Please don't bitch about not having six hours to watch this humane and heartbreaking Italian film that requires you to read English subtitles. If you saw Boogeyman, Hitch and Hide and Seek -- and the box-office figures say you did -- that would qualify as six hours wasted. The Best of Youth, directed by Marco Tullio Giordana from a warmly expansive script by Sandro Pertraglia and Stefano Rulli, is a gift -- an intimate epic to get lost in. It tells the story of modern Italy, from 1966 to the near present, through the lives of the Carati brothers, Nicola (Luigi Lo Cascio) and Matteo (Alessio Boni). As history passes -- the floods in Florence, the Red Brigades, Mafia scandals, political assassinations -- it passes through them. Nicola is the Romeo who becomes a selfless psychiatrist. He loves Giulia (Sonia Bergamasco), a radical who locks horns with Matteo, the idealist soldier turned angry cop. The acting is electric. By the end of this haunting, hypnotic film, you feel you have watched lives being lived, not just imagined.

“Is It True”

As the British Invasion reached its peak in 1964, Brenda Lee went from Nashville to London to record one of her hardest-rocking hits, her perky vocal backed by a stuttering, squalling guitar. That guitar was played by session musician Jimmy Page, yet to skyrocket to fame with first the Yardbirds and then Led Zeppelin. "She said to me, 'I've come here to make a record with the British sound,'" remembered producer Mickie Most. "She felt she wouldn't get the same sound in Nashville because they're only just catching up on the British beat group sound of about six months ago."