Whoever's in charge of distribution for Requiem for a Dream's haunting soundtrack needs to take a business class or two. There they might learn that key to selling your wares is actually putting them on the market. Not a single music store in Ann Arbor has ever seen a copy, and even CDnow.com lists it as backordered. Note to Requiem's marketing department: this is not the way to avoid artistic obscurity. (To be fair, I did find one available on Amazon.com, bless their corporate hearts.)

As should be evident from my consumer frustrations, it's the audio track of Requiem that, in the end, makes the biggest impression. Notwithstanding the spooky contributions of the Kronos Quartet to the film's atmosphere, director Darren Aranofsky was clearly intent on communicating the experience of the heroin connoisseur through numerous clever sonic innovations. Foremost among them, an oft-repeated sequence depicting the ritual of preparing their narcotic candy for consumption, from raw contraband to a happily dilated pupil, each second-long scene with its own unique sound. (This almost-musical riff often leads into another ritual, our protagonists listening to techno while on speed, and the beat from their perspective is more manic than the DJ ever intended.) Aranofsky even applies this trademark sound-to-every-image to the act of dealing on a Brighton Beach boardwalk, transforming an ordinary plot point into a rhythmic divertimento. (Most films of this length contain no more than 700 individual scenes; Requiem boasts over two thousand, each like one note of a musical composition.)

Requiem's largely subjective points of view, illustrating the capricious and oft-adulterated mental states of its characters, are communicated with equal wizardry by means of the camera, which also helps elevate a somewhat undistinguished story to an hypnotic display of sight and sound. Frequent use of a split screen (both via editing and camera placement), camera angles that never approach the conventional, and astonishing scenes where the camera somehow floats inches in front of characters as they walk or run, all contribute to an overarchingly paranoid experience. All scenes are effectively bled of color on top of it all, dominated by depressing fluorescent lighting; even Florida in daylight succeeds in looking drab in this movie. (Jarringly abrupt and loud intertitles, shouting the change of the seasons, finish off the unsettling effect, and guarantee you won't doze through this film for long.)

Documenting the decline and fall of three young heroin addicts (played by Jared Leto, Jennifer Connelly, and Marlon Wayans) who dream of easy street in the drug trade is only half the story of Requiem; the other half features a resurfaced Ellen Burstyn, who apparently chose to reappear in the big-screen spotlight with an unflatteringly realistic role I can't imagine anyone her age would touch. Paralleling the descent of her son (Leto) into drug-induced tragedy, Burstyn plays a lonely widow who inadvertently gets hooked on carelessly-prescribed diet pills which are little more than uppers and downers. In between convincingly delivering some of the most unexceptional dialogue, Burstyn suffers some very unpleasant hallucinations en route to a complete breakdown. It's one of the bravest performances by any actress in years, requiring more harsh close-ups than any major star would allow, and her humiliating collapse is painful to witness. Burstyn's Sara Goldfarb is the only element that saves Requiem from being a merely aesthetic experience; her courage humanizes the entire enterprise, and even without such light competition this year, should guarantee her an Oscar® nomination.

The film ends with depravity, detox, prison labor camps, amputation, electroshock, insanity, and death, offering the definitive alternative to the wholesome family fare out there during the holidays. As if treating the entire film as a musical endeavor, Aranofsky orchestrates the tempo of the story until we're rushed to a devastating climax both sadly avoidable and somehow inevitable. Were it not for the truckloads of virtuosity on both sides of the camera this would be pretty standard fare, little more than a cinematic attempt to scare straight anyone even contemplating recreational drug use. Thankfully we're given much more - an illustration of how easy it is to teeter on the brink of tragedy, how common it is to find escape from your problems until the mode of escape itself becomes the problem. Requiem stands as one of the more disconcerting films of the year, not least for the disturbing unavailability of its soundtrack. Get with it people!

After a trip like that, clearly what's needed is style without an ounce of substance. Thank God then for Charlie's Angels, which provides a shot in the arm of scopophilic narcotics in the way Hollywood does best: women kicking ass and looking fantastic the whole time. When movies are made of old TV shows, the hope is to capitalize on our nostalgia (retro being the dominant aesthetic these days) without diffusing the effect by trying too hard to fill in any gaps of reasoning in the original premise (which only succeeds in making the silliness more obvious). Charlie's Angels unexpectedly pulls off a plot with enough twists to fill out ninety-eight minutes, but the creators knew what mattered was providing enough excuses to put our heroines in as many different outfits as possible. Thank you, scriptwriters and costume designers.

This time the Angels find themselves trying to save the butt of Charlie himself, after a clever opening sequence that suggests this particular trio has already survived their own season of TV episodes in various settings (yet another excuse for costume changes!). The gals are initially sent to infiltrate a vaguely Cold War-esque corporation ("Red Star") to track down some pilfered voice identification software, giving them an opportunity to show off their scientific, gymnastic, espionage, and disguise skills to our increasing delight. Everything goes awry after that, and slowly our erstwhile crime-fighters piece together who the bad guys are ultimately targeting. You may be lost in the first half-hour amidst all their capers, but who cares? It's all so jet-settingly hip you only hope some of the glamour might rub off on you before it all ends.

Key to the film's appeal is inevitably the casting of its angelic leads, and here the film strikes gold. Drew Barrymore, as Dylan, is the rougher one, in the biz due to Charlie's much-needed role in her life as a father-figure, carefree with her men and supremely capable of kicking heinie. Lucy Liu is Alex, the culturally sophisticated and technologically adept one, torn over hiding her job from her boyfriend, trying not to poison everyone with her cooking, and supremely capable of kicking heinie. Cameron Diaz, playing Natalie, is the mildly geeky yet scientifically polymathic one, harboring dreams of one day being the life of the dance party, yearning for Mr. Right, and supremely capable of kicking heinie. As if that weren't enough, Bosley (Charlie's liaison to the Angels) is played by none other than Bill Murray, whose presence reminds us that the film knew where to squarely place its chips: this is foremost a comedy, and that the film never takes itself seriously is an absolute blessing.

The kung-fu in Charlie's Angels is sufficiently mind-boggling and comic-book-esque, not least when practiced by Crispin Glover (as the "Creepy Thin Man," a suitable arch-foe for the franchise), another welcome return to the silver screen. Dressed all in black and secreting borderline-psychotic menace every time he appears, he is nonetheless the character we identify with most, watching him grapple with our heroines and fetishistically smelling their hair. It's ravishing for Crispin, and for us, to see these ladies so capable and yet so stunning, busting heads while tied to a chair or flirting on their cell phone while dodging thrown axes, and if it requires placing them in constant danger to see their moxie at work, we're only more than willing to start a fight. Now, where are the action figures?

Which of course leads us to Iranian cinema. After two films with such deliberate strategies, it's refreshing to find one content with simply being. The Detroit Institute of the Arts found it in their hearts to screen for one night only Et La Vie Continue (And Life Goes On, also known as Life, and Nothing More), which was a critical smash while I was studying in Paris half a decade ago, and only now found limited theatrical distribution in the United States. Filmed in the aftermath of the 1990 earthquake in northern Iran, it's hard to tell what scenes are staged and which are recordings of actual rescue efforts, which lends an air of unease to those watching: are we party to the exploitation of those victimized by catastrophe? And yet, the film's blurring of narrative fiction and documentary is probably perfectly suited to the medium, one which often claims to a higher degree of reality by photographing the material world. (In a sense, all films are documentaries, even the fictional ones documenting performances by actors that really took place.) Both approaches have a story to tell, and La Vie's is poetically simple, and a secret from no one, as it's summed up in the title.

La Vie cannot be understood apart from its status as a film, in actuality, as it involves a filmmaker driving through the backroads of devastated northern Iran with his son to investigate the fates of the boys who starred in his last film, all of which lived in that now-razed region. (The incident re-creates director Abbas Kiarostami's identical search for the young stars of his previous Where Is The Friend's Home?, also well-received among the French.) Though the characters in this film are portrayed by actors, the devastation he encounters along the way could not possibly have been choreographed, and his quest becomes secondary to the sights along the way. The moral is twofold: how unexpectedly green and beautiful Iran is (in contrast to its more negative depiction in the Western media as harsh and dry), and how well the locals are coping with their massive tragedy. Nature's beauty persists despite the shifting of tectonic plates, as does the human will to live after relatives are chewed up between those plates.

The director surveys various upended sites en route to a town called Koker, interviews the locals and marvels quietly at their nonchalantly practical approach to their circumstances just days after the disaster. "Do your homework," says one mother to her remaining son, while a newlywed neighbor waters the flowers in her newly-appropriated residence, both activities you'd assume would be farthest from anyone's minds. Which of those subjects were scripted remains a mystery, but at least one elderly gentleman refers repeatedly to the house he's been asked to pretend he lives in for the purposes of the film, a self-referential moment that proves more humorous than jarring: if he doesn't have a problem doing such relatively frivolous work in the aftermath of an earthquake, why should we? In between encounters, the camera happens upon various scenes of inadvertent beauty amidst chaos, showing that when you frame most anything, it can be transformed into art. This becomes La Vie's redemptive achievement, declaring such an unlikely subject fit for aesthetic attention.

The effect is so patently unmelodramatic, and surprisingly subtle in its emotional trajectory from deep concern to casual celebration. Even when living in tents and suddenly bereft of siblings, children speak animatedly of the pending World Cup match, adults polish their shoes as though they won't have to once again hike several miles for water, and perfect strangers help the director push his tiny car up a hill even after he's refused to give them a lift. La Vie is a lyrical triumph clearly deserving of a wider audience, light enough to let you wonder if the Persian script wiped on a dirty van in a traffic jam is saying "Wash Me." Even with the body count thousands of times higher than in Requiem or Angels, such frivolity never seems inappropriate.