Red Road:   If you thought the whole Dogme 95 think was either exciting or ridiculous, you'll be thrilled or revolted to know there's a new Dogme-related movement happening in Scotland.  Gauntlet-thrower Lars von Trier (see The Five Obstructions) thought it would be interesting to see what would happen if characters created by Dogme writers Anders Thomas Jensen and Lone Scherfig were transplanted into completely different settings, calling the project the Advance Party.

Red Road, the debut film from 2005 Best Live Action Short Oscar-winner Andrea Arnold, is the first Advance Party picture, and it has already won one of the top jury awards at Cannes earlier this year.  It's about a woman named Jackie (Kate Dickie) who works at a bank of television monitors connected to security cameras located around Glasgow.  We're not given any back-story on Jackie, so when she begins to become more than a little obsessed with one particular ginger-haired man (Tony Curran), viewers will be in the dark.  Hey, speaking of dark, that's what you should expect from Road.  It's a Lynne Ramsay-esque Scottish handwringer in that it could possibly make you want to come home and take your own life.  That was a compliment, in case you weren't sure.

Also to clarify, the three scheduled Advance Party flicks will feature the same seven characters, which might help explain why Road seems a little scattered when it comes to introducing and including some of the peripheral characters.

Renaissance:  There is a noticeable lack of high-profile commercial animated films at the festival this year (and I'm not complaining), which means a little flick like Renaissance gets the chance to grab the mantle.  If you're a fan of Frank Miller's Sin City graphic novels, then you'll probably nut in your pants after about five minutes of this movie.  It's dark, shadowy black-and-white motion-capture animation, and it's honestly good enough to sit there and watch without paying any attention to the story.

What?  There's a story?  Yeah, it some kind of futuristic French police thriller, set in 2054 Paris.  A scientist goes missing, and there's a cop hell-bent on finding her.  It's in English, too, with voice talent including Daniel Craig, Romola Garai, Jonathan Pryce, and Catherine McCormack.  Renaissance is a living, breathing comic book, and that's something that will only appear to a narrow section of the public.  But it's a narrow section that will be extremely satisfied.

The Half Life of Timofey Berezin:  I can't possibly imagine how a potential distributor might market this picture, which is a surprisingly funny tale of a man dying from radiation poisoning.  Tough sell.

In its defense, only half of Berezin is about radiation poisoning, and it's the other half that earns the uncomfortable laughs.  The setting is 1995, and the titular Timofey (Paddy Considine) is working at an off-the-books nuclear plant in Russia when something goes wrong and he is exposed to a lethal amount of the bad stuff.  He's a walking dead man -- he knows it, his wife (Radha Mitchell) knows it, and even Brak knows it.  To make matters worse, Timofey is suspended indefinitely by his crooked employers.  So he steals a little plutonium and heads to Moscow, where he hopes to sell it for enough money to support his family from the other side.

Meanwhile, in Moscow, we're introduced to a low-level mobster wannabe named Shiv (Oscar Issac) who works with a pair of idiotic meatsticks.  They're so dumb (how dumb are they?) that they accidentally blow up the wrong shop for not paying protection money.  Because of the mistake, Shiv needs to quickly come up with a bunch of scratch to kick upstairs to his boss.  And that's when the two stories merge together in a slightly awkward union the world has not seen since the Minnelli/Gest marriage.  The Clooney/Soderbergh-produced film debut from Scott Z. Burns is still worth checking out, though, as is the ethereal score from Polish composer Abel Korzeniowski.

Summer Palace:  I'm not sure what to make of writer-director Lou Ye.  His first picture (Suzhou River) knocked my socks off at the 2000 festival, but a scheduling conflict made me miss his 2003 follow-up called Purple Butterfly.  Everyone who saw Butterfly told me I dodged an enormous stinky bullet.  Now it's three years later, and I had to clear an entire afternoon to squeeze in the 140-minute Summer Place.  And if you're nice, I'll let you see my fresh bullet wound.

I never thought I'd be so utterly bored watching a movie about a ridiculously cute girl (Lei Hao -- she's Zhang Ziyi with Ellen Pompeo's smile) having sex with a bunch of different guys.  And that's essentially all Palace is, though it is set amongst some pretty important socio-political events in China during the late 1980s and early 1990s.  Yu Hong (Hao) comes from a small village near the North Korean border, and begins attending the University of Beijing . . . right around the same time a certain student uprising was beginning to simmer.  Palace is a good looking picture, but it's way too long for something with this little content.

My Best Friend:  Patrice Leconte's latest is a little light and a little telegraphed, but still quite enjoyable mostly due to a strong comedic performance from Daniel Auteuil.  Starring for a third time in a Leconte film, Auteuil plays an art dealer with no friends.  He's not an asshole, or anything, but he's pretty close to approaching asshole status, and this is a fact that blindsides him when his business partner makes an unusual bet: Show me your best friend within 10 days, or you have to give me your valuable Greek vase from 5 BC.

Enter a chatty cabbie (Danny Boon) who might be a bit too sociable, spouting facts that nobody wants to hear as he prepares for his umpteenth audition for the television gameshow Know-it-Alls.  You can probably tell where the plot is going based only on that brief description, and that's Friend's biggest downfall.  I couldn't help but think that the premise would have made a much better Woody Allen film, but would still recommend Friends to friends.