This debut film from Montreal filmmaker Kim Nguyen follows the heart-wrangling story of Komona, a 14-year-old child soldier who escapes the army with an older albino soldier. It's an impossibly tragic story that is one of the few movies to grapple realistically and artistically with one of the great atrocities of our age.

Jafar Panahi is a filmmaker from Tehran who was put under house arrest and forbidden from making films. He managed to do so anyway, however, by shooting his own life on an iPhone and submitting the resulting documentary into the Cannes Film Festival by hiding it in a cake. It's a stirring, poignant meditation on one man's growing despair, the force of art and the power of film.

Supergroups are generally setups for disappointment, but this collaboration of Thom Yorke (Radiohead), Flea (Red Hot Chili Peppers), Nigel Godrich (legendary producer), Joey Waronker (Beck and R.E.M.) and Mauro Refosco actually delivers on the potential of the lineup behind it, and in some unexpected ways. It sounds like music rom the future, it sounds like nothing you've ever heard before, and scratches an itch you didn't know you had.

Marisa Silver's new novel attempts to fill in the many, many blanks left in the wake of one of America's most iconic photographs: Dorothea Lange's 'Migrant Mother.' The shot became the Great Depression's most enduring impression, but little is known of the subject herself, her children or her harrowing plight. Silver's new novel is no idealized, uplifting take, but instead, a square-jawed look into the heart of a nation's most trying years. It does a service to the picture itself, and that is no mean feat.

HBO's new miniseries stars the world's fastest rising fast-rising star, Benedict Cumberbatch (you know him as Sherlock and will know him as the baddie in this summer's new Star Trek outing). In this, however, he plays someone more subtle and refined than either of those roles. He's the lead in this adaptation of a series of novels by Ford Madox Ford, and early buzz is terrific.