Meg (Scarlett Johansson) and Robert (Mark Umbers) have been happily married for a year, and thanks to the latter's nose for money, the two are spending the summer in Italy with a bunch of other upper-crust snobs who gossip and make jokes that aren't very funny.  Enter Stella Erlynne (Helen Hunt), a woman with a shady past (read: she's sucked a lot of cock to get to where she is) when it comes to bedding wealthy husbands.  Meg gets jealous and turns to the arms of Lord Darlington (Stephen Campbell Moore) when she finds check stubs showing Robert has been slipping Stella cash and god knows what else.  But it's all just a big misunderstanding.  And then Mr. Furley thinks Jack is gay.  Been there, done that, now leave me alone.

Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession – The best kind of documentary there is will tell you about something your ignorant eyes have never seen before (and, yes, this means docs about the Holocaust and Rwanda don't count so stop making them).  I had never heard of Z Channel before seeing Obsession.  And now that I have, I kinda wish, for the first time in my life, that I lived in Los Angeles.  At least before O.J. ran around killing white people.

Z Channel was, in a pre-HBO world, the first pay television network to show uncut, commercial-free films.  The net's brains were Jackie Harvey (not the entertainment reporter for The Onion), a maniacally knowledgeable film buff who filled Z Channel's programming with obscure foreign films, little-seen domestic releases, and things like original cuts of Heaven's Gate, Das Boot, 1900 and Once Upon a Time in America.  By playing Oliver Stone's long-forgotten Salvador in December, Harvey parlayed Z Channel's power into multiple Oscar nominations for that picture.  Praises are sung by the likes of Robert Altman, Quentin Tarantino, Jim Jarmusch, Alexander Payne, Alan Rudolph and Henry Jaglom.

Like any story about a person this driven and successful in any one particular field, Obsession doesn't have the happiest of endings.  Actually, I'm just guessing because I had to leave five minutes early to catch my next film (something I really hate doing), but I'd bet my life it didn't end well.  This doc was produced by the IFC Channel, so odds are, it'll end up there.  I recommend it to any serious film lover.

Bluebird – 12-year-old Merel (Elske Rotteveel) seems like a pretty cool kid.  She skateboards, looks like she could have been in a '70s era commercial for Golden Grahams, and is one of the best divers on her school's team.  She has a part in the school play, and seems to be doing well in her classes.  Merel loves to read, and has recently abandoned Dahl for Tolstoy.  And she doesn't hesitate to spend every other available second of her time dotting over her gimpy, wheelchair-bound little brother Casper (Kees Scholten).

Merel isn't a cool kid, though.  At least not when it comes to her peers, who for some reason, have tagged our protagonist as the subject of increasingly rough bullying.  Other than turning to the tried-and-true cure-all of makeup and piercings, Merel doesn't let on that she's being bothered by any of it.  So I sat there and waited for her to snap.  How will it happen?  Pushing Casper into the sea?  Bringing a gun to school and showing everyone what for?  Running off with the friendly black man on the train she takes to school?  Jesus, I thought.  This is giving me a stomachache.

Then I realized Bluebird was one of the few films the festival programmers specifically targeted toward children (usually nobody under 18 is allowed into any of the screenings).  So it can't end that darkly, can it?  It can't, but that didn't make my stomach feel any better.  I can attribute that to Rotteveel's incredibly earnest and deeply moving performance.  It's another in a long line of great roles nailed by pre-pubescent actresses, following the likes of Dakota Fanning, Keisha Castle-Hughes, the Bolger sisters, and Valentina de Angelis.  Where are the boys offering the same level of skill?  All my team has to show for it is a weird-looking Haley Joel Osment.

Right Now – Remember when you were 19, and you met that guy who made you fall head-over-heels in love with him in, like, two minutes?  Remember when he turned out to be a bank robber, looking for a place for him and his accomplice to hole up for a night?  Remember when you ran off with him, hop-scotching through Europe and Northern Africa whilst constantly looking over your shoulder for John Q. Law?  Well, they finally up and made a feature film about that crazy summer.

Girls Can't Swim's Isild Le Besco stars as you, and Ouassini Embarek is your beloved.  They are directed by Benoît Jacquot, who shoots it all in digital black and white, which, along with the stock footage he uses of street, building and cities, makes the whole thing look like it was 1975.  Isild (think a younger, Frencher Sofia Coppola) really nails you as the confused yet somehow assured lead.  Especially when she has to stay on her toes to protect her amazing breasts from sweaty Greek men.  Decent first and third act, but Now sags a bit too much in the middle.  A must-see for fans of the black-and-white flicks, though.