Nine Lives (2005)

JOE MANTEGNA AND KATHY BAKER

With 2000's Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her, Rodrigo García demonstrated his fondness for small films about women's lives. Now he's taking nine of his self-dubbed ''miniature'' stories — each focused on two people and the confining, complicated relationship between them (Glenn Close and Dakota Fanning as mother and daughter, for example) — and filming each segment...in one take. ''Ultimately, the only thing that matters is, Is the piece moving, is the piece interesting?'' says García. ''So many times you go to movies and it's two hours of coming and going, and at the end you think, Well, that had a couple of good scenes, but I could have been told that in 15 minutes.''