I’ve never walked out of a movie feeling as happy as when I saw Amélie in 2001. Director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Delicatessan) had shown me a color-saturated, hyped-up Paris—the way his poetic protagonist Amélie (Audrey Tatou) would have experienced it—and the Parisians were even better-looking and sassier than I had hoped. More importantly, Jeunet’s writing was delicate and dark. As a little girl, Amélie imagines rabbits in the clouds, slips her hand deep into barrels of dried beans for the feel of it, and in a fit of naughtiness, punishes a neighbor who berates her by disconnecting his antenna at key…

In the film I Am Because We Are, Madonna reflects on cultural traditions and antiquated laws fueling Malawi’s epidemic number of AIDS patients and orphans:“On the one hand you could come to Malawi and say, ‘wow,’ these people are so caught up in these traditions that are thousands of years old. If only they could understand what I understand, and then they could fix everything. But on the other hand, there are so many things I’d never want to change. The people who live here are amazing. In spite of all the hardships and devastation, they have a sense of…