Film distributor Sony Classics did filmgoers a service last fall with a touring retrospective of the films of Pedro Almodvar, timed to precede the release of his new film Volver. They should give serious consideration to doing the same for the Chinese director Zhang Yimou, whose name isn’t quite a household word in the West despite having made some of the biggest arthouse hits of the past two decades. It’s true that Sony doesn’t have the rights to Hero, his worldwide 2003 hit starring Jet Li, Zhang Ziyi, Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung. But some of Zhang’s most popular movies are inexplicably unavailable in DVD, even in the Asian market, and a series of them would be a welcome opportunity for many viewers to rediscover the work of this most sensualistic of modern filmmakers: House of Flying Daggers, Shanghai Triad, To Live, The Story of Qiu Ju, Raise the Red Lantern, Ju Dou, Red Sorghum—how all of these would brighten up a dreary winter!

It surely must happen only rarely that anyone has occasion to compare Edward Norton with Bill Murray, but Norton’s new film provides us with such an opportunity. About 23 years ago, Murray managed to persuade 20th Century Fox to pay for another movie version of W. Somerset Maugham’s serio-camp 1930s novel, The Razor’s Edge—there having already been one too many, the 1946 effort starring Tyrone Power as the young seeker of eternal truth. Murray’s success was short-lived; his movie was a flop, a passing strange one.

How much does outside, off-screen knowledge about a movie affect the way we watch it? Although we may not want to admit it, I suspect the answer is: quite a bit. Fabian Bielinsky, the maker of the impressive new Argentine film The Aura, died suddenly of a heart attack a few months ago. He was only 47, and The Aura was only his second film: His first, the twisty con-game thriller Nine Queens, was a surprise arthouse hit in the US. (It was remade by Hollywood as Criminal with John C. Reilly.)

Pedro Almodovar’s Volver begins with a panoramic tracking shot of women tending graves in an old cemetery in a provincial Spanish town. Among them is Raimunda (Penelope Cruz), a very pretty thirtyish woman who is cleaning up around the grave of her parents. Which is appropriate because before the film is over she is going to encounter one of them, a visit from the other side. Sort of.