Based on a play by Athol Fugard, Tsotsi is South Africa's entry in this year's Oscar race for Best Foreign-Language Film. This remarkable movie means to shake you, and boy does it ever. In Johannesburg's Soweto townships, Tsotsi (slang for "thug") is a gang leader played with brutal force and unexpected tenderness by Presley Chweneyagae. After carjacking a Mercedes and shooting the woman who owns it, Tsotsi discovers the woman's baby in the backseat. His decision to care for the infant with help from a young mother (Terry Pheto) he threatens at gunpoint could have driven the film into crass sentimentality. Instead, writer-director Gavin Hood turns the film into a wrenching portrait of a character and a country at a crossroads. Chweneyagae's haunted and face is a window into a soul.

Peter Travers' new book, "1,000 Best Movies on DVD" is available now.

“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."