The festival has drawn stars including George Clooney, Meryl Streep, Woody Harrelson, Alan Rickman and Sigourney Weaver to promote their work. Nineteen films are competing for the Golden Bear, to be awarded on Feb. 18.

One of them is ``A Prairie Home Companion,'' in which Altman does away with an American institution by imagining the last night of Garrison Keillor's country-music radio show after three decades on air. Keillor wrote the script and plays himself.

He's joined by Streep and Lily Tomlin as Yolanda and Rhonda, the two remaining members of a four-sister country quartet; Harrelson as one half of a cowboy duet that specializes in coarse jokes; and Kevin Kline as Guy Noir, a dim security guard who sees himself as a Chandleresque detective hero and has the similes and hyperbole to match.

Add to this mix a mysterious, beautiful woman (Virginia Madsen) and Tommy Lee Jones as the sinister businessman who has bought the theater from where Keillor broadcasts, and the result is classic Altman: A collage of colorful characters and dry, irreverent humor. It leaves the audience with a sneaking suspicion that the people involved in the film had even more fun making it than it was to watch.

With a cast from Korea, Japan and China, director Chen Kaige needed three or four interpreters on the set during the making of ``Wuji'' (``The Promise.'') That wasn't the only expense: The film cost $30 million, making it the priciest Chinese movie ever made, according to the producer.

It looks it. ``Wuji'' is an opulent fantasy film with computer-generated special effects, extravagant battle scenes, dazzling costumes and top stars from across Asia.

It evokes a land where gods and humans lived together and follows the tale of Qingcheng (Cecilia Cheung), who, as a child starving among the corpses on a battlefield, makes a pact with a goddess that she will forgo the love of any man in return for riches and adulation.

The story fits a familiar pattern: Good prevails against evil and the princess eventually finds the hero who saved her life and can reverse the spell against her. ``Wuji'' is a feast for the eyes -- not for the intellect.

Of the four German films in competition, the heaviest- hitting in terms of the talent involved is ``Elementarteilchen'' (``The Elementary Particles'').

Director Oskar Roehler transposes French author Michel Houellebecq's scandal-provoking novel of the same name to Berlin at the beginning of the 21st century.

Michael (Christian Ulmen) is a mathematical genius leading a monastic existence. Sex-obsessed Bruno (Moritz Bleibtreu) is a high-school teacher who visits brothels and fantasizes about his pupils, even exposing himself to a schoolgirl in the classroom.

The brothers each get a fresh chance at love. Michael's childhood friend Annabelle (Franka Potente) re-enters his life. At a hippie summer camp, Bruno meets Christiane (Martina Gedeck), a woman who encourages him to live out his sexual fantasies by taking him to orgies.

``Elementarteilchen'' is a bleak portrayal of a society so obsessed with individual fulfillment that people are almost incapable of forming couples, let alone families. While Roehler has softened the novel's ending to avoid Houellebecq's dark conclusions about society's incapacity to reproduce without cloning, he leaves only one of the four main characters intact. One is dead, another infertile, a third insane.

The film isn't wholly pessimistic. It also pays tribute to the redemptive power of love for those who recognize it and have the courage to seize it.

This is cache, read story here