There may be fewer buttered-popcorn-related traffic incidents during the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Film Festival this year. Most festival films are playing at a single location -- St. Anthony Main's five-screen Stone Arch Cinema. In previous years, the festival was held in theaters across the Twin Cities, making it harder to see all the movies playing.

"It's a luxury that you can just walk out of the theater, go downstairs, get your ticket and watch another film," said Jim Brunzell, one of the festival's programmers. And the fest has worked out a deal with the parking ramp behind the theater -- 50 cents for 24 hours, making it easier to take in more than one film at a time.

Viewers will have plenty of chances. The festival is 15 days long -- five days longer than last year's -- and includes 50 more films than last year, totaling more than 140 titles from

more than 40 countries. As always, there's a combination of international and homegrown, documentaries, features and shorts. Many of the international films were Academy Award submissions for their countries.

Some writers and producers will be present to introduce their films or for questions after the screenings, including Tom McCarthy, director of the opening-night film "The Visitor." Steve James, known for his documentary "Hoop Dreams," will present his film "At the Death House Door." And Chuck D., frontman of the classic hip-hop group Public Enemy, will appear at Friday's screening of "Public Enemy: Welcome to the Terrordome."

For those accustomed to heading to Oak Street Cinema for the festival, the theater will host only four screenings, but will be the venue for spillover screenings or delayed features May 2-3 and beyond.

The festival's opening film is a delicate, human reminder of why indie films matter. After a life full of music, Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins) lives in chilly silence. The Connecticut economics professor moves through the paces of his day like a clockwork robot with a metronome heart. But when he encounters a young immigrant couple inhabiting his rarely used New York City apartment, the antisocial teacher begins to open himself up to a life lived with feeling. Read the full review and add your own.

Don't be deceived by the cute title. Although based on popular manga, this is very much an adult film that refuses to gloss over even the harshest issues. Satoko, Akiyo, Chihiro and Toko are four young Tokyo women who are only tangentially connected. Read the full review and add your own.

½ When you think "Polish sightseeing destination," Auschwitz probably isn't the first place that comes to mind, but the concentration camp draws swarms of tourists and high school history classes. Read the full review and add your own.

Jacques Tati's puckish humor meets Ingmar Bergman's angst in this erratic, eccentric gem. Absurdist Swedish auteur Roy Andersson, a prolific director of TV commercials, shoots his scenes like single-panel cartoons. One fixed camera angle, one lens, run the scene for two or three minutes and cut to the next vignette. Read the full review and add your own.

½ A slick, stylish thriller concerning murder, writer's block and romance from veteran director Claude Lelouch. The eternally gorgeous Fanny Ardant plays a popular author (the title translates as "railway station novel") whose brilliant new book propels her to the front ranks of French intellectual respectability. Read the full review and add your own.

½ Meet Liam O'Leary: wealthy Dublin developer with a stylish wife, a Marxist son and newfound knowledge of a stunning family secret. Meet his doppelgänger: a mysterious stalker with revenge on his mind and the savvy to pull it off. Read the full review and add your own.

In this drama that feels like a documentary, a Somali mother living in Ottawa works two cleaning jobs to support her two daughters and send money home to her husband, but it's not enough. The family is evicted and winds up living in a motel, where her teenaged eldest pulls away from her and flirts with the neighbor boy. Read the full review and add your own.

½ Touted as the priciest Egyptian film ever made, this modern urban epic centers on the residents of a decaying luxury apartment building in Cairo. The intersecting story lines are simplistic, yet engrossing: A young shopgirl who lives on the Yacoubian's rabbit-warren roof fights off lecherous bosses as she dreams of a future with her earnest beau, who falls in with a group of violent insurgents after failing to get a police job. Read the full review and add your own.

Sure to raise the ire of image-conscious Chinese authorities, this independent, understated tour de force has an unprecedented air of authenticity. Eleven-year-old Xiao Erzi is sold for $100 to a couple intent on exploiting a disease that has rendered Xiao unable to walk. Read the full review and add your own.

½ Wang Quan'an's epic tragedy harks back to the "fifth-generation" filmmakers who brought mainland Chinese film to world attention 20 years ago. Tuya is the sole provider for her paralyzed husband and two young children until health concerns of her own threaten to take away their livelihood. Read the full review and add your own.

You'd have to have a heart of coal not to smile at a movie like "Young@Heart." The documentary follows the exploits of a New England chorus group made up of senior citizens who cover songs by James Brown, Coldplay and other pop icons. Read the full review and add your own.

Yella (Nina Hoss, an auburn-haired beauty with mesmerizing eyes) is a businesswoman on the move, leaving her backwater hometown and bankrupt ex for a job as a financial analyst in Hanover. After a nightmare passage across the Elbe, she joins forces with a cynical financier, helping him shake down rivals in bribe- fueled contract negotiations. Read the full review and add your own.

Combining three of Hong Kong's biggest directors, this omnibus film is more of a relay in which, after 30 minutes, the action is handed off to the next director. Those familiar with Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam and Johnnie To will have no problem identifying their signature styles. Read the full review and add your own.

½ Composer Gian Carlo Menotti once wrote of Maria Callas: "She always gave a sense that perhaps she would not be able to finish an aria. It was like watching Callas fighting Callas." Read the full review and add your own.

½ Overstuffed with self-indulgence, this documentary is a sloppy tribute to prolonged adolescence. The film ostensibly concerns Beijing's first upscale lounge, which dared to stay open during the 2003 SARS scare. In truth, it merely tails a pair of the bar's regulars. Read the full review and add your own.

One of world cinema's most underappreciated talents, South Korean director Hong Sang-Soo boasts a remarkable repertoire, including "Turning Gate" and "Woman Is the Future of Man," that have inexplicably failed to make it past the festival circuit. Read the full review and add your own.

This charming, leisurely documentary focuses on a stubborn and idiosyncratic old Dane who longs to turn his castle-like estate into a Russian Orthodox monastery. In response, the Moscow Patriarchate sends a whip-smart nun, Sister Ambrosija, on reconnaissance. Read the full review and add your own.

½ There's considerable debate about whether the "Sixth Generation" of Chinese filmmakers constitutes a full-blown cinematic movement, but any way you figure it, director Jia Zhangke has emerged as one of world cinema's most fascinating talents. Read the full review and add your own.

½ American crime writer Harlan Coben's bestselling wronged-man thriller, transplanted to Paris, compensates for its improbable plot with an unerring sense of pace and careful attention to character. Francois Cluzet plays a Paris pediatrician who was a prime suspect in his wife's murder eight years earlier. Read the full review and add your own.

½ A gangster, a pimp, a prepubescent prostitute: This deeply disturbing British thriller follows Joanne, an 11-year-old runaway, and Kelly, a hard-boiled streetwalker who sports an impressive shiner, as they flee London's seedy underbelly. Read the full review and add your own.

Sixties rock figure Marianne Faithfull, now a substantial matron, plays a widowed Londoner whose grandson's medical bills leave her in desperate need of cash. With no marketable skills and unable to secure a bank loan, she accepts a "hostess" position at a Soho sex club. Read the full review and add your own.

½ It opens with Rabbi Eidelman (Assi Dayan), framed by his holy books, struggling with the Torah to salve his grief -- a grief that we all will share by the end of this powerful movie. Read the full review and add your own.

The blasted landscape of Chechnya, with its rubble-strewn streets and shantytown Russian Army barracks, is a poignant backdrop to this story of an aged Russian woman visiting her infantry captain grandson in the war zone. Read the full review and add your own.

½ The intertwined fates of four Turks and two Germans lead to love, tragedy and reconciliation in this beautifully realized drama. Faith Akin, a German-born writer/director of Turkish ancestry, deals sensitively with each culture as his clockwork plot brings his characters together in surprising configurations, or separates them in frustrating near-misses. Read the full review and add your own.

A genial spy spoof that aspires to nothing more than empty-headed entertainment and achieves its goal. Our secret agent hero is OSS 117, a clueless, shallow nitwit made lovable by the performance of beloved French comic Jean Dujardin, who bears a convenient resemblance to the young Sean Connery. Read the full review and add your own.