Daniel Handler

Ten years in the making, Strange Powers is an intimate documentary portrait of songwriter Stephin Merritt and his band the Magnetic Fields. With his unique gift for memorable melodies, lovelorn lyrics and wry musical stylings that blend classic Tin Pan Alley with modern sounds, Stephin Merritt has distinguished himself as one of contemporary pop's most beloved and influential artists.

Pat Spurgeon is a professional musician whose dreams of being in a successful rock 'n' roll band have come true. But just as his band, Rogue Wave, starts to take off, his kidney starts to fail. "D tour" chronicles the life of a musician with "no back-up plan" as he's faced with daily dialysis, a grueling tour, and a search for a new kidney.

The movie captures the responses of 31 authors, musicians, filmmakers and dancers to Olivier Messiaen's monumental organ work "Apparition of the Eternal Church." Listening to the 10-minute piece through headphones, the documentary subjects-most of whom are outsiders to the church and do not know what they're hearing-put Messiaen's project to the test: Is it possible to portray, through time-bound, invisible sound, the spiritual, the architectural, the eternal? The result is a collective interpretation improvising its way through an aesthetic landscape defined by violent contradictions. Resolution abuts eternity, eroticism asceticism, spiritual ecstasy physical torture. Together, the music and its interpreters conjure something like what William Blake famously called the marriage of heaven and hell.

Three wealthy children's parents are killed in a fire. When they are sent to a distant relative, they find out that he is plotting to kill them and seize their fortune.

"Rigoletto" retold at Christmas time in Manhattan's corporate world. Rick, an executive at Image, is a jerk to a woman applying for a job. That evening, he's out for drinks with his much younger boss, Duke, and the same women is their waitress. Rick's continued rudeness leads to her getting fired. She puts a curse on him. A potential rift with Duke quickly surfaces; Rick is approached by the hail-

When a marriage of convenience becomes the real thing, Joe moves his pregnant French wife to a tenement building on New York's Lower East Side. The street is like a war zone with none of the nostalgic appeal that Joe remembers from tales of his immigrant grandparents arriving in the same neighborhood with a new life. This is the urban frontier filled with comic mixture of gentrifies, homeboys, dealers and local residents simply bent on staying a float