflections on fate, chance, and the degree to which a broad patchwork of intersecting lives can yield a ripple effect and impact individuals in startling ways; a central despair and sadness about the pitfalls of the human race, offset by flashes of dark humor.

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As a modestly scaled yet masterfully crafted chamber drama from Gallic director Claire Denis, 35 Shots of Rum observes a group of working-class Afro-Europeans living in an unspecified arrondissement of Paris. At its core, the film meditates on the difficulty of transitions in a tightly knit familial unit.

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I met screenwriter-producer Larry Gelbart only once – enough to make me wish for much more - but he gave me one of the most memorable and enjoyable evenings of my life. The time was late June 2001. I was coming off of a horrendously difficult period following an eight-month executive-level tenure in Hollywood – a period marked by a premature job loss, economic and emotional strain, the persistent inability to find work and the looming threat of eviction. But on one of my last nights before moving out of Southern California, I impetuously bought a ticket for a master-class screenwriting workshop hosted by Gelbart at an adult education facility in Santa Monica. The evening felt like a breath of fresh air and compensated for many of the difficult weeks that preceded it.

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Crude constitutes Joe Berlinger’s account of Texaco’s alleged pollution in Ecuador - massive oil spills that reportedly contributed to tens of thousands of cases of illness and an untold number of deaths, and nearly extinguished the population of an entire village. The film devastates the audience almost by default. Without falling into excess, Berlinger repeatedly turns his camera on images that shake us to our core

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