Great English-language introduction in David Fincher's screen adaptation of the first book from Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy. Although gritty, It's slightly more polished compared to Niels Oplev's Swedish film version. Here the opening credits pulse with a Goth-industrial animation sequence worthy of a horror film that sets a confusing expectation to the story, but Daniel Craig and Rooney Mara are remarkable.

Guns and family tensions don't often mix, and when they do, tragic consequences happen. A father's two sons at odds over upholding traditional cultural values on the night before a family hunt and social opportunities embracing urban adolescence pushes one son over the edge leading to the killing of his brother. Their father goes on a spiritual journey to make peace with the event. Great Danish-Greenland film debut.

Yellowknife filters Lynch's dark margins of desire (Lost Highway, Wild at Heart) with Monte Hellman and Chris Petit in a brew lingering with age. Less about the landscape of the North, it's a Canadian search for home in it against impenetrable shadows. On the road sex burns near this scrim for the twin male strippers and siblings looking for a new life. Can it contain the heat? Diva Patsy Gallant stars in rare film.

Iceland's wintry and snow-and-ice scraped setting is introduced to Fridrik Thor Fridriksson's viewers through the fresh eyes of a visitor in Cold Fever. Although it's not a tourist draw that beckons Hirata the film's central character to Reykjavik and points beyond. His parents died in an accident on a remote road where Hirata wishes to draw closure. Cold Fever had a limited fest run but no US distribution on DVD.

In Nuri Bilge Ceylan's remarkable somber film Uzak, Istanbul is a beacon attracting Yusuf whose recent layoff from a rural factory spurs him to seek work in the city and points beyond. Mahmut, his urban photographer cousin, puts him up in his apartment but the snowy Istanbul winter blanketing the city not only seems to freeze time but chills the weak emotional connection between them. A spring thaw seems indefinite.

Serving up a koltbord mix of grim Nordic fariy tales tossed with mockudrama and horror references (The Blair Witch Project, Mystery 6, et al),Troll Hunter unspools as a dramedy following student filmmakers who stumble into Hans an old salt who hunts for trolls to keep them out of the public eye. Fact is their camera person who never speaks and the script's one-note quality tires quickly. But Norway's setting shines.

Ambient minimalist musician Thomas Köner's experimental film NUUK is perhaps his strongest work associating visuals that seem to set with a deep freeze. Redolent of Warhol's early static-cam films, NUUK lingers above a snowy street in Greenland's largest city from a hotel room absorbing a glacial pace as dusk falls. A rocky cape is the focus of the film's second segment. The effect is like reversing climate change.

Warsaw residents seemingly losing grasp of their moral compass or are struggling to find it populate Krzysztof Kieslowski's landmark film Dekalog. At its center, the characters who live in and around a concrete flat block during a bitter winter reveal urban dramas inspired from the Ten Commandments. Rather than offering a black and white view, Kieslowski prefers to depict their human folly set against a nuanced gray.

As if the hot water tap turns a bit cooler, the stormy relationship between Ho Po-Wing (Leslie Cheung) and Lai Yiu-fai (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) sparks hot and cold in this bedroom drama set in a less-than-sunny and perpetually nocturnal Buenos Aires. Wong Kar-Wai's film about love on the edge near the world's edge has its cabin-fever lovers nearly shout "I can't quit you!" Christopher Doyle lenses its searing visuals.

Martin Donovan's Apartment Zero is a Hitchcock-worthy political thriller nicely shot on location in Buenos Aires in the 1980s, a period when Argentina's economy lagged and people mysteriously disappeared. Colin Firth's character Adrian, a cinema owner in need of a roommate to save money, turns to Hart Bochner's Jack Carney whose seductive good looks belies his secret past and present. Excellent cast in taut drama.

Taqwacore: The Birth of Punk Islam reveals two intersecting narratives about spirtual awakening. Michael Muhammad Knight, a Pentecostal preacher's son, converts to Islam at 15 in New York. After meeting his father, a self-identified white supremacist, Knight moves to Islamabad, Pakistan, for immersive Islamic study. His conversion inspires him to write The Taqwacores a book that attracts Muslim youth to punk culture.

Against political adversity and beset with corruption allegations, the late Pakistani President Benazir Bhutto's rise to power to elevate standards for women, the poor and breathe life into a national democracy in a country that would rather resist it is a tall order for anyone with political ambitions. Pakistan's tumultuous modern history is explored in context of Bhutto's emergent rise and subsequent assassination.

Ralph Waldo Emerson's oft-quoted maxim "Life is a journey, not a destination" aptly describes this film about a father's wish to make the hajj to Mecca by car from southern France. This simple story amplifies the differences between a traditional Muslim father with his younger restless son on a road trip wonderfully shot on location across Mediterranean Europe towards Saudi Araba. En route there's closure at the end.

Édgar Ramírez gives a tour de force performance as the young Ilich Ramírez Sanchez in Olivier Assayas biopic capturing Seventies swagger and style. Carlos is an imaginative retelling of events that propelled Sanchez to an international stage of intrigue and mystery from his reign of terror and evasive outlaw status. Although Assayas embellishes a romantic profile to Carlos, his narrative remains freshly energetic.

Ari Folman's 2009 Academy Award-winning animated feature Waltz With Bashir captures his own personal narrative reconstructing his experience in the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Visually rendered in monochromatic and amber-splashed hues, this powerful animated graphic novel style brings a gritty-edged vision spiked with magic realism and a pulsing score to the screen. This antiwar portrait is an evocative memoir.

Tunisia's post-Arab Spring forward into a world of ideas and differences have been tested with Nessma TV's recent broadcast of Marjane Satrapi's acclaimed animated adaptation of her autobiographical graphic novel series. Persepolis which won the 2007 Cannes Jury Prize contains an imaginary depiction of a deity a young Marjane talks to which sparked violent protests among Islamic conservatives. Recommended viewing.

They say that the first time is always the best, and that's definitely true for Gus Van Sant's cinematic feature film debut. His gritty adaptation of Walt Curtis's semi-autobiographical novel "Mala Noche" captures the nicotine-stained edges and rain-soaked pavement of Portland's Skidmore / Old Town with an unlikely amor fou between a grocery clerk and the young Latino freight-hopping drfiters new to town. Excellent.

If the Arab Spring needed a soundtrack to amplify the voices of a generation, the Iraqi metal band Acrassicauda could bring the playlist. No contemporary band, metal or otherwise, gets as hardcore as the young guys in Baghdad's only metal band who played a live set to their fans at Al-Fanar Hotel in 2005. Filmmakers Suroosh Alvi and Eddy Moretti follow the band in Iraq, their journey to Syria and a legacy in sound.

All in a day's work. Life inside one of Angeles City's crumbling and porous movie houses that used to entertain US army and navy men from the now-closed Clark Air Base serves as a metaphor for institutional corruption that exacts a burden on contemporary urban Filipino society. How does one family keep their house in order? Challenges are plenty for the Pinedas whose adult theater offers little privacy and secrets.

A boat coursing near the Laotian border along the Mekong River serves as a metaphor for a life's journey in Luminous People. A family pays respects to the memory of a man's father who appears in his dreams. This short film captures subtle impressions from the spray of water, the boat's staccato engine noise, and arms scattering petals. On the other side it's peaceful; they turn off the lights at night, one man says.

Tropical Malady is one of the best films from the past decade, and no wonder, Apichatpong Weerasethakul's film won the 2004 Cannes Jury Prize. This ghost story, unlike many Thai films, defies the genre with its late summer palette brushed with cinema verite, magical realism, mystery, and a quiet desire lingering in the afternoon heat. A soldier's seduction of a young man eerily leads him on an obsessive hunt.

Yellowknife by Rodrigue Jean is a classic Canadian noir that filters the dark margins of desire and obsession from David Lynch's work (Lost Highway, Wild at Heart) with Monte Hellman and Chris Petit into a distilled brew that lingers with age. It's a film that's less about the landscape of the North but more about the Canadian search for home in it in the shadows of impenetrable forest and remoteness. Sexuality burns against this scrim -- between the characters including a pair of male stripping twins and the brother and sister looking for a new life -- but can it contain the heat? A remarkable and rarely seen work that also features New Brunswick's diva Patsy Gallant as a soulful torch nightclub singer.

The analog world of a family's shared memory offers clues to 18-year-old Tan Xiang En's father's mysterious past, but piecing it all togther is threatened to fade. His grandparents try to help him understand who his father was as a youth leader in Singapore's student protests in the Fifties. His grandmother, however, ebbs into dementia and his grandfather dies. On the cusp of entering military service, En's search for identity is his way to bring closure to his past.

The Oath, directed by Laura Poitras, is a compelling portrait of two men linked to each other and formerly to Osama bin Laden. Guantánamo prisoner Salim Hamdan's dramatic legal story as bin Laden's personal driver is paired with Abu Jandal's who resides in Sana'a and drives a taxi but was once bin Laden's bodyguard. Jandal draws perspective on his year living in Afghanistan and advises young men to take another path.

"Some fucking callers call up, 'Are you an answering machine?'" one Mumbai call center worker says during a break. Another explains that after working all night "you're back in India." Ashim Ahluwalia's brilliant sophisticated doc offers an immersive look behind the scrim of globalization at call agents on and off their jobs and how phone support impacts culture, language and identity. A haunting and sobering film.

Could a French summer retreat inspire a sultry romantic murder story? Charlotte Rampling wonderfully plays the cool dim-eyed crime writer Sarah Morton whose publisher offers her the chance to stay at his rural villa in Luberon's idyllic countryside to inspire her next book. Tensions frustrate Sarah's focus when the publisher's daughter Julie arrives and attracts a stormy sexual mystery around her. One of Ozon's best.

What's it like to have an evil twin? Just ask Latif Yahia. In the early 90s during the height of Pres. Hussein's rule over Iraq, his eldest son Uday considers Latif, a childhood classmate, to extinguish his identity to become his double. Hussein's free-wheeling son can't get enough sex, drink, and money to satisfy his violent lust and narcissism while Baghdad's burning. Dominic Cooper expertly pulls off both roles.

If one film could dramatize this year's Arab Spring revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, and around North Africa and the Gulf in a story about youth, democracy and offering a voice of freedom, Microphone is it. Directed by Ahmad Adballa, this allegorical narrative about Alexandria artists and musicians aspiring to stage a small performance is caught up in a struggle to find a venue for it in a cri de coeur from Egypt's youth.

Kolkata simmers with 15 million people and thousands of unsolved crimes. In this sprawling city, Rajesh Ji's Always Detective Agency is called upon to smash commercial counterfeit rings, expose adulterous affairs and solve murders. Screened at Seattle's SIFF 2011, it's part biopic profiling Rajesh and his professional and family life, and part Bollywood exposing his passion to dance in competition with his team.

Andrew Haigh's charming narrative about the young, single and conservatively romantic Russell who stumbles into Glen at a Notttingham gay bar on a late Friday night is an enjoyable story about friendship, sex and the energy of social connections. He is the kind of tidy youth who compartmentalizes his personal life from his buddies like most people, but his brief encounter with Glen is about change that. Nicely done.