Keira Knightley, Steve Carell

I don’t suppose “The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner” can be described as plausible, but it’s lovable in a way that’s sometimes goofy, sometimes sad, always optimistic. The places are Bulgaria and Italy. The times are the Cold War and the present. The story shuttles between both times and both places.

In a village in today’s Bulgaria, a small group of friends meet every day to gossip and play backgammon, a game they take very seriously. How seriously? As a matter of pride, they don’t play for money. To be the winner of their never-ending tournament is to be the King of Backgammon, i.e., the world. The reigning king is the immensely likable Bai Dan (Miki Manojlovic).

One day tragic news arrives. Bai Dan’s son and daughter-in-law have been killed in an automobile crash. His grandson, Sashko (Carlo Ljubek), has survived. In flashbacks that continue through the film, we learn more of the story. Under the communist regime, Bai Dan had not expressed the proper devotion to the authorities. You wouldn’t call him a dissident, but he’s feisty and sarcastic, and mocks a sullen man in a business suit who often sits in the cafe but refuses to join in a game.

This bureaucrat puts pressure on Bai Dan’s son to inform on the old man. This suggests the young people, the wife pregnant, should leave the country quickly, and we follow them on a fraught odyssey through Yugoslavia to a refugee camp in Italy. Here they hope to get their papers to move on to Germany. In interlocking flashbacks, they’re kept on indefinite hold by Italian authorities, who like collecting a per diem for their upkeep. Years pass. Then there is the crash.

Bai Dan travels immediately to his grandson’s bedside, but Sashko has no idea who he is. He suffers total amnesia, a condition that is sad in life but invaluable to director Stephan Komandarev. As Sashko’s physical health returns to normal, Bai Dan gradually wins over the boy’s trust, and decides the way to restore his memory is for the two of them to join in a journey back home to Bulgaria. In theory the sights, sounds, smells and language of his native land will restore the lad’s memory. Sashko, a robust, open-faced, apparently 20-ish, after all has nothing better to do than go along.

It will not be a quick trip. Bai Dan obtains a bicycle built for two, and with Sashko sets out to pedal halfway across the Balkans — where, the narration informs us, “Europe ends but never starts.” Now we have the dependable mechanism of a road picture, including even a stop at a hikers’ camp where the young man meets a girl his age and has a skinny-dipping experience that will change his life.

Miki Manojlovic‘s performance as the grandfather is important to the film’s success. There is a tendency in Eastern European movies for mustached salt-of-the-earth older men to become insufferable. Not here. Bai Dan is loving, stubborn, encouraging, and not wearing on our nerves. This is just as well, because Sashko is limited in the personality department, as well a man with amnesia might be.

Finally they arrive home, where grandfather and grandson face off in a backgammon game, cheered by the cafe’s crowd of friends (still apparently around the same table in the same configuration after 20 years). I’m not sure if it matters, really, who wins the game, but I will observe that in Bulgaria as in many, many other nations, the filmmakers find it handy to use a crowd of regulars in a cafe or bar as a sort of Greek chorus to bear witness and play to a reliable audience.

Late on the night of June 9, 1982, the West German film director Rainer Werner Fassbinder made a telephone call from Munich to Paris to tell his best friend he had flushed all his drugs down the toilet — everything except for one last line of cocaine. That was the line that killed him. He made his first film at the age of 22, and 40 films before dying at 36. So there should be another 50 or 60 films. Could he have maintained his incredible output? We will never know. What is remarkable is what a high standard he maintained, what a stylistic vision he produced on such small budgets.

In the treasure of his work, it’s not surprising that “World on a Wire” (1973), a two-part, 212-minute science fiction project for West German television, went unseen in the rest of the world for many years. Only now is it being shown in the U. S., earlier at the Museum of Modern Art and now at the Siskel Film Center. It involves a familiar sci-fi theme: The possibility that this entire world exists entirely inside another world, perhaps as a computer simulation.

I don’t believe we’re expected to be shocked by that possibility. The story centers on Stiller (Klaus Löwitsch), an engineer who works for a program named Simulacron, which fabricates complete identities for characters who don’t know they’re unreal. In the film, Stiller and others discuss the notion that reality is unreal, tracing it to Plato. The purpose of Simulacron is said to be the prediction of consumer trends 20 years into the future, although there may be a more sinister purpose. It’s possible to imagine all the creatures inside Simulacron as living in a sort of SimCity controlled from a higher level. Or are perhaps the fabricators of Simulacron themselves manipulated by still higher puppet masters?

I’m not convinced Fassbinder really cared. The plot for him simply provides an occasion to demonstrate the way he imposed his visual and dramatic style on characters who were often played by the same actors, who spoke in the same mannered melodramatic manner, who inhabited worlds in which everyone seemed aware of artifice.

Stiller’s dilemma is that his world, whatever it is, doesn’t add up. He works for Vollmer (Adrian Hoven), who has programmed Simulacron. Vollmer discovers something about his program before mysteriously disappearing, and Stiller believes he destroyed himself in despair. Then Lause (Ivan Desny), head of security for the firm, disappears. At one moment he’s at a party, speaking with Stiller, and at another moment he’s gone, his chair empty, — and, more alarmingly, no one there realizes he was there or has even heard of Lause. Nor is there any record of him.

Fassbinder’s camera massages his characters, gliding through elaborate spatial movements as if somehow their lives are connected in an occult way with the arrangement of space and time. The dialog is usually arch and ironic. The mannerisms — the smoking, the drinking, the sexual display — are affected. Recognizing such actors as Margit Carstensen (“The Bitter Tears of Petra Van Kant”), we realize we could be witnessing what they do, entirely arbitrarily, in this movie when they are not in that one. Fassbinder is their Vollmar. Perhaps Stiller represents all those fascinated by Fassbinder and how he lived and thought.

“World on a Wire” is slowed down compared to most Fassbinder. He usually evokes overwrought passions, sudden angers and jealousies, emotional explosions, people hiding turmoil beneath a carefully-posed surface. Here there’s less of that emotional energy. But if you know Fassbinder, you might want to see this as an exercise of his mind, a demonstration of how one of his stories might be transformed by the detachment of science fiction.

‘Got up went to Twickenham rehearsed until lunchtime — left the Beatles — went home, and in the evening did King of Fuh at Trident studio, had chips later.” So George wrote in his diary on Jan. 10, 1969. He returned a few weeks later, and then the band broke up for good after January. 1970.

George Harrison always seemed to me the unhappiest of the Beatles. Of course such an opinion is worthless. The Beatles are a screen upon which we project our own ideas, and George seemed the least willing to be projected upon. To be a member of that group, to have a hand in creating the pop music of our time most likely to be heard in later centuries, was to run the risk of losing yourself. George (we call them all by their first names) was the most defiantly individual.

In Martin Scorsese‘s documentary “George Harrison: Living in the Material World,” Harrison’s journey is traced as a search for himself in the tumult of incoming distractions. It is clear, as Paul Theroux points out in a recent article, that in Harrison’s life Scorsese saw much of his own reflected. They began as lonely, alienated children. They found escape and joy in music and film. They focused their lives on those arts. They resisted the possibility of being entirely consumed.

This is a long film, for which the expansiveness of cable television is appropriate. With “Material World,” which will debut over two nights on HBO, at 208 minutes, Scorsese has accomplished the best documentary that is probably possible. With George’s faithful second wife, Olivia, as his co-producer, he has assembled all the archival material, all the photos, all the film and video, transient and lasting.
With his own prestige, and because they loved George, Scorsese has been able to call on those who knew Harrison in all weathers: his son Dhani, Ringo and Paul, Yoko Ono, Eric Idle and Terry Gilliam, Eric Clapton, Jackie Stewart and many others.

“In my beginning is my end,” T.S. Eliot wrote. For George Harrison, raised in the working class in postwar Liverpool, one of those beginnings must have been his father’s vegetable garden. Victory Gardens, they were called during and after the war, and my own father had one, too. All through his life, as money and fame came to him, he found seeking houses with gardens.

English country houses are known for their gardens, but many of their owners never got their hands dirty. George was obsessed by the physical act of gardening, working with his land every day that he could. When you garden, you imagine its effect for those who will see your garden — for future generations and strangers. It is a gift you give to the land and to others, and it shows love of beauty in a pure form.

George’s professional life was caught up in a maelstrom almost from the day he first auditioned for John and Paul, playing “Raunchy” for them on the top deck of a bus. Scorsese’s film deals fully with the rise of the Beatles, when pop stardom was transformed into a great deal more, because it quickly became obvious that the Beatles were extraordinary.

Paul and John were the composers of most of the great Beatles hits. George wrote hundreds of songs, but somehow they kept being squeezed out of albums and not included on show lists. There is an invaluable scene here showing him in an argument with Paul. His songs were not valued as he thought it should be, and after he struck out on his own, we heard much more of his work.

Searching for inner quiet in the chaos of stardom, he found himself drawn to Eastern religion, and was instrumental in bringing the Beatles under the influence of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and A.C.
Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada. He joined the Hare Krishna tradition and was a vegetarian from 1968 until he died.

George believed that a great purpose of life was to prepare oneself for death. With chanting and meditation, he turned inward. His serenity received a severe challenge when he and his wife were attacked by an invader in his home, and he was stabbed as they fought off the mentally disturbed man.
Thoughts of the murder of John Lennon must have struck him with great force. In 1997, he was diagnosed with throat cancer, which later spread to his lungs and his brain. He died in 2001.

All of this, and a great deal more, is covered in this respectful film. This is a more objective, less personal documentary than Scorsese usually makes. Considering its length, there isn’t much concert footage, and it focuses on archival interviews with George, news footage, and an impressive selection of talking heads.

Those who knew George loved and respected him. His use of LSD and other drugs is discussed, but he seems to have been seeking truth, not a high, and soon enough he was drug free and found his highs in spiritual practices. He left his music. Even now, there is something a little hidden and private about him. I suspect if we want to sense his presense, we should visit his gardens.

Jessica Alba, Joel McHale, Jeremy Piven