It wasn’t until he died, in 2016, that the celebrated Italian author and philosopher Umberto Eco went properly viral. Resurfaced as a listicle of sorts, his 1995 essay delineating the salient features of fascism seemed newly timely then, not just as so-called shareable content, but also as tribute to Eco’s deep consideration of how words mean what they mean, and why it matters. Even more widely shared, however, was something wholly wordless: a video of Eco striding through his enormous personal library, which gradually reveals itself as preposterously vast. With the camera tracking his every turn down new book-lined corridors, a sort of sublime rapture sets in; it’s a bit like Danny Torrance Big-Wheeling through the Overlook Hotel in The Shining, except what’s spine-tingling here isn’t creepy twin-girl ghosts but the simultaneous magnificence and precariousness of all human knowledge.

Bibliophiles who passed that video around should be delighted to know its originator, Davide Ferrario, now has added essential context, by making it the opening of his new documentary, Umberto Eco – A Library of the World (2023). An affirming experience for those who line their living spaces with physical media in one form or another, Ferrario’s film also offers an apt memorial to Eco the avuncular public intellectual, whose eclectic scholarship covered other stubbornly topical cultural phenomena such as misinformation, conspiracy theories, and the tech-abetted evolution of semiotics.

Eco thought a lot about the difference between information and knowledge. For him, the advent of the internet called to mind the Borges story about a man who remembered everything and was therefore too overwhelmed to think, let alone communicate. As Ferrario gently but enthusiastically points out, choice Eco pronouncements—including “memory is soul” and “without memory it’s impossible to build a future”—feel bittersweetly prophetic now, with even the most sophisticated forays into AI so far seeming like escalating episodes of collective dementia.

Yet books, if we hold them dear, have a way of holding up. Sentimentally, sure, but technologically as well. You can’t dog-ear your iPad Proust, Eco says during a characteristically erudite conversation with prolific screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, in what might seem like a too-easy quip except for how thoroughly it’s substantiated: their whole conversation also became a book, called (in English) This Is Not the End of the Book. In that text and in this film we find the durable idea that there is no contradiction between book smarts and worldly wisdom.

Loosely joining archival footage, interviews with loved ones, key Eco writings reframed as dramatic monologues, and the occasional animated interlude, Ferrario’s casual collage of techniques is refreshingly unacademic. He’s not above panning reverently across leather-bound tomes bathed in caramel light, or staging a summary montage of worldwide library solidarity, as if, somewhere between the vaguely Borg-cube vibes of the Biblioteca Vasconcelos and the sleek, soft-white, supermodern Eye of Binhai, our intellectually prosperous human future awaits. Umberto Eco paved one possible way there, by roaming purposefully among the stacks.

By now a casual specialist of loose and lively riffs on Shakespeare comedies, the young Argentine writer-director Matías Piñeiro here ventures, albeit glancingly, into the enchantments and entanglements of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Agustina Muñoz stars as a young theater director who departs Buenos Aires for a fellowship residency in New York, ostensibly to translate the play into Spanish. Complications gently ensue, with game turns from a companionable cast full of indie-film notables including Keith Poulson, Mati Diop, Dustin Guy Defa, and Dan Sallitt. This is a chamber drama, but with the chamber windows thrown open to let in lots of fresh air. Piñeiro and cinematographer Fernando Lockett have a gracious and easygoing way of following people around, favoring human gestures even amidst periodic flourishes of formal experimentation. It all has a decidedly Bard-like aspect of deeply engaged creative playfulness, though the filmmaker’s voice is fully his own. It’s also a neat trick that this low-key tale of lostness in translation becomes a resonant affirmation of cultural commonality. Wistful Eric Rohmer nostalgists should be delighted to discover Piñeiro if they haven’t already, and for that matter so should anyone who’s ever been moved by William Shakespeare.

Martin Shore’s valentine to Memphis musical history is the second documentary I’ve seen this week that’s bracketed by scenes of an empty chair being sat in and later vacated by a narrator. (The other is Second Opinion.) Directors, cut that out; just get to the good stuff, especially when there’s more of it than time allows. Here the narrator is Terrence Howard, whose earnest listen-up-kids intro seems superfluous given a subsequent rush of so many soul-drenched and contagiously joyful tunes. It’s easy to see and hear why this music has cut across lines of race, gender, generation, and geography, enduring in part by buoying spirits during moments of otherwise completely spirit-crushing American social history. Shore’s is a torch-passing project, a chronicle of sessions for a compilation album, on which veteran Stax and Hi Records journeymen collaborate with rappers, school kids, and, for old times’ sake, each other. Since shooting, some of them have died, but clearly the Mississippi Delta mythology never will. There’s a lot of love in this sentimental family album, if also a familiar manner of music-doc restlessness, with shots interrupting other shots, songs interrupting other songs, and structure going periodically slack. Nitpicks notwithstanding, I’ll also say that for most of the duration of Take Me to the River my head was swaying, my heart was in my throat, and tears were in my eyes.

Having so cordially chronicled the Justin Bieber and Katy Perry experiences, concert-doc filmmakers Dan Cutforth and Jane Lipsitz now turn their souvenir-factory style of production to America’s largest music festival, Las Vegas’ Electric Daisy Carnival, to which hundreds of thousands of flamboyant DayGlo-bedecked EDM pilgrims routinely travel from all corners of the globe. Last year these included a young man in a wheelchair, a young woman with social anxiety, a young couple who’d been living in separate cities for six months, an older couple who’d met at EDC years earlier and finally decided to get married there, some bros in an RV, and the requisite handful of polyamorous Californians. They all seem pretty adorable, or at least eager to serve as promotional pawns, and you’d have to be a real jerk with a lot of spare time to want to refute their testimony about three days of “eat, sleep, rave, repeat” being an oasis of spiritual liberation. Still, there’s something slightly queasy-making in how this film summons the tireless piety of a church-recruitment pamphlet to describe what basically amounts to Burning Man as a business model. Cutforth and Lipsitz don’t much get into cultural or economic context, so there’s a lot of deep 3D focus and a lot of shallowness. Non-ravers who think the music tedious will at least concede that this movie does it justice.

The creators of The One I Love have been doing interviews and taking good care not to drop spoilers, but they already made the movie unspoilable by just running with, instead of explaining, its surreal twist. Elisabeth Moss and Mark Duplass, both in fine form, play a couple whose marriage is in trouble. Their therapist, played by Ted Danson, prescribes a weekend away in a sun-kissed Ojai country house — from which other couples have emerged, the therapist says, as if renewed. This couple gives it a shot. It goes uncannily. They have reasonable cause to liken their situation to both Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Twilight Zone, and their calculated comings and goings start to resemble an antic farce. But there’s a telling early moment, of fine economy and human understanding, that also calls to mind Annie Hall: a remembered highlight of great romantic chemistry gets restaged but not recaptured, landing instead as a comically poignant failure. That’s the overture, and maybe the cleverest touch. The One I Love is the first feature from director Charlie McDowell, who with writing partner Justin Lader has teased out a concept originated by producer Duplass. The real spoiler, potentially, is that discovery which many couples have to make for themselves: The way we were is hard enough to live up to; harder still is the way we might be.

It’s hard to imagine the curmudgeon-maverick director Mike Leigh even deigning to utter the word “biopic,” let alone making one. If there’s anything we can safely expect from Leigh, it’s that he won’t go boiling down famous historical figures into series of wearily obligatory story beats. Certainly not the prolific 19th-century English painter J.M.W. Turner, whose work became a sublime segue from Romantic landscapes to Modernist abstractions, and whose personal life, as robustly inhabited in Leigh’s film by Timothy Spall, apparently contained multitudes of gropes and grunts. Maybe not since Billy Bob Thornton in Sling Blade has a movie actor conveyed a greater range of human feeling through animal sounds. Or course our Mr. Turner talks, too, sometimes most eloquently, and of course he paints. What’s most important to Leigh, though, is that the filmed Turner goes about his living, with a spirit which is both coarse and fine. Here, the only person with whom he shares any real intimacy is his seaside landlady, excellently portrayed by Marion Bailey, and the seaside itself is shown to mean a lot to him too. So Mr. Turner is a strange movie about a strange person. A singular work of portraiture, it captures the mystery of a man apart from and yet deeply at home within his inspirations. An affinity for environment, and for light, suggests that Leigh and cinematographer Dick Pope have appreciated Turner’s work to the point of absorption. But it’s Spall who summons the life and commands the screen.

The low-key action of Land Ho! involves hanging out with a pair of silver-haired former brothers-in-law who, having drifted apart in the wake of divorce and widowerhood, find themselves on an impromptu holiday together in Iceland. One’s a feisty southerner (Earl Lynn Nelson), the other a taciturn Australian (Paul Eenhoorn), and their dynamic is familiar, but thankfully more so from life than from movies. A credit to writer-directors Aaron Katz and Martha Stephens, this gently invigorating meditation on mortality and companionship is a movie whose essence is meandering, yet it moves very briskly from scene to scene. That’s a shrewd rhythmic balance, wholly organic to the characters’ cognizance of having more life behind them than ahead. Nelson is Stephens’ cousin, and this is the second film of hers that he’s been in. It’s easy to see why; he’s a great find, eccentric in a camera-ready way without being artificial. As his straight man, Eenhoorn seems perfectly cast and entirely without vanity. Iceland, too, is a character here, the duo’s otherworldly third musketeer, and Katz and Stephens gamely prowl its landscape for the occasional treasure of a stunning image. Most importantly, though, the filmmakers don’t presume to reinvent the recognizably shopworn two-guys-on a-trip scenario. Instead they simply relax into it, as one might gradually and gratefully lower oneself into an arctic hot spring.

Hong Kong director Dante Lam delivers thrills aplenty in this nimble action-horror hybrid. It’s mostly cops and robbers, but yes, there’s also that matter of That Demon Within. (Ah, but isn’t there always?) In fine form, Daniel Wu plays a fresh-faced but mentally fragile young constable, stationed on the ER night shift, who gives blood for an emergency transfusion only to learn the life he saved was that of a ruthless cop-killer (Nick Cheung). Nightmares ensue. The rescued patient, understandably known around town as the Demon King, escapes the hospital and rejoins his gang of thieves to continue a spree of deadly violence, leaving the young officer with PTSD of supernatural proportions, along with some major guilt. Already practiced in the art of the hard-boiled modern cop thriller (see 2008’s Beast Stalker), Lam makes short work of infusing uncanny elements into what becomes a story about a tortured soul confronting his inescapable nemesis. So aside from trafficking in stolen diamonds and city-street shootouts (with several civilian casualties) and other familiar genre finery, that means delving into a would-be hero’s darkest impulses, all perceptively reflected in the hellfire of a nasty nocturnal underworld. Reportedly the film was inspired by the case of an actual Hong Kong cop who murdered several fellow officers and finally was gunned down by several others. It’s always bad news when the demon gets out.

The opening credits of A Five Star Life let us know it was made “with the support of the Leading Hotels of the World.” That’s actually the name of a hospitality conglomerate, whose luxury properties get some good publicity here — even though the movie's protagonist (Margherita Buy) is a hotel critic. As a “surprise guest,” she shows up to nitpick the particulars of poshness, toting a scoresheet which includes such queries as: “Did the hotel personnel attend to your needs, without being overbearing but indulging your every wish?” And for the most part, the answer is yes. Every property she visits is fancy and lovely, a tastefully tension-free zone. The problem is that movies generally need tension. Some conflicts do eventually percolate with her ex (Stefano Accorsi), and with her sister (Fabrizia Sacchi), but the main idea is our protagonist’s loneliness and rueful awareness of having one of those jobs that no one wants to hear you complain about. She’s good at it, she says, “because I don't have a life.” Later, a spunky feminist intellectual (Lesley Manville) befriends her for just long enough to remind her that “luxury is a form of deceit.” Filmmaker Maria Sole Tognazzi glides through these proceedings with sensitivity and an eye for elegance. But her film seems ultimately more rewarding to its benefactors than to viewers, even those select few whom it inspires to book rooms at Leading Hotels of the World.

At the end of Tsai Ming-liang's modestly confident 1992 debut, seen from arm's length and from above, a clutch of sad little phone-dating cubicles looks like something out of Jacques Tati. Except instead of a mod Parisian arena for coy clowning, this is the dead end of pre-millennial Taipei malaise. Tsai isn't without mischief — one key to this film's hypnotic power is humor so subtle it's practically subliminal — but his preferred takeaway is the pathos, the still-universal frustration, of an unanswered ringtone.

Also like any given Tati film, Tsai's Rebels of the Neon God is distinctly of its time but not dated: The rituals of this era's disaffected youth, set to hooky synth-bass riffs, include drilling into public pay phones and then blowing the stolen loot on arcade video games. (It's a nice touch that one of the games is played by punching something as hard as you can.) Or, as modeled by the young Lee Kang-sheng, who would become Tsai's leading man of choice, responding to moments of emotional confusion with peculiar spontaneous dancing.

Listlessness abounds in an atmosphere of sodden fluorescence, with even the most built-up environments apparently defenseless against water pouring from the sky or oozing from the ground, but Tsai never seems pompous. Rebels of the Neon God inaugurates the filmmaker's multi-movie study of urban alienation not with showoff chops but quiet, enduring compassion. Premiering here at last in a new HD restoration, and as part of a simultaneous Tsai retrospective at the Museum of the Moving Image, it's a welcome reintroduction to a modern master's work.

Isn’t it just like humans to invent a thing of gravity-defying beauty and then use it to slaughter each other? Hayao Miyazaki’s tribute to Zero fighter-plane designer Jiro Horikoshi has sparked controversy not for having fictional elements, but for being, furthermore, a nostalgic fantasy, prone to lyricism -- the title borrows from a poem by Paul Valéry -- and temperamentally averse to treating Horikoshi’s legacy with any tone other than bittersweetness. It should be said that this reportedly final film from the animation maestro and Studio Ghibli co-founder extends very naturally from his rightly beloved earlier works, which collectively reveal Miyazaki’s own refreshingly incorruptible fascination with flying contraptions. Also, it’s not wholly a flight of fancy to imagine his chosen protagonist as having once been just a young aspiring aeronautical engineer who happened also to be a citizen of Japan between the two World Wars. With consistently and characteristically exquisite visual design, Miyazaki’s stance is elegantly established by the movie’s overture: a boyhood dream of flight whose soaring liberty is heinously colonized by winged battle machines. He definitely does protect his notion of Horikoshi the dreamer, as if limning the violence made possible by his work would only dignify or enable its destructiveness. It’s a touching idea, but pacifism does lose force if it feels like denial.

At last, a darkly shiny new collectible from Jonathan Glazer, that tantalizingly infrequent director of films, including Sexy Beast and Birth, and great specialist of highly charged movie moods. This one’s a mesmerizing and at times utterly chilling fable of sorts, in which Scarlett Johansson inhumanly roams the Scottish Highlands picking up men and bringing them back to her place. Let’s say it’s a very dark place. Adapted by Glazer and Walter Campbell from Michel Faber’s novel, whose expository details it discards, Under the Skin plays out as a welcome if willful throwback to arty vintage sci-fi that doesn’t care to explain itself. With great help from Mica Levi’s brooding-freakout score, Glazer moves fluidly between naturalism and stylization, transcending the alien-seductress trope by interrogating it cinematically. We behold the movie star as covert and terrifying otherworldly predator, her victims reportedly including several non-actors who, at first, didn’t even know they were being filmed. (For this Glazer’s team invented a tiny concealable camera.) What does it all say about us? Under the Skin is sure to leave some viewers feeling fed up, but others will curl with glee at its finely calibrated fusion of genre cool and metaphysical inquiry. Or you can just see it as a travelogue: Scotland never looked so sinister and gorgeous.

The documentary category is rich with contenders this awards season, so it’s understandable if a film about a low-priority and admittedly insoluble 17th-century mystery seems less urgent than some other rightly lauded fare. But Tim’s Vermeer, in which a non-painter painstakingly replicates a masterpiece just to test a theory about how the original was made, is one documentary not to miss. Being an inventor by trade, Tim Jenison barely knows how to hold a paintbrush, but he has a flair for solving problems. He’s the right man for the job of testing David Hockney’s hypothesis that the most famously photo-realistic paintings made before the invention of photography were done using camera obscuras and portable mirrors. We watch as Jenison reconstructs every detail of the room in which Vermeer painted “The Music Lesson,” then reproduces the painting itself. It takes hundreds of days, and the results are stunning. Odd, you may think, that a Penn & Teller film — Teller directed, Penn produced — seems so bent on revealing a great magician’s secrets, but their evident appreciation of Vermeer, and of Jenison for that matter, only affirms the revelatory power of pure curiosity. The film plays less like an extension of Penn & Teller’s own critical-inquiry cable show Bullshit! than like a refined long episode of Mythbusters; even still, this is no prosecutorial debunking, but rather an awed yet also clear-eyed tribute to aesthetic ingenuity.

In Night Moves, director Kelly Reichardt and writing partner Jon Raymond expand their singularly spartan field guide to off-the-grid Oregonians. Here Reichardt, the maker of Meek’s Cutoff and Wendy and Lucy, applies her characteristically laconic style to an ostensibly conventional movie plot about three environmental activists planning to blow up an Oregon hydroelectric dam. It’s best not to reveal what happens, but be forewarned that this film places its emphasis differently than the average suspense thriller would, with the result being a two-part study of movie tension: first the tactics, then the guilt. In what will likely prove the greatest point of contention about this movie’s merits, Reichardt prioritizes her characters — played superbly by Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning, and Peter Sarsgaard — without ever letting us fully get our bearings on them. Thus we may take no comfort on the grand matter of volatile interactions between humans and the natural world, or for that matter between humans and each other. Eisenberg emerges as the central figure, yet also paradoxically the most marginal; he has great intuition about the nature of detachment, and glowers through the film with pinched, inscrutable intensity. Maybe the only unambiguous takeaway from Night Moves is the masterful unhurried clarity with which it advances through its setup — the thrill that comes from vital independent filmmakers, including also cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt and composer Jeff Grace, working together at the top of their game.

As a sort of counter-programming to the relentless pep of American Hustle or The Wolf of Wall Street, may we suggest Ralph Fiennes’ stoic and tastefully oblique Charles Dickens biopic? In his sophomore feature as a director, Fiennes avails himself of some impressive production values, including discretion and intelligence, unhurriedly homing in on the clandestine affair between middle-aged Dickens (Fiennes) and teenaged aspiring actress Nelly Ternan (Felicity Jones), to whom the movie’s title and narrative perspective pays somber tribute. The restrictive social context of the affair is filled out with wise awareness by Kristen Scott Thomas as Nelly’s mother and Joanna Scanlan as Charles’ wife, but our first dramatic priority clearly is that low-boil love story between the master and the mistress. Abi Morgan’s script alertly adapts Claire Tomalin’s Dickens biography, but the prevailing sense of collectedness must come from Fiennes, whose best performances always seem somehow invitingly recessive — as befits his portrayal of a publicly venerated Victorian. Muted, mannerly, and more thoughtful than adventurous, The Invisible Woman doesn’t quite teem with life, but it could be called Dickensian for so sensitively exploring the idea that, as Nelly concludes from her experience, “Whoever we’re with, we’re alone.”

Given its title and its makers, the Coen brothers’ new movie might conceivably be a 105-minute proctology joke, but actually it’s an incisive melancholy drama, with some funny bits, about the burgeoning folk music scene in early-1960s New York. (The very fine 1963 album Inside Dave Van Ronk is a clear inspiration here.) Oscar Issac plays the eponymous anti-hero, a true but willful talent who won’t compromise, and this wintry week-in-the-life tracks him up and down Manhattan and halfway across the country as he struggles toward a personally acceptable version of success. It’s a cautionary tale, but not condescending, and all the more moving for it; the Coens can be so good when they just get over themselves. The music is consistently fine, the design details expertly observed, and Isaac seems exquisitely situated between standout supporting performances by Carey Mulligan as a fellow scenester and combative lover, John Goodman as a bloviating jazzman, and F. Murray Abraham as a Chicago impresario. Mulligan’s character in particular deserves a fuller arc than she gets, and some scenes’ intentions seem fuzzy, but the filmmakers get away with that because it’s all done with such extraordinary, experience-abetted confidence — and sincerity, which is nice, and a relief, to see from them.

You may detect some sarcasm in its title, which paraphrases and inverts an old familiar hateful slur, but by and large the salient trait of God Loves Uganda is its evenness of temper. Director Roger Ross Williams’ documentary backgrounder on Uganda’s legislation to make homosexuality a crime punishable by life imprisonment -- or, for “reoffenders,” death -- calmly traces the origins of that so-called “Kill the Gays” bill back to a Missouri megachurch, the International House or Prayer in Kansas City. Neither IHOP honcho and one-time Prop 8 cheerleader Lou Engle nor any of his bright-eyed proselytizers will quite cop to that, but one affable young missionary pronounces the whole situation overblown by western media and figures that in any case the law itself is godly. These folks seem unaware of or untroubled by a Ugandan LGBT activist being beaten to death in the street, or a progressive Ugandan clergyman running for his life all the way to Boston, never to return, and so Williams methodically makes his case that such is the unfortunate fallout of American AIDS relief with the attached strings of right-wing evangelism. It is also mentioned, almost in passing, that Uganda’s HIV infection rates have in fact risen since abstinence-only education began there.

Certainly this spry sci-fi puzzler sets a new bar for little indie movies about young white couples having dinner parties and sorting through their romantic angst. On this occasion, heartaches and head games get even more complicated by the quantum-mechanical upheaval of a passing comet: Our company finds itself on a roulette wheel of alternate realities, and, like a game Star Trek crew, does its best to troubleshoot. As you might expect, lacking experience with this sort of thing proves to be a dramatic accelerant. Its setup being vaguely Buñuellian, Coherence might have been braver about letting surreal silences play, but writer-director James Ward Byrkit was shrewd to make talking through conceptual exposition seem like a situation-appropriate nervous habit. It’s also unexpectedly useful that his cast of eight, led by Emily Foxler, comes across at first as a little vanilla — collectively a clean blank page just calling out for some elaborate scribble. Byrkit’s is an exactingly proportioned blueprint for well-paced cerebral freakouts, downplayed humor, and the humblest of special effects, not to mention the robust cult fandom that attends similarly resourceful sci-fi trips like Primer. It’s all great fun, and a tribute to what’s possible with the modest means of earthbound materials and a cosmic imagination.

Coming out of nowhere in 2006, writer-director John Carney’s Once was a demo-tape revelation of a movie, the understated alt-pop antidote to a scourge of prefab overblown musicals. Carney’s newest film seems in many ways like a glossed-up Once remix, with songs less good, actors more famous, and moments of truth mostly in quotation marks. It’s the same basic stuff: a romance consummated chastely through the making of a record, this time with Keira Knightley as a woebegone singer-songwriter and Mark Ruffalo as the washed-up producer she inspires. Together fleshing out her songs and recording them live in various outdoor New York City locales, they seek correlation between heartache and hooky melody, and ponder the everlasting tension between creative integrity and mainstream success. While stubbled, rumpled Ruffalo gets reduced to cigarillo-waving shtick, Knightley mists her eyes and bites her lip as only she can. “I think that you lost the song in the production,” her character eventually tells the fame-spoiled boyfriend who left her, a sensibly cast but perfunctory Adam Levine, and it almost sounds like a filmmaker’s note to self. But then isn’t that the easiest ever note to give? Whether lost or not, Begin Again is song-like, a fantasy story with familiar specifics. At least it’s nice to know Carney’s still a big believer in the romance of wearing your headphones and wayfaring through a city at night. How else but by being completely sincere could he not seem to notice that treating the quest for authenticity as a formula tends to be self-canceling?

It took nearly a decade for the legend to continue, but here it is, reuniting director Adam McKay, producer Judd Apatow, and stars Will Ferrell, Steve Carell, David Koechner, and Paul Rudd, who this time shall buffoonishly negotiate the burgeoning cable news scene of New York City in the 1980s. After an ego-bruising split with his partner (Christina Applegate) and subsequent bottoming out, Ferrell’s Ron Burgundy relocates his mojo via graveyard-shift broadcast of common-denominator-lowering infotainment. This brings new rivalries with a professional nemesis played by James Marsden and a domestic one played by Greg Kinnear, not to mention a pitifully failed attempt at “breaking down the barriers of race by assimilation” with his new producer (Meagan Good). Fittingly, it all climaxes with a cacophonous, cameo-filled brawl between anchor teams from increasingly esoteric cable-TV territories. Like its predecessor, the movie has its share of inspired lunacy and quotable quips, plus some retrospective leisure-suited satire of what 24-hour news hath wrought on America. (At the very least, it hath wrought a culture in which promotion for this film all but requires a string of surreal stunt appearances by an in-character Ferrell on real news broadcasts.) It’s all tied together, of course, by the requisite narration from golden-throated veteran newsman Bill Kurtis.