Cinephile.

If you were to take a behind-the-scenes look at any Broadway season, you could scarcely pick a more dramatic one than 2003-2004, which launched two megahits (Wicked and Avenue Q) and two high-profile stiffs (Taboo and Caroline, or Change).

Dori Berinstein's new documentary, Show Business: The Road to Broadway, follows all four shows from their humble beginnings to their sometimes ignoble ends, and the result is a backstage pass that proves utterly absorbing.

Each of the musicals looked like a big gamble as the season began, and Berinstein's impressive access captures every last anxiety. The creators of Avenue Q wonder whether their show will have an audience when a critic sniffs, "It'll be gone by January," while the troubled Rosie O'Donnell-produced Taboo manages to sell more tabloids than tickets. Caroline, or Change has a book by Angels in America playwright Tony Kushner, but the producers fear that a downbeat musical set during the civil rights movement may not exactly pack in the tourists. Only the revisionist Oz musical Wicked seems a sure bet, but its massive budget and uneven out-of-town tryout send composer Stephen Schwartz into such paroxysms of worry that he has to flee New York on opening night.

Even Broadway neophytes will find these proceedings dramatic--the massive cost of mounting a musical has made such ventures so risky that some talent (most especially Taboo's Euan Morton and Caroline's Tonya Pinkins) worry they'll be swallowed up and spit out, while others, like the boys behind Avenue Q, find that their years of hard work have finally paid off. With all these memorable characters struggling to make it, Show Business could practically be a Broadway musical in and of itself.

If the bombast of the Great White Way isn't your taste, maybe the new movie musical Once will prove more palatable. This charmer (which was a wordof-mouth hit at Sundance) doesn't feature anyone spontaneously breaking into song, but it still uses music to underscore and comment on the budding relationship between a Dublin busker (Glen Hansard) and a piano-playing Eastern European immigrant (Marketa Irglova). As he teaches her the ballads he's penned and she tentatively meets his voice in perfect harmony, we realize that music is the only way these lonely souls can connect. The more they get to know each other, the more confident and flirtatious they--and their songs--become.

Alas, though the two make beautiful music together, each has a backstory that keeps them sadly off-limits. The only place they can form a perfect union is in their songs, and the lovely compositions (actually written by Hansard and Irglova) take on a yearning that seems all too real. Once is a simple story, neglecting to even give its characters first names, but that's part of why it works. The actors are as appealing and unadorned as their voices, and as a movie, Once sings.

Two very different women are crisscrossing France this season. The first is Fay Grim (Parker Posey), the eponymous heroine of Hal Hartley's sequel to Henry Fool. She's an unlikely choice to send to Europe on a dangerous mission of spying and reconnaissance, but Fay rationalizes it thus: At least it will provide a good opportunity to wear a daring dress. The film offers a similar chance for Posey to work her screwball chops, and when successful, it's a giddy romp. Unfortunately, Hartley sidelines his character during the sluggish second half, bogging scenes down in long stretches of exposition, to which Fay can only respond, "Oh. OK." I felt the same way, Fay.

Attacking things with greater gusto is Edith Piaf, played sensationally by Marion Cotillard in the new biopic La Vie en Rose. Nicknamed La Mome Piaf, which translates as "the sparrow kid" or "little sparrow," the songbird led a troubled life that transformed her into a difficult woman, though, as her most famous song said, she regretted nothing. Olivier Dahan's direction is sometimes overbearing, but it's fitting since Piaf herself was a tiny tornado, throwing epic tantrums as the attendants around her quivered. Talk about your mome wraths! Still, Cotillard's full-throttle performance is mesmerizing. Piaf's not an easy woman to spend over two hours with, but Cotillard makes her bearable.