Nanni Moretti (Italy-France)
After two diary films, Caro Diari and Aprile, Italy's Nanni Moretti offers a more conventional feature film in La Stanza del Figlio. In some respects, this film, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this year as best picture, is a superior movie-of-the-week about grief. But the handling of the material never feels manipulative, simply scrupulously accurate to the emotions involved. Moretti plays a psychiatrist who runs his provincial practice in middle-class comfort and and no more than the usual family tensions. Then his son is killed in a freak diving accident. From the details of the funeral, through the family's gradual acclimatization to its state of shock, the movie manages to be unrelenting yet essentially gentle. The family may be headed for disaster until they discover a letter sent to their son by a unknown girl. They arrange to meet her, in the blind hope that she can offer them some solace. - L.L.

(Thurs. Sept. 13, 9:30 p.m Visa Screening Room, Elgin; Sat., Sept. 15, 2:45 p.m., Uptown)