NOTRE MUSIQUE
“Why don’t humanitarians start revolutions?” Jean-Luc Godard is asked early in the “Purgatory” section of this quietly dazzling film. Because starting revolutions isn’t a humanitarian thing to do, he replies ruefully, a rumpled éminence grise. “Humanitarians do things like build libraries.” A little later on, some of the film’s cast visits a library in Sarajevo—one that’s been bombed into a husk. Such is the tragically ironic wisdom of onetime provocateur Godard, here essaying a Divine Comedy–structured dissertation on war and war imagery that’s packed with insight and heartbreak.

GOODBYE DRAGON INN
Inside a cavernous, dank (you can practically smell the wet floors), run-down Taiwan movie theater on an impossibly rainy night, the ‘60s martial-arts film Dragon Inn is playing. Inexplicably, a couple of its cast members are in the house. A young Japanese man wanders desultorily around the aisles and the rest room. A possible gay hookup is defused, hilariously. The slightly lame ticket-booth girl brings a sticky bun to the projection booth. Not much else “happens” in this remarkable picture, written and directed by Tsai Ming-liang. But it casts such a peculiar spell that I believe this will be one of the handful of films I’m going to rescreen once a year for the rest of my life.

THE TIME OF THE WOLF
Austrian auteur Michael Haneke follows up his often cauterizing but ultimately dubious The Piano Teacher with an extremely sure-footed and utterly convincing end-of-the-world movie. Isabelle Huppert plays a mom who shepherds her kids through a rural France that’s become a survivalist nightmare in the aftermath of apocalyptic events that are never spelled out. Offering neither a big bang nor a defeatist whimper, the movie feels terribly right throughout and has an ending that leaves one grappling with some very unexpected feelings.

THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU
A movie that’s a celebration of both the sea and a certain brand of imaginative exuberance, Aquatic sees director Wes Anderson testing the limits of what he can say about the human condition while exercising an almost baroque sense of visual and aural elaboration. Bill Murray, playing a character that seems equal parts Jacques Cousteau and Rodney Dangerfield, doesn’t try to anchor this craft; he just floats on, as the ideal audience for this picture will.

AND THEN THERE WERE . . .

THE AVIATOR, Martin Scorsese’s vivid, compelling Howard Hughes biopic, a great American saga of adventure and madness; BEFORE SUNSET, with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy conducting a soul-searching conversation of the highest order; FINDING NEVERLAND, the enchanting story of the creation of Peter Pan, a tearjerker that earns its salt; DOGVILLE, Lars von Trier’s cruel, virtuosic allegory; the thrilling martial-arts epic HERO; the droll martial-arts almost-burlesque ZAITOCHI; TOM DOWD AND THE LANGUAE OF MUSIC, an illuminating look at an unsung architect of sound; SPRING SUMMER, FALL WINTER . . . AND SPRING, Buddhism as you’ve never seen it before; THE CORPORATION, a maddening doc dissecting the titular entity; A VERY LONG ENGAGMENT, a very good follow-up to Amélie from its director and star
CODE 46, director Michael Winterbottom and writer Frank Cottrell Boyce’s intelligent, eccentric take on dystopian sci-fi; Bernardo Bertolucci’s movie-and-sex–crazy ’60s fantasia THE DREAMERS; KILL BILL—VOL. 2, featuring the best buried-alive sequence ever filmed