Fados is Carlos Saura's art-gallery fête of a popular genre of Portuguese music whose influence can be traced to the Moors. This concert film blissfully synthesizes various modes of fado, but while Saura's accommodation of styles old and new represents a humane exercise, the Spanish director does not risk the fearlessness of Tony Gatlif's Vengo—not because Fados lacks a conventional narrative, but because a reverential Saura does not elucidate how fado music is an extension of a country's history and expresses a people's private needs. The closest he comes to such insight is a performer's stroll through a row of room-high panels onto which documentary snippets of modern Portuguese living are projected—or is this thrilling tableau simply an acknowledgement of the formalist Saura's agoraphobia?