Searching for Sugar Man

This captivating film is such a wild story that it has to be true; nobody would take it seriously if it were fiction. Director Malik Bendjelloul tells the tale with quiet precision, and before you can figure out who it's about and why we should care about a musician who never caught on, you're hooked. It helps that the music is soulful and piercing -- as several of the music industry executives say, it's hard to figure out why Rodriguez's albums flopped. (Therein lies a major hook for the movie, though.) It's also easy to see how his songs of quiet strength and gentle rebellion caught on in South Africa during the apartheid years.

But that's just the foundation of this film. The real story is how a dogged music journalist tried to find out what happened to the mysterious Rodriguez, a man who had seemingly dropped off the planet. What happens next is heartwarming and uplifting, as we learn happens to someone who discovers very late in life that he's not the failure he had thought he was.