Salma Hayek gives it her all playing Frida Kahlo, the Mexican artist known for her bisexual appetites, her substance abuse, her back injuries sustained in a bus accident, her stormy marriage to fellow painter Diego Rivera (a scruffy, splendid Alfred Molina), her affair with Leon Trotsky (a pinched Geoffrey Rush) and her refusal to tweeze her eyebrows.

Frida, with a script partly written by Hayek's boyfriend, Edward Norton (who does a cameo as Nelson Rockefeller), crams it all in. That's the trouble. Director Julie Taymor (Titus, Broadway's The Lion King) keeps everything lively and colorful, but this maverick is hamstrung by a script that seems determined to stop at all the big moments in Frida's life (she died in 1954 at age forty-seven) without giving anything time to resonate. Hayek fought hard for the role (J. Lo and — yikes! — Madonna wanted to play Frida), but her passion fights a losing battle with biopic conventions.

“The Pretender”

This song wasn't part of the planned track listing for 2007's Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace, and was put together in a day. "It happened after we recorded a lot of stuff," said Dave Grohl. Yet it ended up as the album opener and the lead single. Grohl called it "a stomping Foo Fighters uptempo song with a little bit of Chuck Berry in it." The singer hinted at the lyrics' political overtones: "Everyone's been f---ed over before and I think a lot of people feel f---ed over right now and they're not getting what they were promised."