I thought I'd be bored stiff watching a bunch of word geeks gather in Stamford, Connecticut, for the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament. Boy, was I wrong. There's more palm-sweating suspense in one minute of this baby than in all of The Omen. The tournament, begun in 1978, is the brainchild of Will Shortz, puzzle editor of The New York Times. The documentary, directed with speed and high spirits by Patrick Creadon, indulges in more than its share of Times ass-kissing, but Shortz makes an amiable focus for the brain-spinning fun on display. We meet puzzle constructors, such as Merl Reagle; celeb solvers, like Bill Clinton, Jon Stewart, Ken Burns and the Indigo Girls; and best of all, the word-mad contestants who flock to Stamford every March to test their wits against the clock and their own gifts for instant recall and pattern recognition. Ellen Ripstein, the Susan Lucci of solvers — it took her eighteen years to win the prize, in 2001 — is wonderfully appealing. As is Jon Delfin, the musician who holds the record with seven wins. But keep your eye on Trip Payne, Al Sanders and twenty-year-old Tyler Hinman, who take the 2005 tournament down to the wire in a finish that helps make Wordplay a heartfelt and hilarious surprise.

“The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie”

The opener off the Welsh group’s The Big Roar album was an epic one, but the band was worried that track had polarized fans. “The first song is eight minutes long,” Rhydian Dafydd, the Joy Formidable bassist, said. “If you did that in the Seventies people would be, ‘Whatever.’ You do it now, people think, ‘Holy s---!’ Some people think it’s the f---ing greatest track on the entire album, and some people think it’s f---ing boring. It’s that element of needing to challenge people.” The band concluded through the song’s lyrics that love was the “everchanging spectrum of a lie.”