Time to Leave (Le Temps qui reste) – Another year, another minimal but solid offering from François Ozon (5 x 2), who makes fashion photographer Romain (Melvil Poupaud) his subject.  I felt a special connection to Romain, on account of having so many similarities, aside from him being French, gay, good-looking, and wealthy.  Shortly after the film opens, Romain finds out he has inoperable cancer and a very short life expectancy.  He refuses chemo, and opts to alienate himself from his lover (Christian Sengewald) and family (this is the part with the similarities to yours truly).

The only person Romain opens up to is his grandmother (Jeanne Moreau), because they share the unique trait of being close to life's finish line.  And, if you know Ozon, you know he'll find a way to work a hot three-way scene into the fold, as well as an occasional glimpse of the sea.  Ozon also peppers the film with several scenes in which Romain encounters his younger self as his condition worsens.  These were the most powerful to me, and I thought Poupaud did a great job looking more and more gaunt as the film progressed

Sympathy for Lady Vengeance – Just a few weeks after the American release of te second picture, Chan-wook Park's "revenge" trilogy goes out with a bang in Vengeance, which took home two prizes at the Venice fest earlier this week.  This is the first of the three films boasting a female lead, with Lee Yeong-ae playing Lee Geum-ja, who is being released from prison as Vengeance begins.  She's just finished a 13-year sentence for a high-profile murder of a child . . . but did she really commit the crime for which she served the time.

I'm not going to say if she did, but Vengeance's second act is an indescribably emotional, twisted, and totally fricking awesome culmination of a plan Lee has had in the works for over a decade.  Also, it has Choi Min-sik (from the first installment, Oldboy), as well as a scene in which several characters don plastic tarps, as if they were going to be sitting in the front row of a Gallagher show.  That's how crazy it gets.

Vengeance is, hands down, the best conclusion to a trilogy, and easily the best triptych since the original Star Wars.  And if you've not seen the first two films, they're connected (aside from an inside gag or two) in theme only.  You don't need to watch them in order to appreciate the fact that you should be worshiping at the altar of Chan-wook Park.

Zozo – Warning: This film has nothing to do with Led Zeppelin IV.  Zozo, the presumably somewhat autobiographical (but hopefully not too autobiographical) story of writer/director Josef Fares (Kops) begins in 1987 Beruit, where young Zozo (Imad Creidi) is on the verge of moving, with his entire family, to Sweden so they can escape the war inferno.  The day the relocation's final piece of paperwork is approved, Zozo's apartment building is shelled, and he suddenly becomes the sole survivor of his clan.

The first half of the film shows Zozo trying to get to the airport to catch his flight to Sweden, while the second half shows the boy adjusting to life after being taken in by his hysterically bickering grandparents in the Scandinavian country.  Zozo is a rare example of a coming-of-age picture that didn't irritate and bore the piss out of me, mostly because there's a talking chicken in it, but also because I imagined most of the film's scenarios happening to Fares in real life.  Not quite as funny as Fares' previous movies, but there's as much humor as one could possibly squeeze in to a story this maudlin.

Metal: A Headbanger's Journey – I wouldn't have a problem with Sam Dunn, unapologetic heavy metal fan, making a documentary as a love letter to his favorite genre of music.  But when the anthropology major from Victoria, BC begins Journey by saying he's interested in uncovering the truth behind why there are such extreme reactions to heavy metal, then totally drops the ball by presenting an extremely one-sided film.  And then has the audacity to wrap it up by essentially saying that you should get bent if you don't like the music.

What happens in between, though, is essential viewing for anyone who was or is still into metal.  There are a ton of interviews, lots of live footage, photos I've never seen, and a funny flowchart of the history of the genre.  Dunn even treks to Wacken Open Air, the annual four-day Holy Grail of metal in Germany.