Throughout the night, eyes were locked on Tracyanne Campbell, and although she maintained an unyielding straight face the entire show, the moments she actually did smile sent a ripple through the crowd.

I’m happy to say that Deerhoof is getting the popular appreciation that they deserve. A band whose sum is exponentially greater than its parts, Deerhoof has been blowing me away for years, and while critics have adored them, they have often been unfairly categorized as too difficult for the casual listener.

There’s a scene in Michel Gondry’s new film, The Science of Sleep, in which Stephane (played by Gael García Bernal) makes clouds of cotton suspend in mid-air by finding the right chords on a broken piano, much to the delight of his new friend Stephanie (Charlotte Gainsbourg). It is a moment of fantasy, but it couldn’t be more real for the two characters sharing it.

Young Canadian actress Ellen Page seems to be everywhere as of late. She shocked audiences as a red-hooded teen vigilante in the April release Hard Candy, and last week she surfaced as mutant Kitty Pryde in X-Men: The Last Stand. In Mouth to Mouth, shot before both those films, Page plays Sherry, a teenage runaway who gets recruited by SPARK—Street People Armed with Radical Knowledge—a fictional communal organization that roves the streets of Europe in buses, seeking to resuscitate the lives of people living on the margins.

Australian director Cate Shortland’s feature-length debut Somersault is a treasure, one of those rare, intimate films that quietly begins to envelop you with its opening images and then lingers indefinitely after the theater lights have come up.

Annie Leibovitz’s cover photograph of Gretchen Mol for the September 1998 issue of Vanity Fair caused a minor stir when it hit the stands that fall. Not only did the form-hugging Alberta Ferretti dress worn by Mol reveal more than the typical Playboy cover, but the 25-year-old actress’s most prominent movie role to that date was as Michael Madsen’s girlfriend in Donnie Brasco (1997). So it was little surprise that the Vanity Fair cover prompted even avid moviegoers to ask, “Who’s Gretchen Mol?”

What happened to the concert film? For years, music-related films have been relegated to straight-to-DVD purgatory; denied the big-screen splendor that they rightfully deserve. Enter Coachella, the Woodstock for a new generation, helping to bring back the theatrical musical experience.

iyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse finds its roots in Japan’s ongoing problems with over-population and, using the Internet as a means, sets out to make simple but potent commentary on our perchance for seclusion and the quiet, desperate loneliness that can result.

In movies, when we are introduced to a couple that is enamored of each other, it’s often a safe bet that one of them will become the innocent victim of something dreadful. France’s sentimental Le Grand Role, despite its intriguing subtexts, is no exception to this pattern.