Land of Plenty – Every few years, during the festival's waning days, you get to see something really special that stands out amongst films not buzz-worthy enough to be programmed into the first half of the front-loaded festival.  It happened a few years ago with In America, and it happened again this year with Wim Wenders' Plenty -- his first narrative film since 1997's The End of the Affair.

Plenty focuses on two people: 20-year-old Lana (Michelle Williams), an American who has spent most of her life living abroad with her missionary father; and Paul (John Diehl), an over-jealous "these colors don't run" Viet Nam vet with a surveillance van, conspiracy theories, a disturbing amount of medication, and an even more disturbing amount of free time.  Their two lives collide because . . . well, because Paul is Lana's uncle.  Also because an Arab guy gets shot right outside Lana's LA mission, and Paul thinks it might have something to do with dirty bombs and borax.

The film is made by two presences: Wenders and his choice to shoot the entire picture with digital video, and a truly star-making performance from Williams.  Her Lana -- decked out in short, dark hair and thrift store clothes -- is almost overly smiley and pure.  Angelic, even.  She totally eats the camera in a way you only get to see once a year, if you're lucky.

Primer – Here's the thing about Primer -- a picture directed, written, photographed, produced, edited, scored and starring Shane Carruth -- I'll probably need to see it at least two more times to fully understand it all.  Thankfully, it's good enough and, perhaps more importantly, short enough for me to do just that.  I wasn't the only one scratching my head, either.  I've never seen fewer people leave a theatre and the end of a festival film before.  They all wanted . . . needed to stick around for the Q&A with Carruth.  Sadly, I had to cut out to make my next screening.

Primer is about a group of regular guys who have office jobs for a tech company.  When they're not at the office, they're tinkering in the garage hacking up their cars and refrigerators while trying to come up with some kind of invention that will make them all rich (now re-read that sentence without thinking of Homer Simpson trying to do the same thing).  Two of the guys (Carruth and David Sullivan) break off from the group and cook up something on their own.  Something that, apparently, can launch them forward in time.

The whole time-travel thing has been pretty much rubbed in the dirt (again, stop thinking of Homer), but Carruth manages to find a way to keep Primer extremely fresh and interesting.  And he shoots the film like he's goddamn Steven Soderbergh, too (sorry -- Peter Andrews, I mean).  A real gem of a first film.

Vital – The premise behind Shinya Tsukamoto's Vital is enough to make it worth seeing.  The fact that Tsukamoto doesn't try to stretch that premise into a two-hour film doesn't hurt, either.

Aspiring medical student Hiroshi Takagi (Tadanobu Asano) wakes up in the hospital after a car crash.  He suffers from amnesia, remembering zero about the accident or pretty much anything else in his life.  When it comes time to dissect corpses in anatomy class, Hiroshi lucks out and is assigned the body of his girlfriend, who died in the crash that sapped his memory.  As he dissect Ryoko, his memory slowly begins to come back.  Also, there's a lot of auto-erotic asphyxiation.  As expected, Tsukamoto attacks as many of your senses as possible.