Never Forever (2008)

Writer-director Gina Kim helms this corker about the delicacy of marital infertility and sympathetic infidelity. Vera Farmiga (The Departed) plays Sophie, a Caucasian housewife married into a Korean-American family. With her husband unable to impregnate her, Sophie turns to a financially needy Korean immigrant (Jung-woo ha) for seeding sessions. What begins as prostitution inevitably evolves from physical to personal intimacy, creating a love-triangle crisis of emotionally epic proportions. For my money, Never Forever marks an improvement over Kim's self-consciously arty Invisible Light—here, fearless performances and incisive writing put adultery and even stalking into understandable and, yes, sympathetic contexts.