Days & Clouds - Bread & Tulips director Silvio Soldini returns with a story of a middle-aged woman who seems to have it all.  Elsa (Margherita Buy) is married to a successful businessman, and has a gorgeous house with expensive art covering the walls.  The couple has a maid, owns a boat, and is on the verge of yet another vacation to an exotic location, presumably because they've already been to all the normal places.  Elsa has just earned a fancy art degree, and husband Michele (Antonio Albanese) spoils her with dinner, a lavish gift, and a huge surprise part with all of their friends and family once they return to their Genoa home.  The next morning, Elsa quite literally wakes up to a nightmare.  After cutting her foot on a lamp broken in a drunken stupor the previous night, Elsa learns Michele was fired two months earlier.  The couple is nearly out of money, and viewers witness their rapid descent into the working class.  A tiny apartment and menial jobs are in their immediate future, and great care is taken to keep everything hidden from their friends and daughter (Alba Rohrwacher).  Ever wonder what this sort of social shock does to a husband and wife?  This is your big chance to find out.

Clouds is filled with an ominous tone that made me think that Michele was going to hurl himself into traffic, or leap off a roof at any given second.  But that would be the easy way out, and deprive viewers of the watching the erosion of a relationship.  Decent performances from the two leads, and a nice touch of adding the subplot of Elsa restoring a fresco, carefully scraping away layers to find something beautiful just as her relationship is whittled down to its true essence.

Night - Funny they'd follow up Days with Night.  What at first promises to be an Australian Koyaanisqatsi fizzles out despite a lean running time of 82 minutes.  Writer-director Lawrence Johnston initially throws time-altered night-themed images of nature and cityscapes set to a post-rock-y score, but then distracts us by having natives give their opinions about the evening and all the surprises it can bring.  Then, and I wish I was making this us, the final five minutes are about 9/11.

Into the Wild - Sean Penn, as a writer and director, hasn't exactly shied away from picking difficult material over the last two decades, and Wild is definitely no exception, even though the title makes it sound like another one of those insufferable animated films about animals banding together.  Here, Penn reunites The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys stars Emile Hirsch and Jena Malone as a pair of Virginia siblings who have a variety of issues with their cold, unloving parents (Marcia Gay Harden and William Hurt).  Almost immediately after graduating with straight As from Emory University, Chris (Hirsch) cuts up his credit cards, burns his Social Security card, donats all of his money to charity, and hits the road to live the life of anti-materialism.  Using the awesome moniker Alexander Supertramp, the extremely well-read Chris comes in contact with a variety of characters (played by the likes of Catherine Keener, Vince Vaughn, Kristen Stewart and a truly heartbreaking Hal Holbrook), but ultimately winds up in a very desolate area outside Fairbanks, Alaska, living off the land and occasionally having John Bender-like two-sided conversations between him and his invisible father.

Wild is based on a true story (and a book penned by Jon Krakauer), and the manner Penn chooses to tell it is a bit unusual, as well as a tad long.  He uses dual narratives (a pet peeve of mine, but it works fairly well in this instance), and introduces chapter titles nearly 30 minutes into the film.  At one point, Hirsch plays right to the camera.  But honestly, you'll be too wrapped up in the story to notice the inconsistencies.  Instead, what will stick with you is Penn marking the passage of time not via old school flying calendar pages, but by Chris being forced to notch new holes in his belt because of his dramatic weight loss from eating twigs and berries.  At first, Hirsch didn't really seem to be getting any thinner, but by the end -- let's just say it's an image that will stick with you for a while.

As most films directed by actors, the performances here are very strong.  Wild also features new songs from Eddie Vedder, and a scene of the killing and skinning of a moose that created a mini-stampede for the theatre doors.  So consider yourself warned if you're squeamish, or don't like Vedder.

On the Wings of Dreams - Don't think I've seen a film from Bangladesh since . . . well, since The Concert for Bangladesh.  And Dreams isn't going to make me super-eager to see another one right away.  The Golam Rabbanjy Biplob film is about an impoverished family living in a mud hut in a tiny village.  Patriarch Fazlu hawks hinky "magic" balms to support his wife and three children with enough rice to eke out an existence.  After a particularly good day at the office, Fazlu splurges on a brand new filthy pair of used pants for his rapidly-growing son.  When Fazlu takes the pants home for his wife to wash, she discovers four bills of foreign currency in one of the pockets.  Bills with a lot of zeroes on the end.

Since they're never even been to a bank, the family thinks they're rich, and begins setting into motion a plan to convert the currency into local funds.  But, as the saying goes, money can't buy happiness, and all manner of bad things start to happen.  Biplob makes a big mistake by letting the audience in on the Big Reveal way before his characters know anything about it, and that takes away nearly all of the meager emotional impact he would have otherwise earned.  This is a long 88 minute picture with a simple, rickety premise milked way beyond reason (almost like a Saturday Night Live skit that's turned into a feature film).