If this year's enormous success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon indicates Hong Kong's particular school of cinema has finally broken into the American film market, we would do well to recognize that not all movies from that former island protectorate involve aerial acrobatics. Wong Kar-wai's elegant In the Mood for Love, released on a more limited scale in the U.S. but almost concurrently as Ang Lee's much-feted martial arts epic, demonstrates Asian filmmakers have equally mastered the art of the quiet moment. In fact, it's arguable that In the Mood is superior to its more spectacular cousin, despite being ignored by the Oscars®. It's like when Titanic was pitted against As Good As It Gets: two equally outstanding creations, playing on entirely opposite strengths, but the one on a larger scale inevitably garners more attention.

Whereas we may struggle to accurately summarize the ornate plot of Crouching Tiger, it proves easier to explain what happens in In The Mood for Love: nothing much. Hollywood would clearly be stymied if it attempted a remake, for despite the title's suggestion of romance, when our two protagonists discover both that their respective spouses are having an affair with each other and their feelings are pressing them to do the same, they still resolve never to act on it. A U.S. production could never maintain that kind of narrative tension without demanding some sort of erotic release; Wong Kar-wai's stroke of genius is in relishing each individual moment visually, such that we never yearn for resolution. Watching the ravishingly beautiful Maggie Cheung walk down an alleyway in slow motion, in a seemingly endless series of identically-cut dresses, that is enough for us; or lapping up the film's lush colors and haunting soundtrack, or even just enjoying the sight of a cigarette's smoky tendrils curl around an overhead light - the stasis proves resplendent, the unrealized yearning aching in all the good ways. What the film captures in scene after scene is the very mood of burgeoning love, the sensual rapture that the debased plot device of a sex scene never adequately communicates anymore. It's all largely gratuitous and wholeheartedly welcome, and it probably won't earn In the Mood for Love any noticeable revenue at all.

Outside of Michigan, or maybe the north central states, it's hard to imagine Escanaba in da Moonglight making a red cent as well. The notion of "regional filmmaking" has found little currency anywhere besides India these days, since the exigencies of film production require a wide audience in order to break even on expenses. Perhaps non-Michiganders will enjoy Jeff Daniels' labor of love about "the buckless Yooper" as a cultural curiosity, especially its characters' particular dialect as illustrated in the title, but a film still celebrating recreational hunting as a ritual of manhood might feel more than a little outmoded to urban types. Escanaba follows Daniels' Reuben at the beginning of yet another hunting season ("like Christmas with guns"), holed up in the family cabin in Michigan's upper peninsula with various relations and friends, facing a spot in the record books as the oldest local never to bag his own deer if his shooting skills don't improve quickly. Reuben's become a legend in his hometown of Escanaba, feared by all to carry a curse, and he resolves this season to buck all conventions (whiskey, no pasties, plenty of Native American magicks) and reverse his luck.

The forest clearly has other plans for Reuben, though, and what follows has its genuinely creepy moments as they all discover themselves pursued by a sinister woodland spirit of some sort, but Escanaba never fails to return to comic relief and keep the stakes relatively light. Though the ending comes across as more than a little obtuse, we're ultimately handed an affirmation of a long-forgotten indigenous appreciation of nature and our dependence on it. Based on Daniels' own original play, its theatrical roots ensure there's plenty of talk, but he succeeds in sprinkling the proceedings with some surprising special effects that just might find the film a cult following in later years. (That and the infamous fart scene.) Whether or not Reuben gets his buck is for you to find out, but you can be sure that if he does, the popular disdain of killing animals for sport guarantees his perforated prey won't get a second of camera time.

Back in the day, used to be there were two kinds of kids: those who excelled in school, and those who did drugs. Nowadays our youngsters are as proficient at multitasking as their parents, and are succeeding at juggling both. Traffic is the first film to come along in quite a while daring to illustrate just how triumphant the drug war has been for the past couple decades, which is to say not at all. Drugs have penetrated the richest of homes and the bloodstreams of our most upstanding teens, its revenues corrupting countless governments, all of which Traffic shows unflinchingly; what surprises is how the film uniquely refuses to point fingers or offer the usual easy solutions. For once we don't get unconvincing lip service a la "Just Say No," or alienating conservative viewers by demanding drugs simply be decriminalized. Director Stephen Soderbergh merely shows us various aspects of the drug trade in North America, provides mouthpieces for the several schools of thought concerning the issue, and sends you on your way.

But not quite: there is one moral to the three interlocking stories. White House drug czar Michael Douglas examining public drug policy while oblivious to his adolescent daughter's slip into addiction, Benicio del Toro's Mexican cop continuing to uphold the law even as he witnesses everyone around him bought by the drug cartels, Catherine Zeta-Jones aggressively assuming her incarcerated husband's high-level distribution network to preserve the level of comfort she's grown accustomed to, and lobbying to assassinate the primary witness in her spouse's trial; everything the characters ultimately do they do for the sake of their families, which, everyone will agree, would not be in the shape they're in today if parents prioritized a little better. Who are the good guys and the bad guys becomes irrelevant before Traffic's uncynical reminder of what should truly matter, and your take on federal drug law is as moot as mine if we'd just listen to our loved ones once in a while. "I don't know how you wage war on your own family," Michael Douglas admits as he finally realizes he can't take care of an entire nation if he can't save his own daughter from drugs. Traffic's commitment to realism extends all the way to its final scene, resigned that the war will probably never end in this country; but when the war claims more victims than the drugs themselves, perhaps it's time we remembered who all the trouble's for.