The Embalmer does just about everything in its power to turn you off. And guess what? It works. Set along what has to be the dumpiest, dreariest coastline in all of Italy – the sand is strewn with trash; the high-rises are mostly empty – the drama details a romantic triangle involving a diminutive taxidermist

Everything that is good and bad about an “art film” can be found in Eros, a meditation on desire featuring three shorts by three different directors: Hong Kong’s Wong Kar-wai, the United States’ Steven Soderbergh and Italy’s Michelangelo Antonioni. The Hand, Wong Kar-wai’s opening segment, is strictly sensual and very similar to his best-known work:

Just a single normal character would go a long way in Everything Is Illuminated, an aggressively quirky adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s hyperactively quirky novel. Both the book and the movie – which represents the directorial debut of actor Liev Schreiber – revolve around such fanciful conceits as an obsessive-compulsive Jewish-American (Elijah Wood) trying to

Writer-director Henry Jaglom, an icon of independent film, once again employs a very personal, quasi- documentary style, as he follows the intertwining, back-door negotiations involving two very different productions: a big-budget Hollywood prestige piece and an independent debut, both of which want to lure the participation of a legendary French actress. Greta Scacchi, Ron Silver,

One of those low-budget experiments Soderbergh likes to squeeze in between Ocean’s Eleven projects, this means to take a peek at a corner of America Hollywood usually stays away from: the poor, the unattractive, the Midwestern. Set in Ohio and featuring a nonprofessional cast from the area, Bubble centers around the odd friendship between an