The documentary opens with compelling footage: Right-wing activist Anita Bryant is talking about her efforts to condemn homosexuality in appearances around the United States. The lady with the bubble hairdo and the finishing-school diction talks about hatred and righteousness, and the abomination that is homosexuality.

While pop culture's history on the go so often brushes away with a graceless gesture an art life's layers of mystery, the realm of creative nonfiction somewhat revives that glamour, weaving together experience and memory in such a way that even small moments are as beautiful as the big pictures they create. With the precision and patience of a historian, veteran entertainment journalist Mark Harris pens Pictures At A Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, his recently released page-turning study of the 1967 Oscar Best Picture race, in a language crisp, at turns hysterical and at others heartbreaking. It's as if Harris conjures with the beauty, humor and depth of his detail the spirit not only of the films he studies but of that whole idealistic, later downtrodden era just learning to become itself.

Set in 1991 Estonia, a country newly celebrating its independence from the Soviet block, Ilkka Jarvilaturi's City Unplugged opens as the national treasury, a sum of $970 million in gold, returns home to capital city Tallinn from safekeeping in a Parisian bank. A story immediately perfect for a heist set-up, City Unplugged revels in criminal plans gone absurdly awry, smart social commentary on the communist to capitalist transition and a love story worth its weight in fable. Shot on both black-and-white and color stocks, it's a film visually chronicling both memory and progress, its story a joyous glimpse of what's been and what will be in a country now illuminated with change.

Taking an old Shakespearean yarn and weaving it into a hip, energetic romantic-comedy with a few hard kicks, Bruno Barreto's Romeo & Juliet Get Married begs description by a plethora of seemingly trite and obnoxiously diminutive words. Adorable, sincere and heartfelt all immediately come to mind, each of those truly earned by Barreto's light-hearted yet still arty affair.