Charlotte Rampling

The poignant comedy "Goodbye Lenin!" scored a hometown triumph at the 16th European Film Awards in Berlin, winning the prizes for best film, best actor (Daniel Bruhl) and best screenwriter (Bernd Lichtenberg). The Wolfgang Becker film deals with the effects of the fall of communism on a Berlin family. Britain's Charlotte Rampling won best actress for her performance in "Swimming Pool."

Jacques-Yves Cousteau is a man of works, but he is also a man. In the strangely pallid TBS tribute to the oceanographer-filmmaker, "Jacques-Yves Cousteau: My First 85 Years," the works are all on display. The man remains opaque. Did you know, for instance, that one of Cousteau's heroes is the great British mind Bertrand Russell? Or that his filmmaking philosophy is that a film record has a chance to outlive the filmmaker, and thus cheat death?

Germany's blockbuster hit "Good Bye, Lenin!" will lead the field at the European Film Awards competition Saturday with five nominations, while the British films "Dirty Pretty Things" and "Dogville" have four nominations each. Forty-three European films out of 360 submitted for the 16th annual awards presented by the European Film Academy are in the running for the prizes that are sometimes called the "European Oscars."

Barry C. Reed, 75, the trial lawyer who drew on his courtroom experience to write "The Verdict" and several other legal thrillers, died Friday at a hospital in Norwood, Mass. The story of a down-and-out lawyer who wins justice for the family of a seriously disabled girl, "The Verdict" was made into a 1982 film starring Paul Newman, James Mason and Charlotte Rampling. It was nominated for five Academy Awards. Reed's other books included "The Choice," "The Indictment" and "The Deception."

Hans Petter Moland's compelling "Aberdeen" stars Lena Headey as an ambitious young attorney whose life unexpectedly starts unraveling at the very moment she has received an important promotion from her large London firm. Her mother, Helen (Charlotte Rampling), who lives in Aberdeen, Scotland, and to whom Kaisa is not close, has asked her to travel to Norway and bring back her father, Tomas (Stellan Skarsgard).

For a nation bewitched by period dramas in which men wear hats and sip whiskey while making eyes at crimson-lipped women who smoke an endless succession of unfiltered cigarettes, the Sundance Channel miniseries "Restless" offers all that and more. Adapted by William Boyd from his novel of the same name, the miniseries, which premieres Friday, centers on a secret British intelligence agency attempting to draw the reluctant United States into World War II. Which means in addition to the fabulous clothes, there's a fabulous British cast, not to mention the endlessly fascinating world of espionage and a bit of revelatory World War II history.

Art-house audiences by now are surely accustomed to the ways certain filmmakers have scraped away at bourgeois existence to expose the faulty wiring of destructive impulses underneath. That's why the names Bunuel, Kubrick, Lynch, Polanski and even "gadget-overload" comic genius Jacques Tati may all too easily come to mind over the course of Dominik Moll's brooding puzzler "Lemming."