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Wolfgang Petersen’s early 80s submarine actioner was a surprising hit in America, netting six Oscar nods and much bigger audiences than would normally have turned out for a brooding German drama with an unhappy ending. While sub thrillers had been around long enough for cliches to stick like unwanted barnacles, Petersen found something fresh by combining nailbiting battle sequences with a documentary-like depiction of what serving underseas was like. Namely, claustrophobic and often monotonous, punctuated by moments of exhilaration and terror during combat. Especially in the 3.5-hour director’s-cut version here, Boot remains unsinkable. No sub movie since has been able to top it, and all have quoted from it. Especially effective are the sound effects, ratcheting up tension and transforming the ship itself into a character, its pressure-battered hull creaking and moaning like an angry whale.

Krzysztof Kieslowski’s marvelous trilogy provided a worthy capstone to his three-decade career as a leader in European cinema. He retired after finishing Red, and died two years later. Similar to his Decalogue series reinterpreting the Ten Commandments, Three Colors is nominally a loose exploration of the Revolutionary slogan of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Kieslowski himself downplayed this in later interviews, saying he merely wanted to tell stories about people, but that he could get financing from across all of Europe if investors were given the hard sell on the trilogy as noble ideological artifact. And it’s true that each movie can be seen separately, as three unconnected love stories, without becoming incomprehensible. (Juliette Binoche’s powerfully understated performance in Blue is surely worth singling out.) Still, the thematic connections are there, and trying to make them is a good part of the trilogy’s fun. Liberty intertwines with grief, equality with revenge, fraternity with loneliness, and all connect with Kieslowski’s overarching interest in how random caprice shapes our lives.

David Cronenberg is infamous for his unique style of horror filmmaking. His films—among them The Fly, Naked Lunch, and Dead Ringers—gaze with icy formalism on worlds where biology has gone mad. They’re a catalogue of physical breakdowns, sexual dysfunctions, florid mutations and hallucinations. His latest, Spider, based on Patrick McGrath’s novel, stars Ralph Fiennes as a muttering, schizophrenic Londoner struggling to make sense out of his fractured relationship with his mother (Miranda Richardson, terrific in a triple role). Quieter and largely grue-free, it’s still a clearly Cronenbergian film, and his best in years.

Terry Gilliam’s work had always had anarchy deep in its heart, and more than once anarchy has overwhelmed the project entirely. Certainly, our favorite hometown Python can say with some justification that his failures are more interesting than a lot of director’s successes. There is, in fact, a whole cottage industry devoted to chronicling his fights to keep his artistic vision and his films alive: The Battle For Brazil, Losing the Light and The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of 12 Monkeys. And now this wry documentary, a blow-by-blow account of Gilliam’s catastrophic attempt at Don Quixote. Gilliam’s the first to admit he thrives on disorder and brings much trouble on himself. But the windmill giants he contends with to make The Man Who Killed Quixote are too numerous even for a director nicknamed Captain Chaos: An infirm and incomprehensible lead actor, budget-smashing monsoons, and a shooting location a stone’s throw from a practice site for NATO bombers. And though it’s sad to see Gilliam’s inevitable abandonment of the project, at least this documentary means that somebody got a decent film out of the experience.

He was the Hendrix of jazz, was Charlie Parker. The living genius who flamed out young, so consumed by his music that he could practice 15 hours a day if he wasn’t strung out on junk. He helped forge a new form of jazz—bebop, in this case—and improvised riffs on his saxophone that fellow musicians sometimes could barely comprehend, let alone copy. His skills were elevated to an almost ludicrous level of worship by journeymen sax players, and even now, Bird is the word. This three-disc collection captures him during his last four years—not generally pleasant ones for him. The combination of heroin abuse, exhaustion and hounding by the authorities was ravaging him to such an extent that when he died in 1955, the coroner thought he was 60 when he was only 34. But he could still play like wildfire when the mood took him, and some think his best work lands square in the middle of these years.

This is the Bristol duo that almost singlehandedly invented the late-90s genre du jour, “trip-hop”—meaning atmospheric, heavily remixed club music that brought together elements of electronica, turntablism, rock ’n’ roll, film soundtrack, and torch song. You probably remember Geoff Barrow and Beth Gibbons best for “Sour Times,” a wonderful, sepia-toned single that hit the airwaves right around the time REV-105 went off the air forever. Their second, self-titled album was a mostly inaccessible mash of aural dementia, but the concert album PNYC was among the very best records of the 1990s. The five-year hiatus bodes well for this particular group: Either the world is ready for a trip-hop revival, or Portishead will again rewrite the rules of prerecorded pop music, or possibly both. Like a dog and a tin whistle, the ears of every critic in the country will be tuned to this one. Whether you should care about that, of course, remains an open question.

Sophomore slump is often nothing more than the indifference of critics and fans who are still digging the first record. Macy Gray got about as big as anyone can get with her 1999 debut, On How Life Is. The freak queen of rock ’n’ soul combined a Jimi Hendrix sense of style with a vocal sound that reminded most of James Brown on helium. Top-40 stations around here are still spinning that breakthrough single, “I Try.” Gray’s 2001 followup, The Id, built further on both her strengths and her weaknesses. What she lacks in real range as a vocalist, she makes up for in straight funk, no chaser. Perhaps most important of all, Macy’s a good CEO: She has a special talent for working with great co-writers and a backup band that knows how to groove in the great soul tradition of “Cantaloupe Island” and “The House that Jack Built.”

Northfield native Siri Hustvedt first caught our attention with her 1996 novel The Enchantment of Lily Dahl, a self-consciously quirky noir set in a small Minnesota town populated by a ditzy femme-fatale heroine and a cast of flaky eccentrics.What I Loved, her third book, chronicles the quarter-century friendship between a painter and an art historian secretly in love with the painter’s wife. It’s something of a cross between a John Irving family drama and an erotic thriller, and it’s creating quite a bit of critical buzz.

If he were the protagonist in one of his own crime novels, Andrew Vachss might be unbelievable: A hard-as-nails lawyer, grizzled and sporting an eyepatch, who’ll only take cases defending child victims of sexual abuse. But his singleminded, furious crusade is for real, and it informs not just his writing but his whole life. Vachss works tirelessly for his cause, and has a string of achievements to show for it, such as the law mandating national background checks for sex offenders (which was his idea). Vachss’ stories are an outgrowth of his activism, and they burn with the same fiery rage he shows in court. He’s best known for his Burke novels, a remarkably brutal and angry series in which the villains are usually child pornographers, intended not so much to entertain readers as to build them up to Vachss’ level of moral outrage. These books are often powerful, and not exactly light reading. If this all sounds too extreme to start with, try his new The Getaway Man. A Thompsonesque tale of a bank-job driver hard on his luck, Getaway harks back to 1950s pulp-fiction—especially the Gold Medal series of dime novels. That means lean prose and slam-bang action—sunnier than Vachss’ usual territory, but with streets that are still plenty mean. Ruminator Books, 1648 Grand Ave., St. Paul, (651) 699-0587, www.ruminator.com

Right out of the gate, with her early novels The Bluest Eye and Sula, it was clear that Toni Morrison was a writer to be reckoned with, capable of powerfully articulating the rage and despair of black women trying to get by in a society permeated with both racism and sexism. Her big-league status was cemented with the Pulitzer she won for her fifth book, 1988’s Beloved, a horrifying ghost story about a former slave haunted by the daughter she murdered. (Ten years later, it was made into a movie by Oprah Winfrey, which in some quarters beats a Pulitzer any day of the week.) In 1993, she became the first black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, and in her acceptance speech talked movingly about her mission to document “what moves at the margin. …What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company.” Now 72 and a humanities professor at Princeton, she visits St. Kate’s as part of the Women With Substance lecture series. O’Shaughnessy, 2004 Randolph Ave., St Paul, (651) 690-6700, www.stkate.edu/oshaughnessy