In art-house territory, Jun Ichikawa's Tony Takitani is an exquisite Japanese movie with a minimum of dialogue, a continual voice-over narrative and carefully composed shots. The protagonist is a withdrawn illustrator who's cocooned against emotion by his solitude. When he marries a girl obsessed with clothes and shopping, he experiences happiness and misery for the first time; when she dies, he attempts to recapture these sensations by creating another woman in her image. Watching the movie is like reading a minimalist New Yorker short story and conjuring up pictures in one's mind. The film is, in fact, based on a New Yorker story by Haruki Murakami and has about it something approaching perfection.