This stunner of a movie is so far under the radar you'll have to go to HBO to find it. Get crackin'. It's the hip antidote to multiplex junk such as Mad Money and Meet the Spartans. Susan Sarandon is at her scrappy, sexy best as tobacco heiress Doris Duke — think Paris Hilton with brains and genuine hotness. And this is Ralph Fiennes like you've never seen him, as Bernard Lafferty, a secretly alcoholic, furtively gay Irishman who stumbles into a job as her butler. The time is 1987. Six years later, Doris is dead and Bernard, out of rehab, controls her billion-dollar estate. Was it murder? So went the rumor, but the charges didn't stick. The deft script by Hugh Costello cheerfully admits, "Some of the following is based on fact and some of it is not." In reality, Bernard resembled Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Doris looked like, um, hell. But you won't care. Get Emmys ready for Sarandon and Fiennes, who transcend everything tabloid in the material. They create an intimate love story that manages to be hilarious and heartbreaking, often at the same time. How fitting that they duet so movingly on an S&M ballad from Peggy Lee (Bernard's former employer) called "I Love the Way You're Breaking My Heart."

All praise to director Bob Balaban, who doesn't miss a beat or a nuance in bringing us in, close as a whisper, to what might have been.

“All Along the Watchtower”

Jimi Hendrix got hold of Bob Dylan's early John Wesley Harding tapes and in late 1967 recorded a version of "All Along the Watchtower" with the Experience in London. Dissatisfied with that first development, Hendrix brought those tapes with him to New York in early 1968 when he began work on Electric Ladyland. Eddie Kramer, Hendrix's engineer at the time, told Rolling Stone that Hendrix "was still looked upon by his basically white audience as the mammoth black guitar hero. There was a constant fight within him to expand himself." Hendrix's successful take on Dylan's work has long been recognized by the songwriter. "I liked Jimi Hendrix's record of this and ever since he died I've been doing it that way," Dylan wrote in the liner notes to his Biograph box set. "Strange how when I sing it, I always feel it's a tribute to him in some kind of way."