My personal pick is the powerful, haunting There Will Be Blood, but there are other intriguing titles to explore. Manda Bala (Send a Bullet) won the inaugural Cinema Eye Award for Best Feature; according to one synopsis, the documentary examines the "cycles of violence that plague Brazil's upper and lower economic classes in fits of rampant corruption and violent kidnappings." The DVD from City Lights includes an audio commentary by the director and producers, as well as several additional scenes.

Linda Hattendorf first met the subject of her documentary, The Cats of Mirikitani, on the streets of New York. He was homeless; she bought one of his drawings. "Thus began a strange, intimate relationship," Martha Fischer wrote in her review. She called the doc "a treasure of personal filmmaking, created on a shoe-string budget and completely devoid of pretensions or aspirations beyond simple, intimate, storytelling." The DVD from Arts Alliance America includes 20 minutes of bonus footage, deleted scenes and Mirikitani art gallery images.

In a classic case of doc vs. doc, nature vs. nurture, environmental doc The 11th Hour battled video gaming doc The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters for top honors among limited engagement earners this past weekend -- and the environment won, according to Leonard Klady of Movie City News. Klady's estimates put The 11th Hour in first place with a per-screen average of $14,700 at four locations for an estimated total of $58,800 for distributor Warner Independent. Cinematical's Ryan Stewart felt it had little new information to offer but "overall, The 11th Hour does a serviceable job of preaching to the environmental choir." Rotten Tomatoes rates reviews as being 79% positive.

Trailing not far behind was The King of Kong (I really don't like that needless titular verbiage). Scott Weinberg saw it at SXSW and gave it high marks; I saw it a couple of weeks later at AFI Dallas and loved it. For my money -- or quarters, if you insist -- it's one of the best movies of the year because of its keen sense of humanity; the snappy pace and non-condescending sense of humor helps too. Of the 36 reviews accumulated so far at Rotten Tomatoes, only one has been negative, giving it a 97% positive rating. The King of Kong averaged $10,300 per screen at five theaters in New York, Los Angeles, Seattle and Austin; distributor Picturehouse will expand it to more cities in the coming weeks.

Nature doc Arctic Tale, which Paramount Vantage pitched to family audiences, lured very few paying customers. Klady estimated a per-screen average of just $830 during a weekend in which the picture was expanded to 227 theaters. Our own Jette Kernion was none too impressed, noting: "I think it would play just as well on a television, perhaps on DVD if your family didn't want to sit through 90 minutes of nature film all at once." That seems to be what most parents have decided to do -- wait for the DVD.

Having long ago thrown in with a wussy posse of environmentalists, Leonardo DiCaprio has now produced something from that commitment -- a 90 minute polemic called The 11th Hour that seeks to summarize and draw awareness to the poor health of planet Earth in general. There's hardly any new information on offer in the film, even for those with only a loose understanding of the major talking points of the environmental movement, but as a classroom teaching tool, it could serve a useful purpose. It breezes from topic to topic with great alacrity, and the bases covered include global warming, overpopulation, soil erosion and forest depletion, the political landscape vis a vie environmentalism, and the emergence and practicability of green technology. There's an abundance of talking heads in the film, and they're an eclectic bunch, ranging from the authors of scary-sounding books like The Collapse of Complex Societies, to professional climatologists and environmental consultants, to he-of-the-authoritative-sounding-voicebox Stephen Hawking, to a Native American gentlemen who represents something called the Turtle Clan, to Leo himself.

One of the most interesting points argued throughout the film is that we live during a fundamentally unnatural juncture in Earth's history, with humans living very successfully off of the "ancient sunlight" stored in non-regenerative fossil fuels, instead of basing our life cycles on the natural dawn-to-dusk cycle of daily sunlight. Having found a way to live and produce food on our own schedules instead of nature's, we've exploded our numbers beyond what the Earth can bear. There are now twice as many people as there were when Kennedy was president, and if it were not for the technological advancements of the Industrial Revolution, the planet could not sustain more than one billion. The cumulative effect of all that human activity is a terribly negative one for Earth's health, the film argues, and the planet will eventually try to reject us, like a virus. A grim showdown between us and mother nature is postulated, and the film even notes that climatologists and economists have already begun crunching numbers to see what it will cost to "replace nature."

When movies start to matter beyond entertainment value, box office receipts and popcorn sales, is that a sign that the end of the world is nigh? We've been writing a lot lately about Michael Moore and the impact of his latest film, SICKO, Leonardo DiCaprio, who's been relentlessly promoting his environmental film, The 11th Hour. Last year, Al Gore generated a big splash (and cries of "Gore in 2008!") with his end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it slide show turned Oscar-winning film, An Inconvenient Truth, which I first wrote about at Sundance in 2006, when Gore shocked me by showing up for the Q&A with a passion I'd never seen in the man before. Amy Berg's wrenching Deliver Us from Evil, which played last year at Toronto, brought the issue of the alleged cover-up of decades of sexual abuse committed by priest Oliver O'Grady by the Catholic Church to the forefront. Suddenly, it seems, documentary filmmaking isn't just about informing -- it's about affecting real social change.

Tooling around the internet this morning, a number of movie posters from the Cannes Film Festival have somehow found a way invade my computer screen; one of which just happened to be the production poster for Charlie Kaufman's (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York. Philip Seymour Hoffman stars as a theater director who, while attempting to create a life-size replica of New York inside a warehouse for a new play, struggles to maintain the several different relationships he has with those of the opposite sex. ( I imagine the poster should make a lot more sense to people now.) Of course, since it's also written by Kaufman, look for lots of weird things to happen along the way. Catherine Keener, Michelle Williams, Hope Davis and Tilda Swinton also star.

Apart from Synecdoche, New York, we also have posters from flicks like Paranoid Park (the new Gus Van Sant flick), Leo DiCaprio's The 11th Hour (in which he attempts to be as cool as Al Gore), Tenderness (featuring Russell Crowe sporting a wicked mustache) and a new Jessica Simpson film called Major Movie Star (which in and of itself is a major contradiction). She wears an army-style bikini, and I imagine the film will have her joining the military as a dumb blonde -- gee, keep them original ideas coming boys. I don't get it, is it Simpson's goal to only star in films that are either inspired by or based on old 80s flicks and 70s TV shows?