Mathieu Amalric

In the latest James Bond thriller, "Quantum of Solace," opening today, Agent 007 is pitted against a most unusual adversary. Just don't tell French actor Mathieu Amalric ("The Diving Bell and the Butterfly") that his character is the bad guy. "Dominic Greene is a great guy," enthused the 43-year-old Amalric, over the phone from London before the film's premiere. "He has a big concern for environmental issues. He wants to help poor people to find their land again. He doesn't understand why Bond is looking for him!"

Seasonal family gatherings are a prime cinematic arena for dramatic dysfunction. There's nothing like a holiday reunion, it seems, to get a fractious clan in the mood for bad behavior and heartwarming catharsis. On paper, Arnaud Desplechin's "A Christmas Tale" (2008) -- in which an extended middle-class French family comes together for a round robin of brusque confessions, drunken accusations and general acting out -- would seem to offer more of the same. But in fact -- and this is key, since the gifted Desplechin is nothing if not a maximalist -- it offers much, much more.

Seasonal family gatherings are a prime cinematic arena for dramatic dysfunction. There's nothing like a holiday reunion, it seems, to get a fractious clan in the mood for bad behavior and heartwarming catharsis. On paper, Arnaud Desplechin's "A Christmas Tale" (2008) -- in which an extended middle-class French family comes together for a round robin of brusque confessions, drunken accusations and general acting out -- would seem to offer more of the same. But in fact -- and this is key, since the gifted Desplechin is nothing if not a maximalist -- it offers much, much more.

In the latest James Bond thriller, "Quantum of Solace," opening today, Agent 007 is pitted against a most unusual adversary. Just don't tell French actor Mathieu Amalric ("The Diving Bell and the Butterfly") that his character is the bad guy. "Dominic Greene is a great guy," enthused the 43-year-old Amalric, over the phone from London before the film's premiere. "He has a big concern for environmental issues. He wants to help poor people to find their land again. He doesn't understand why Bond is looking for him!"

The holidays, no surprise, always bring forth a surge of holiday-themed movies, but there has never been one quite like this. I know, nothing can sound more familiar, or more banal, than the subject of this film by French director Arnaud Desplechin, yet nothing could be more energizing, more captivating, more pure pleasure on screen.

The last thing you expect from a movie about a man who can't move any part of his body save for his left eyelid is for it to be expansive, gorgeous and uplifting, but that's exactly what Julian Schnabel's remarkable "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" turns out to be.

The Cannes Film Festival jury defied the oddsmakers on Sunday night, voting to give Apichatpong Weerasethakul's "Uncle Boonmee Recalls His Past Lives" its top prize of the Palme d'Or. A supernatural-laden drama about a dying man who takes a mystical journey, the film had won the hearts of many critics anf festival-goers when it screened last week, but most experts believed the prize would go to one of a group of Cannes veterans, including Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu, Abbas Kiarostami and Mike Leigh, all of whom had well-received films.

Don't be taken in by the title of the glum French film "Diary of a Seducer." There's no ooh-la-la here but instead a solemn treatise on the psychology of love and desire inspired by existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard's essay of the same name. It's writer-director Daniele Dubroux's notion that the essay actually does possess darkly magical powers for anyone who reads it.

SERIES Ghost Whisperer: After three teenagers wind up in danger during what started out as a fun night, a boy's ghost leads Melinda (Jennifer Love Hewitt) to an unsolved kidnapping in this new episode (8 p.m. CBS). Friday Night Lights: As Season 4 gets under way, Coach Taylor (Kyle Chandler) has difficulty uniting his new team, the East Dillon Lions, and Matt (Zach Gilford) lives as a townie for the first time, while Tim (Taylor Kitsch) finds his calling in the season premiere (8 p.m. NBC)

That Nazi evil was so pervasive and widespread has yielded, over the decades, a steady stream of splendid films illuminating the myriad aspects of the Holocaust and, in turn, the equally myriad facets of human nature. Adapted by the veteran French director Claude Miller from Philippe Grimbert's autobiographical novel, "A Secret" is one of the finest. A complex, subtle telling of how a French Jewish teenager, Francois (Quentin Dubuis), in 1955 learns how his parents, Hannah (Ludivine Sagnier)

"Late August, Early September" is involving and intimate as only other people's lives deftly observed can be. An insightful film that takes us on a nuanced emotional journey with a group of friends trying to make sense of the romantic choices they've made, it has the sympathy and psychological acuity we've come to recognize as the hallmark of French cinema at its best.

"Alice and Martin" is another of director Andre Techine's quietly shattering depth charges probing complex relationships within families and between friends and lovers. It continues a remarkable Techine cycle that includes "Wild Reeds" and "Ma Saison Preferee." Boldly structured, intensely focused and briskly paced, "Alice and Martin" has a tremendous emotional density that places the utmost demands upon its actors--and asks a lot of audiences, too.