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In November Deutsche Grammophon DG became the first major classical label to distribute its recordings online. In the first phase of a plan to digitize the company's entire catalog, DG announced that it would offer about 2, high-quality albums— of them no longer in release—to consumers in more than 40 countries via its DG Web Shop Internet site.

Soprano Barbara Hendricks, who left the EMI label in , founded the label Arte Verum in and in released a new album, Endless Pleasure, as a CD and online; she invited listeners to pay whatever they chose for each download. She became the first classical artist to pursue a commercial path that had been blazed by rock group Radiohead earlier in the year, bypassing the once all-powerful record labels. Classical organizations intensified their efforts to reach out to a broader public via new media and technological formats.

Many orchestras—not to mention public radio stations—streamed concerts on the Internet, and some offered downloads of recent performances. The Met also broadcast live, in a high-definition digital format, six productions to movie theatres around the world and reached more than , viewers; for the —08 season the program was expanded to eight operas at more locations.

The New York Philharmonic got into the act by launching a series of free podcasts that featured interviews with orchestra members and guest soloists about upcoming concerts. The podcasts were made available for download at the orchestra's Web site and from iTunes; plans were also made to offer downloads of four live concerts by the orchestra.

The Philharmonic also made the news in October when it was invited by the government of North Korea to perform in the insular country. That month orchestra president Zubin Mehta and other NYPO officials flew to the capital, Pyongyang, to discuss details of the invitation. They later announced that the performance would take place in February Controversy erupted during the summer and, to no one's surprise, emanated from the perennial hotbed of scandal, Germany's Bayreuth Festival.

Audiences booed and critics jeered at the staging, which included a rewritten plot and full-frontal nudity. Katharina Wagner and Christian Thielemann, music director of the Munich Philharmonic, subsequently announced their intention to take over leadership of the festival, replacing Katharina's ailing father, Wolfgang, who had strenuously guarded his control of the festival for decades. Richard Wagner, generally regarded as Hitler's favourite composer, was also inadvertently in the news when it was reported that part of the record collection of the Nazi leader had been discovered in the attic of former Soviet intelligence officer Lev Besymenski, who had reportedly retrieved the recordings in from the ruins of Hitler's chancellery in Berlin.

In addition to Wagner, Russian and Jewish composers and musicians were represented in the collection. In June one of the world's most illustrious chamber ensembles, the Guarneri String Quartet, announced that its members would retire in The quartet was formed in at the Marlboro Vt. Music Festival and over the succeeding decades was hailed for its performances of the string quartet canon. Renowned pianist Vladimir Ashkenazy also announced that he would give up concert performing because of arthritis, although he planned to continue to make recordings as a pianist. He intended to focus on his career as a conductor and in would take the position of principal conductor and artistic adviser for the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.

In November Alfred Brendel, hailed as Britain's greatest living pianist, announced that he would retire at the end of As usual, conductors played musical chairs during In July the New York Philharmonic announced that current music director Lorin Maazel would be succeeded at the end of the —09 season by Alan Gilbert, who in turn gave up his post as music director of Santa Fe N. Opera to Dutch maestro Edo de Waart. At the Los Angeles Philharmonic, music director Esa-Pekka Salonen Salonen, Esa-Pekka said that he would leave the orchestra at the end of the —09 season; he was to be replaced by Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel, who was 26 at the time of the announcement.

In June, Franz Welser-Most was named music director of the Vienna State Opera from the start of the —11 season, and he said that he would continue his duties as musical director of the Cleveland Orchestra. Symphony Orchestra, becoming the first woman to head a major American orchestra. Opera companies found that calling on well-known outsiders could freshen their image.

Placido Domingo, general director of the Los Angeles Opera, announced that film director Woody Allen would direct the company's season-opening production of Puccini's Gianni Schicchi; another film director, William Friedkin The Exorcist , would direct the other one-act operas on the same bill. In the Met's artistic director, Peter Gelb, had imported a production of Madama Butterfly by British film director Anthony Minghella The English Patient , and in Gelb went on to program productions created by two American women who were new to opera but known for their creative stage work: As the classical ranks were being depleted by losses and retirements, the music itself continued to be renewed with the debut of new works and the revival of old.

Lee, and Abraham Lincoln. In a hint of things to come, modernist mainstay Charles Wuorinen announced in September that he had begun work on an opera based on the short story and film Brokeback Mountain. The Metropolitan Opera announced that it had commissioned a collaboration between film director Minghella and composer Osvaldo Golijov for a work to be produced in the —12 season. An ominous undercurrent in the 21st century was the dispersing of the jazz community in New York City, centre of the jazz world, as rent increases and gentrification shuttered venues.

The April closing of Tonic, a leading club that specialized in adventurous music, brought the issue into sharp relief. Musicians and fans protested singer Rebecca Moore and guitarist Marc Ribot were arrested , and a city councilman proposed tax breaks to landlords and others who aided artists. In the summer the Alliance for Creative Music Action was formed to lobby the city for performance spaces, affordable housing for artists, and arts education in public schools.

Jazz at Lincoln Center, previously a bastion of conservatism, presented a concert of free jazz that featured high-energy saxophonist John Zorn and innovative pianist Cecil Taylor. The young musicians of the Brooklyn Jazz Underground made news with a four-day festival at the Manhattan club Smalls. A number of young Israeli musicians received attention, among them bassists Omer Avital and Avishai Cohen, trumpeter a different Avishai Cohen, clarinetist-saxophonist Anat Cohen the trumpeter's sister , and pianist Yuval Cohen the trumpeter's brother. Chicago's Umbrella Music, which had offered weekly shows at several locations, held an international festival in November.

Perhaps the major festival of the year was the eight-night affair at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D. For the first time, a largely improvised jazz work won the Pulitzer Prize in music: Sound Grammar , a album by alto saxophonist Ornette Coleman; the Pulitzer committee awarded a posthumous special citation to John Coltrane.

Coleman also received the Grammy Award for lifetime achievement. In the midst of his set at Bonnaroo, a Tennessee pop-music festival, Coleman collapsed of heat stroke, but he went on to lead his quartet later in the year. The Internet became increasingly important to jazz, with labels such as Ayler, artistShare, Tompkins Square, and Greenleaf selling some recordings—by artists such as Ran Blake, Dave Douglas, and the Maria Schneider Orchestra—only over the Web, usually as digital downloads. The label Verve reissued hundreds of out-of-print jazz albums as downloads. Among the proliferating artist Web sites, sonnyrollins.

King Oliver's classic band included four great artists from New Orleans: Together they created true ensemble music that peeped through the fragile grooves of rpm recordings in the premicrophone era and still sounded tinny in LP and CD reissues. The Complete Jazz Band Recordings. For the first time, the players' individual sounds, intricate blending, and, most of all, their passion became real to contemporary ears. Mosaic Records reissued two vital swing-era boxed sets— Duke Ellington: Metheny and Mehldau's Quartet , trumpeter Charles Tolliver's big-band collection With Love, singer Kurt Elling's Nightmoves, and Winterreise by pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach and his trio were also among the year's notable releases.

Death took a dreadful toll in The fusion of traditional styles with Western influences resulted in some of the finest global music of recent years; in the trend continued as African artists worked with Western rock musicians or produced their own distinctive form of hip-hop. The most successful newcomer was K'Naan, who as a child fled with his parents from war-torn Somalia to Canada. K'Naan developed a unique minimalist African—hip-hop fusion, in which he was often backed only by one African drum.

His approach was bravely low-key by hip-hop standards, but he succeeded because of the power of his music, in which he educated Western audiences about Somalia and asserted that he had witnessed more suffering and brutality than American superstars who bragged about gangster lifestyles and violence.

He impressed crowds across the U. Journey to the West, which incorporated Chinese folk music and circus performers. Albarn became involved in the El Gusto project, producing an album recorded in Algeria that revived the multiethnic chaabi style that flourished before the country's independence in A European tour by the member El Gusto Orchestra featured several Jewish musicians, including the celebrated pianist Maurice El Medioni, who had lived in Algeria before The shows were hailed as an important collaboration between Jewish and Muslim artists.

Incidentally , Plant got the three surviving members of Led Zeppelin together for a London concert, their third reunion since the band broke up in Not all the African musical experiments of the year related to rock music. She responded with an experimental piece in which Mozart was born in Mali, as a hereditary musician, or griot. Her songs were backed by a string quartet, as well as the traditional Malian n'goni a four-stringed lute and Western guitars and bass.

The African instrumental newcomer of the year also came from Mali. His debut album, Segu Blue, was recorded with his wife, singer Ami Sacko. In Brazil musicians also mixed revival and experiment. Members of Os Mutantes, the rock band that had been hailed as Brazil's answer to the Beatles in the '60s, released a live album to celebrate their return to the scene after nearly 30 years.

Their albums mixed indie rock, electronica, and samba, but the trio also started Orquestra Imperial as a side project, playing big-band samba from the '40s and '50s. The orchestra developed a cult youth following in Rio de Janeiro. Popular music in the U. On the scandalous side, former pop starlet Britney Spears embarrassed herself repeatedly, legendary producer Phil Spector faced a murder trial, and country singer Sara Evans weathered a messy public divorce. In fact, sales had been eroding throughout the new millennium.

Warner Music Group laid off employees; big-box retail giant Wal-Mart shrank its music inventory; and musicians and record-company chiefs began wondering whether the business was in a death spiral. Not everyone was subject to the commercial pummeling, though. Kanye West West, Kanye , for one, proved averse to any downturn.

His album Graduation , released on September 11, posted the biggest first-week totals of any album since rapper 50 Cent's The Massacre in At the 49th annual Grammy Awards in February, the Dixie Chicks—a group that had received little country radio airplay in the extended wake of lead singer Natalie Maines's critical comments in about Pres. Bush—swept the major categories, winning five trophies, including the top song, record, album, and country album prizes.

Other big winners included hip-hop soul singer Mary J. Blige and rock band the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Country superstar Kenny Chesney remained a top performer as well, drawing more than a million fans for the sixth consecutive year. Multiple styles were represented among the year's most successful albums.

Longtime stars seemed unfazed by the changing commercial landscape. Bruce Springsteen released a number one album, Magic , and played numerous sold-out shows with his E Street Band. Critics also cheered the return of year-old Porter Wagoner Wagoner, Porter Wayne , who released the much-heralded album Wagonmaster. Wagoner died later in the year. The two-act reduction of the work's traditional three-act scheme, with a unit set and costuming by Danish painter and designer Per Kirkeby, turned out to be more interesting on paper and on the Internet than onstage.

Against any number of familiar productions, NYCB's youth-oriented version ended up looking thin as drama and monotonous as ballet theatre. This production drew attention to the participation in the direction and rethinking of the ballet of the well-known, and sometimes controversial, former dancer Gelsey Kirkland. The final result, credited to ABT artistic director Kevin McKenzie with the assistance of Kirkland and the dramaturge Michael Chernov, also received a mixed critical response.

Tony Walton and Willa Kim, familiar to Broadway theatregoers, designed the generally successful sets and costumes, respectively. The year saw the departures from the stage of three noted ballerinas: NYCB's programming overall celebrated the centennial of the birth of Lincoln Kirstein, who was instrumental in the founding with George Balanchine and great success of the company. The Harvard Theatre Collection, along with other cultural institutions on the East Coast, variously presented special events that showcased Kirstein's interests in the literary, visual, and performing arts.

Cunningham's company toured extensively, with one special stop at Dia: Later in the summer PBS showed Nureyev: The Russian Years, a documentary about the legendary career of Rudolf Nureyev, who was also the subject of a new biography, Nureyev: The Life, by Julie Kavanagh. Dance on Film, a two-disc DVD presentation of historic films expanded by recent interviews and essays. Independent dancemaker Twyla Tharp found her work the subject of a specially arranged performance by groups from five New York City-area colleges.

In the Canadian company performed the version of Balanchine's rarely performed Don Quixote, in a co-production with stager Suzanne Farrell, who held the rights to the ballet. The New York Public Library concurrently restored a historic film of a preview performance from , which featured Farrell dancing opposite Balanchine himself. The library screened the remastered film and then made it available for individual viewing on the premises of its Jerome Robbins Dance Division.

The NBC also presented an all-Robbins bill, including his West Side Story Suite, in anticipation of commemoration of the 10th anniversary, in , of the renowned choreographer's death. Set to music of Gyorgy Ligeti, the four-couple showcase helped the choreographer launch his own venture, Morphoses: The Wheeldon Company, at the Vail Colo. Polyphonia joined other works that the choreographer was preparing for weeklong seasons in London and New York City. As an outdoor event the festival presented Slow Dancing, digital portraits of individuals from across the world of dance—including the legendary Bill T.

Jones Jones, Bill T. The Jacob's Pillow festival, Becket, Mass. The European dance world in was, as usual, busy with celebrations of anniversaries, but one in particular stood out as a truly continentwide occasion. The Stuttgart Ballet dedicated a season to its great choreographer and former director John Cranko, who would have turned 80 in August; he was credited with having raised the company to international status. The programs included most of his best-known works as well as a revival of his Carmen from Neumeier also made a new work based on J. The Bayerisches Staatsballett attracted an international audience to Munich with its new production of Marius Petipa's Le Corsaire, staged by company director Ivan Liska with the assistance of American Doug Fullington, an expert in Stepanov notation, the method used to record many 19th-century classics.

Yury Burlaka and director Alexey Ratmansky reproduced as closely as they could the ballet as it was done in , replacing lost passages with their own choreography where necessary. Other notable events were a gala to celebrate the 80th birthday of Yury Grigorovich, the debut of guest star Carlos Acosta in the title role of Spartacus , and a revival of Asaf Messerer's showpiece Class Concert.

Diana Vishneva , in which the ballerina danced extracts from some of her greatest roles in an unusual contemporary setting. Former Mariinsky principal dancer Faroukh Ruzimatov was appointed director of the ballet company of the Mussorgsky Theatre, St. Boris Eifman premiered his latest work, The Seagull, for his own St. Petersburg-based company in January, transferring the action of the Chekhov play to a ballet studio.

Company principal Kenneth Greve staged a new production of Nutcracker. The Greek National Opera Ballet started the year with completely new versions of two 20th-century classics: The company's artistic director, Lynn Seymour, resigned from her post after a year, citing problems with working conditions. The city of Kalamata, Greece, again hosted its well-established international festival of contemporary dance.

In the United Kingdom, the Royal Ballet's year was marked by the retirement of Darcey Bussell, who was by far the company's best-known ballerina. Her final performance, in Kenneth MacMillan's Song of the Earth, was shown live on national television. The Birmingham Royal Ballet performed director David Bintley's full-length Cyrano, a completely new version of a story he had first used for the company some 16 years earlier.

The title role was danced by principal Robert Parker, who retired at the end of the season at age Northern Ballet Theatre showed two new versions of Tchaikovsky ballets— A Sleeping Beauty Tale, giving a new twist to the old story, and Nutcracker ; both were choreographed by company director David Nixon. The company also visited China, performing Nixon's Madame Butterfly.

Scottish Ballet continued its progress, performing director Ashley Page's best-known ballet, Fearful Symmetries, as well as a new piece, Ride the Beast, by Stephen Petronio. The Bolshoi Ballet spent an extremely successful three weeks in London in the summer. After the successful Complete Works Festival at Stratford-upon-Avon ended in the summer of , the Royal Shakespeare Company RSC under artistic director Michael Boyd still could not rival the National Theatre, led by Nicholas Hytner, in terms of achievement and reputation, and the company's fortunes thus appeared volatile.

The main Stratford house and the smaller Swan too was closed for several years for refurbishment and renovation. Nonetheless, a number of big projects were under way for RSC. Boyd himself began directing another RSC company in the entire Shakespeare history play sequence, in the order of their composition. His Henry VI trilogy at the Courtyard an exciting 1,seat temporary accommodation in Stratford-upon-Avon was topped with a brilliant Richard III , in which Jonathan Slinger established himself in the front rank of British actors; a few months later he impressively portrayed an ethereal, hedonistic Richard II.

All the histories were slated to run in chronological order at the Roundhouse in North London in the spring of , and associate director Gregory Doran planned to direct yet another RSC company back in the Courtyard. The RSC was very active, and its work was often very good, but audiences could not always find its productions. In contrast, Hytner's National Theatre conveyed a sense of integrated purpose, despite a varied repertoire of classics and new plays.

Rafta, Rafta…, for instance, was Hytner's version of a domestic comedy from by Bill Naughton, adapted and modernized by Ayub Khan-Din; working-class characters in northern England, in an utterly convincing shift, were made South Asians. Howard Davies's superb staging of Maxim Gorky's first play, Philistines, illuminated universal aspects of family relationships in times of great change.

New plays at the National included The Reporter, a slickly staged biographical play by Nicholas Wright about James Mossman played by Ben Chaplin , a famous British television journalist who committed suicide; The Five Wives of Maurice Pinder by Matt Charman, a striking comedy of polygamy in the suburbs; and the British premiere of 19th-century Swedish writer Victoria Benedictsson's The Enchantment, a Strindbergian story that featured Nancy Carroll as a heroine in romantic turmoil. Bola Agbaje with Gone Too Far! The Court's artistic director, Ian Rickson, bowed out after seven years with a superb performance of The Seagull, newly translated by Christopher Hampton and starring Kristin Scott Thomas; Rickson then made a fine National Theatre debut with a chilling revival of Harold Pinter's second play, The Hothouse.

Some critics charged that the flood of musicals in the West End left behind the audiences for new drama and classic revivals. The criticism was not strictly fair to London's producers, who, unlike those of Broadway, could not depend on attracting a committed audience. London's theatre overall was as varied and as vibrant as ever, but audiences were unpredictable. The casting of Lee Mead, winner of the viewers' voting, as Joseph ensured instant stardom for the actor and a huge surge at the box office.

The production was a slightly scaled-down and much-improved revival of Steven Pimlott Pimlott, Steven Charles 's colourful London Palladium production. Pimlott, a talented director with the RSC, and of operas, succumbed to cancer before the revival's opening night. David Ian, co-producer in of Lloyd Webber's The Sound of Music, brought back his own version of Grease , directed by David Gilmore, with two other TV-talent-show discoveries, but their impact was far lighter than Mead's.

In addition, Bad Girls—the Musical, based on a TV series set in a women's prison, proved a surprise critical hit, and singer Michael Ball and comedian Mel Smith opened in the musical Hairspray, which made its London debut five years after its Broadway bow. The critics were partly placated by decently presented West End revivals.

Patrick Stewart, another RSC stalwart, continued his remarkable reinstatement as a leading stage actor after having spent years as a main character in the Star Trek franchise; he portrayed Macbeth and Malvolio at the Chichester Festival Theatre. Work had been done on the show since the tepidly received Toronto world premiere in , but Matthew Warchus's production still laboured to clarify the story and win the audience over with dancing hobbits and elves, ludicrous orcs, and literally stilted tree men.

The music was nothing special. In comparison, Warchus's expert revival of Boeing-Boeing, a farce by Beverley Cross—adapted from Marc Camoletti's French hit—about flight attendant roommates and their befuddled shared boyfriend, was a surprise and unalloyed delight, starring Roger Allam and Mark Rylance. In another surprise hit, popular television actor John Simms played a fussy young man obsessed with his dead mother in Elling, based on a cult Norwegian film about a pair of former mental hospital inmates adjusting to life in the outside world—or, to be exact, Oslo.

Across the road the Young Vic flopped badly with The Soldier's Fortune, Thomas Otway's rarely seen Restoration comedy, but rallied with a stimulating season of short plays by Bertolt Brecht, an engaging adaptation of D. The Bristol Old Vic, Britain's oldest operating theatre, was closed down for refurbishment amid concerns that its artistic future was insecure. There were, however, fanfares for the reopening of the Theatre Royal in Bury St. Edmunds and the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry.

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An economically debilitating day strike by Broadway stagehands—the longest shutdown there in more than 30 years—made national headlines in November The strike disrupted the theatregoing plans of thousands of visitors to the city, and it delayed the openings of several high-profile productions, including Aaron Sorkin's The Farnsworth Invention, a play about the early days of the television set, and the Walt Disney Co. On November 28 the on-again, off-again negotiations finally bore fruit, and the shuttered theatres reopened the following night.

The year's most-acclaimed new play, Tracy Letts's August: Osage County, was a big-cast, multigenerational family drama that had originated earlier in the season at Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago. Critics searched for superlatives to apply to Letts known as an actor as well as the author of two much-produced thrillers, Killer Joe and Bug as they compared the play's central figure—Violet Weston, the malicious drug-addled matriarch of a rural Oklahoma family, played by Chicago-based actress Deanna Dunagan—to such classic American stage characters as Eugene O'Neill's Mary Tyrone, Tennessee Williams's Amanda Wingfield, and Edward Albee's Martha.

The production, directed by Anna D. Shapiro, went to the top of the list for potential Tony Awards. The Tonys as well as almost every other applicable award were swept by the wildly energetic rock-inflected musical Spring Awakening, adapted by writer Stephen Sater and pop composer Duncan Sheik from Frank Wedekind's German play. Christine Ebersole and Mary Louise Wilson took acting prizes for their work in another unconventional musical, Grey Gardens. Booth, received the regional theatre Tony. The most-produced playwright was the late August Wilson; works from his landmark play cycle about 20th-century African American life proliferated on theatre schedules.

Young and emerging writers continued to make impressive debuts. Another newcomer, Korean American playwright Young Jean Lee, raised hackles with an in-your-face skewering of identity politics in her Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven , seen Off-Broadway, at festivals in Austria and Germany, and at arts centres in several cities. Other theatrical undertakings were notable for their unusual concepts or contexts. Academy Award-winning actor F.

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Murray Abraham played the infamous Jews Barabas and Shylock in the first two plays in rotating repertory. Samuel Beckett's classic Waiting for Godot took on a range of new meanings when the Classical Theatre of Harlem took its production of the play as Waiting for Godot in New Orleans to New Orleans, performing outdoors for crowds of displaced Hurricane Katrina survivors in the city's devastated Lower Ninth Ward and Gentilly neighbourhoods.

At Arkansas Repertory Theatre in Little Rock, an oral-history-based docudrama called It Happened in Little Rock revisited one of the civil rights movement's most resonant moments—the standoff that forced U. Eisenhower to send federal troops to enforce the racial integration of that city's Central High School.

Notable staff changes included the appointment of Teresa Eyring, the highly regarded former managing director of the Tony-winning Children's Theatre Company of Minneapolis, Minn. Southern California's prestigious La Jolla Playhouse picked as its new artistic director Christopher Ashley, known for such crowd-pleasing projects as the hit disco-musical Xanadu ; he replaced Des McAnuff. McAnuff moved on to become one of a trio of new artistic directors at Canada's Stratford Shakespeare Festival in a much-discussed restructuring of the venerable producing organization.

McAnuff—who would share festival leadership with Marti Maraden and Don Shipley under the supervision of general director Antoni Cimolino—was expected to lead off his tenure in May with a multiracial Romeo and Juliet. The event was headlined by brilliant experimentalist Robert Lepage's Lipsynch, a large-scale group work about the relationships between voice, speech, and language; among the play's devices was a projection of actors' faces onto stationary dummies.

Although the performance lasted more than five hours in Montreal, the work was expected to take nine hours in its final form. Among the most interesting new Canadian plays was year-old Hannah Moscovitch's provocative East of Berlin, a play about the post-Holocaust guilt and retribution that haunt children from both sides of the conflict. It was a hit at Toronto's Tarragon Theatre.

The play—which had an all-female cast, including RSC veteran Penny Downie in a virtuoso performance as Odysseus's long-suffering wife—was scheduled to tour Canada. Facing stiff competition from realistic video games such as Halo 3, the American film industry pursued the public with its own franchise successes. A few of these films went beyond the sequel's usual chore of reinventing the wheel: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix darkened and intensified the drama of the Potter series, and The Bourne Ultimatum significantly boosted its predecessors' nervous energy and adrenaline rush.

The year's most heartening feature was the number of films with grown-up ambition, some with impressive running times to match. With Daniel Day-Lewis's brilliantly detailed performance and Anderson's rigorous artistic control, the film's grim spell held. Andrew Dominik scaled minutes with The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, featuring Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck—a poetic, slow-burning portrait of the outlaw Jesse James, his star-struck nemesis, and their journey toward fate.

In the field of urban crime, David Fincher delivered Zodiac minutes , a well-sustained, densely woven investigation into a series of San Francisco Bay-area killings in the s and '70s. Veteran director Sidney Lumet produced his own quality goods in Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, a crime thriller and family tragedy rolled into one—intricate and tense, with not one wasted shot.

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In England the Ford Motor Co. Dennis Gansel's Die Welle tracked the dangerous progress of a school course in fascist politics. As usual, conductors played musical chairs during Book 8 of 9. Fatih Akin impressed even more with his firm but tender handling of Auf der anderen Seite, depicting the tangled lives and emotions of six people—four of Turkish background and two Germans.

Joel and Ethan Coen curbed their whimsical proclivities to make the excellent No Country for Old Men, based on Cormac McCarthy's novel—a violent, darkly humorous thriller about an ordinary Joe who walks off with drug dealers' loot. No film of the year brought a creepier character than Javier Bardem's psychopathic villain. Even his haircut was frightening. Numerous films had a political dimension, most often focusing on the Iraq war and its consequences.

There was a sameness to the arguments; any differences lay in the degree of anger about the U. Paul Haggis's home-front story In the Valley of Elah fumbled its plot by straining for significance; Brian De Palma's atrocity drama Redacted seethed with inchoate anger. Strouse's Grace Is Gone, another domestic story, aimed modestly—and successfully—at the heartstrings.

This story, filmed in a documentary-mosaic style, adopted the point of view of Pearl's wife, convincingly played by Angelina Jolie Jolie, Angelina , taut with passion. Some of Winterbottom's visual flair could have assisted Robert Redford's Lions for Lambs, a talkative plea for political engagement, nearly carried by its lustrous players Tom Cruise , Meryl Streep , and Redford himself.

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James Mangold continued the Western genre's revival with 3: Indulgences in the acting and directing bloated Sean Penn's Into the Wild, but the film still impressed viewers with its lyrical account of a young man's quest for freedom in the Alaskan wilderness. Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe teamed to good effect as a hoodlum and cop in American Gangster, Ridley Scott's ambitious tale about a Harlem drug lord.

Elsewhere, humans were under siege. Robert Zemeckis's Anglo-Saxon adventure Beowulf refined the performance-capture technique he previously showcased in The Polar Express; life drained out of the cast. Digital effects also took over in Michael Bay's brazen Transformers, inspired by the robotlike toys of the same name. Popcorn cinema thrived with Knocked Up Judd Apatow , a rude, charming , and riotously funny comedy about the unplanned consequences of a one-night stand, featuring Seth Rogen and Katherine Heigl.

Evan Almighty Tom Shadyac went a different route, gathering up environmental pleas and concern for viewers' spiritual well-being into a flimsy story about a latter-day Noah, played by the engaging Steve Carell. The Jane Austen Book Club Robin Swicord offered sophisticated fun with serious twinges, while Waitress , unveiled shortly after the murder of its writer-director, Adrienne Shelly, found warm humour in a pregnant woman's fraught domestic life. But the year's best comedy was Ratatouille Brad Bird and Jan Pinkava , a small masterpiece of animation, blessed with nimble wit, genuine warmth, and a refreshingly different leading character—a French rat passionate about cooking.

Smith and Steve Hickner had its moments, despite its bee-sized plot. The other headline animated feature was The Simpsons Movie David Silverman , which was modestly successful as a belated big-screen expansion of television's The Simpsons, but there were no immediate plans for a sequel. Disney's triumph, Enchanted Kevin Lima , stood in a class of its own, deftly mixing live action and animation to transpose stereotypical Disney fairy-tale characters onto Manhattan's mean streets.

Amy Adams glistened with innocence and optimism as Princess Giselle. Canadian David Cronenberg made the most gripping film shot in Britain: Eastern Promises, a brilliantly managed drama about Russian mobsters at large in London. Working from Steve Knight's ingenious script, Cronenberg moved with panther stealth from one surprise and subtlety to another. Blood and gore played their part in the spell; so did the razor-sharp characterizations, led by Viggo Mortensen's taciturn mafioso.

Joe Wright's suavely handled Atonement , adapted from Ian McEwan's novel about a childhood lie and its aftermath, displayed its full British pedigree in its literary sophistication, genteel period trappings, and disguised emotions. Pursuing his own British tradition, Ken Loach turned his critical eye on the exploitation of immigrant labour in It's a Free World…, a mature and relatively unpreachy treatment of an urgent topic.

The Golden Age, an unnecessary sequel to his Elizabeth , shrieked with melodrama; Cate Blanchett, strutting her finery again as Queen Elizabeth, proved the only attraction. Another British tradition continued with Mr. Bean's Holiday Steve Bendelack , which was set in France—and which was said to be the last screen outing for Rowan Atkinson's comic bumbler. David Mackenzie added idiosyncratic tweaks to British realism in Hallam Foe, an intimate coming-of-age drama with a playful touch, a strong visual sense, and a very convincing central actor Jamie Bell.

Sarah Gavron's film of Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane, about a Muslim woman's life in East London, attracted opposition from area residents, some of whom criticized Gavron's rose-tinted view. The prettiest film of all, perhaps, was Becoming Jane, Julian Jarrold's imaginary spin through Jane Austen's early life and loves, featuring the American Anne Hathaway diligently equipped with an English accent.

Few new talents broke through, but director Tom Shankland put down a strong calling card with wAz, a smart crime thriller set in New York City. The popular touch was also pursued in Hot Fuzz, the whirlwind tale of murder in an English village, though director Edgar Wright assembled his stock ingredients only to make loud mockery.

The action grew more raucous in Allan Moyle's mischievous comedy Weirdsville, which centred on the absurd travails of two heroin addicts. But no Canadian film was more idiosyncratic than Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg, a delicious fusion of fantasy and fact celebrating the director's upbringing in his prairie hometown.

Australian film had a quiet year. Rolf de Heer displayed plenty of quirks in the curious Dr. Plonk —part satire on modern life, part tribute to silent filmmaking. Tony Ayres's semiautobiographical The Home Song Stories was a mainstream drama that centred on Joan Chen's powerful performance as an unstable Chinese Australian mother facing assimilation problems in the s. The strongest drama came from Dee McLachlan's The Jammed, a courageous treatment of enforced prostitution in Melbourne. On July 30 the deaths of two artistic giants, Ingmar Bergman Bergman, Ernst Ingmar and Michelangelo Antonioni Antonioni, Michelangelo see Obituaries , prompted media commentary about the decline of intellectually rigorous European cinema.

Although no masterpieces emerged in Europe, much good work was still accomplished. German director Christian Petzold enhanced his growing reputation with Yella, a stylish thriller anchored by the director's cool gaze and Nina Hoss's performance as a young businesswoman with inner demons. Fatih Akin impressed even more with his firm but tender handling of Auf der anderen Seite, depicting the tangled lives and emotions of six people—four of Turkish background and two Germans.

Admirers of French literary cinema had a feast with Jacques Rivette's Balzac adaptation Ne touchez pas la hache Don 't Touch the Axe , a strongly acted account of the seesawing love affair between a Napoleonic war hero Guillaume Depardieu and a teasing Paris socialite Jeanne Balibar. Those who sought after the fashionable but substantial enjoyed the true-life story Le Scaphandre et le papillon The Diving Bell and the Butterfly —Julian Schnabel's vivid, moving, sometimes funny depiction of the locked-in existence of a fashion magazine editor immobilized by a stroke.

Mathieu Amalric's heroic performance was one of the year's best. Following his own tradition, Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien made the demanding and eloquent Le Voyage du ballon rouge Flight of the Red Balloon , another of his painstaking dissections of loneliness in urban life. Across the border, Belgian film found success with Ben X Nic Balthazar , a brazen crowd-pleaser about a teenager obsessed with video games.

For Italian cinema, was relatively uneventful. The Taviani brothers' political passions enlivened La masseria delle allodole The Lark Farm , though its story about Armenian genocide during World War I never found a firm focus. Mimmo Calopresti kept things simple and light in his charming L'abbuffata. Laughter of the dark kind dominated Johan Kling's comedy of manners, Darling. Denmark provided its own anguish with Hvid nat White Night; Jannik Johansen , an intense, emotionally testing account of an accidental killer's dark nights of the soul.

Much of the film's charge stemmed from Anamaria Marinca's performance; Mungiu's use of long takes, silence, and muted colours told their own story about an imprisoning, dolorous society. Cristian Nemescu, who was killed in a car crash in , achieved posthumous fame with California Dreamin' Nesfarsit California Dreamin' [Endless] , a swirling, hyperrealist comedy of cultural misunderstanding set during the Kosovo conflict in Marking another Romanian milestone, the eternal maverick Francis Ford Coppola arrived to shoot Youth Without Youth —a flickeringly engaging talk-laden tale about regeneration and time's ticking clock, made with much local talent.

The camera prowled slowly and elegantly, as usual, and time stood still in the morose air, yet the spiritual liftoff expected with Tarr never quite happened. Livelier product emerged from the Czech Republic. Russia found less to smile about. Aleksandr Sokurov created one of his most resonant dramas in Aleksandra Alexandra , a muted cry against the Chechen war, dominated by the veteran opera singer Galina Vishnevskaya's powerful performance as an elderly woman visiting her grandson's army base.

The Chechen conflict hung in the background of Nikita Mikhalkov's 12, a weightily acted jury drama inspired by the American classic 12 Angry Men Sergei Bodrov hit a different register in the bloody battles and scenic thrills of Mongol , the first of a proposed trilogy on the life and fortunes of Genghis Khan.

In Poland, Andrzej Jakimowski crafted the bittersweet provincial working-class drama Sztuczki Tricks. Turkish film looked to the not-very-distant past in Beynelmilel The International , Muharrem Gulmez and Sirri Sureyya Onder's entertaining film about Anatolian musicians in who are forced to ditch their folk music for uplifting military fare. Carlos Reygadas, Mexican cinema's troublemaker, trod a surprisingly ascetic path in Stellet licht Silent Light , a testing drama of adultery and spiritual crisis in a Mennonite community.

A year-old's growing pains provided the focus for the Cuban film La edad de la peseta The Silly Age , Pavel Giroud's winning and nimble drama set just before the Cuban revolution. Israel's cinematic fortunes rose considerably with a strong showing in international festivals and the emergence of impressive new talents.

David Volach came to the fore with his tightly controlled Hofshat Kaits My Father My Lord , an emotionally vibrant drama set in an ultra-Orthodox Israeli community, featuring veteran actor Assi Dayan as a rabbi at loggerheads with his son. Warm sentiment and playfulness bubbled out of Eran Kolirin's Bikur ha-tizmoret The Band's Visit , about an Egyptian band stranded in an Israeli desert town; the film won eight Israeli Film Academy awards.

Shira Geffen and Etgar Keret made a strong impression with Meduzot Jellyfish , a part serious, part whimsical film about lonely lives. Amos Gitai's international production Disengagement , smoother in style than his usual work, took a provocative look at Israeli settlers evicted from the Gaza Strip. Veteran director Youssef Chahine, assisted by Khaled Yousset, represented Egypt with Heya fawda Chaos , a visually flat but forceful drama about police brutality.

India's gargantuan commercial industry continued to generate blockbuster entertainments notable for splashy colour and charismatic stars. Om shanti om Farah Khan , a showcase for the megastar Shahrukh Khan, spun a silly story of reincarnation into a dazzling audio-visual parade. Paruthiveeran Ameer Sultan conquered the Tamil market with an over-the-top production about star-crossed lovers.

Jag Mundhra entertained more serious goals in his British co-production Provoked: A True Story, which investigated the case of a battered wife in Britain Aishwarya Rai charged with murder after having incinerated her husband. Melodrama won out over social realism, but it was solid fare. The Asian films with the highest international profile came from Hong Kong. Neither quite showed the directors at their best. The bare flesh in Lee's film triggered censorship in China, but this period drama about a patriotic student swept into an assassination plot during World War II ultimately displayed more caution than lust.

The film won the Venice Golden Lion prize. Wong's English-language My Blueberry Nights lavished its own visual beauties, as well as pop star Norah Jones, on a troublingly slender story about Americans frustrated in love. It was enough perhaps for his die-hard fans. Less-prestigious directors in China and Hong Kong found a better balance between material and style. Li Yu's emotionally involving Ping guo Lost in Beijing , another film subject to Chinese censorship, adopted a liberal view of modern relationships. Zhang Yang's Luo ye gui gen Getting Home looked at Chinese provincial life through amused and gentle eyes.

South Korean activity slowed in For full-out scares a viewer couldn't improve upon Geomeun jib Black House , Shin Tae Ra's spirited exercise in modern Gothic, which earned impressive box-office success at home. Seekers of art-house bliss found fewer pickings than usual. Kim Ki-duk's Sum Breath stripped down to the bare essentials for a typically odd and contemplative tale about love with a death-row prisoner. In Chun nyun hack Beyond the Years , veteran director Im Kwon-taek revisited the folk-music traditions glorified in his film Sopyonje but without recapturing its emotional resonance.

Two Japanese films made their mark. Naomi Kawase's Mogari no mori The Mourning Forest , concerned with a young caregiver and her elderly patient, won the Cannes Grand Prix, though its mix of rarefied visual trappings, respectful plot, and docile actors didn't energize everybody. Veteran Masahiro Kobayashi picked up Locarno's Golden Leopard prize with Ai no yokan The Rebirth , a slow-burning story of grief and trauma gradually overcome. Box-office business in Vietnam was brisk for Charlie Nguyen's Dong mau anh hung The Rebel , a lavish martial-arts feast wrapped inside a bustling period drama.

In Thailand the phenomenon of the year was the release of M. Chatrichalerm Yukol's Tamnaan somdet phra Naresuan maharat The Legend of Naresuan , an exuberant cycle of action biographies celebrating the 16th-century hero who liberated Siam from the Burmese. The clash between traditional tribal life and the modern world fueled two of the continent's most striking films, both from directors making their feature debut: Goddess of the Waters , from Mali , shot with documentary simplicity; and Cheick Fantamady Camara's Il va pleuvoir sur Conakry Clouds over Conakry , made in Guinea, a robust medley of comedy, drama , and romance.

From Rwanda, Munyurangabo by American director Lee Isaac Chung , one of the few films in the local Kinyarwanda language, powerfully revisited the painful history and aftermath of the country's genocide of In South Africa, Darrell James Roodt earned a small triumph with Meisie, a humane drama about a schoolteacher and a gifted girl thwarted by her father. Documentary winner, Manda bala Send a Bullet , an examination of political and economic corruption in Brazil and its tragic consequences.

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The Sundance Audience Award: Documentary recipient was director Irene Taylor Brodsky's Hear and Now, the moving story of her parents, both born deaf, who in their 60s had surgery that enabled them to hear for the first time—a new experience that was not without complications and challenges. The most commercially successful documentary of was Michael Moore's Sicko , a highly critical view of the U. Two of the year's other notable documentaries had musical subjects.

The film, which was screened at numerous international festivals, examined the complicated situation in Iraq from the perspectives of eight insurgents.

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Although the film did not establish whether the child actually made all of the paintings, it did comment on the art world, celebrity, and society's fascination with extraordinary children. It was mostly Mozart, most of the time, during in classical music. Throughout the classical world, orchestras, opera companies, chamber ensembles, and soloists devoted uncounted hours to the performance of many of Mozart's works.

On the birthday anniversary, conductor Riccardo Muti led an orchestral tribute in Salzburg, Austria, the composer's birthplace. Throughout the rest of the year, that city offered more than concerts of Mozart's works, including performances of all 22 of his operas at the annual Salzburg Festival. There were other sides to the year's Mozart mania too, many of which had little to do with the music itself. Salzburg officially opened the yearlong celebrations at 8: Officials then unveiled a huge chocolate birthday cake. For the rest of the year, local merchants hawked everything: In January researchers announced that they had failed to identify positively a skull at the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg as being that of the composer who died in at age 35 and was buried in a pauper's grave in St.

Mark's Cemetery in Vienna. In April researchers in Boston used the performance of four Mozart works to gauge the emotional responses in the form of heart rates and muscle movements of 50 sensor-wired audience members at a concert by Keith Lockhart and the Boston Pops Orchestra. Lockhart and five members of the orchestra were also wired. In Brazil still other researchers reported that listening to Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos improved responses in peripheral vision tests of patients with glaucoma or neurological conditions.

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