A fitfully amazing, frequently disheartening hodgepodge of action, farce, and romance, slapped together as a costarring vehicle for three of Hong Kong's major movie stars: Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung (who also directed), and Yuen Biao. Its light-footed, try-anything spirit makes it consistently enjoyable, but these wonderful performers are working (to put it kindly) beneath their gifts. Chan plays a womanizing attorney who recruits arms-dealer Hung and madcap inventor Biao to dig up dirt on the corporate sleaze balls he's supposedly defending-industrial polluters (and heroin smugglers) whose effluents threaten the bucolic fish farm of a handsome widow woman. The trio doesn't have many collective scenes, so their Three Musketeers act never really gets off the ground. As always, the fights and stunt work are mind-boggling; the jaunty details are fun: Chan's flick-of-the-wrist trick with a fancy briefcase; Hung's deft run- through of a few choice Cantonese opera moves; and Yuen Biao's Olympic-level acrobatics on, around, and within an industrial steel-tube staircase. -David Chute.

Jean Renoir's love of the theatrical life was rarely more colorfully expressed than in this wry comedy, which is lit from within by the life force of Anna Magnani. The Golden Coach is set in a colonial town in South America, where a traveling troupe of actors arrives on the same boat that carried the local viceroy's overpriced gold-covered carriage. Magnani has a beau, and the viceroy and a celebrated bullfighter are quickly dazzled by her charms. Her presence soon becomes an affair of state, but Renoir leaves no doubt that he finds the affairs of the heart of primary importance. Most eloquent of all is the poignancy of Magnani's dilemma-that she is most alive when performing, that life can never equal the charge of applause and footlights. Within his proscenium frame, Renoir gears the movie to his leading lady, and hands her one of the great happy-sad final lines in cinema. -Robert Horton.

Lone-wolf gangster and yakuza outcast Riki Takeuchi decides to form his own mob: the Tokyo Mafia, a renegade outfit with a collective structure that thrives on the outskirts of the underworld. Takeuchi is a curious kind of thug with a peaceful approach to solving problems. Removing the engine of a rival's prize automobile, for example, is a unique way to send a message. In this direction, of course, lays madness as the city is divided into yet one more patch of territory and "Why can't we all just get along" becomes "This means war!" This slick but impersonal gangster thriller kicks off with a completely gonzo yakuza power struggle in a high-rise office that reaches its bloody climax when the offending soldier bites off his own finger, a rather savage twist on the traditional show of respect, but the movie quickly settles into just another production ground out to meet a quota. It's full of the requisite shootouts and gang fights, but the generic revenge plot lacks dramatic punch and memorable (or for that matter distinguishable) characters. It does, however, feature the swaggering confidence and smoldering star power of Japanese action heartthrob Takeuchi, who commands the screen whenever he appears. -Sean Axmaker.

Though he had forced his way into French film culture by working entirely outside his country's studio system in the 1940s and 1950s, by the 1960s director Jean-Pierre Melville was working with larger budgets and well-known actors such as Jean-Paul Belmondo, star of Le Doulos. An extension of Melville's fascination with the existential milieu of American gangster films, Le Doulos presents New Wave icon Belmondo as Silien, a man newly released from prison and by reputation a professional informer. A figure, then, of possible duplicity and ambiguity, Silien is the perfect Melvillian hero, difficult to read but propelled by internal forces manifested as direct action. Maintaining friendships with both cop and crook, Silien's notoriety as a "finger man" who informs on the latter is underscored when one acquaintance, a police inspector (Daniel Crohem), waits in ambush for another, a burglar (Serge Reggiani), to perform his next job. But did Silien actually rat out the fellow? Melville pushes the envelope of our perceptions by making it appear Silien did, and then goes through the tale again to reveal another story. A much darker film than his celebrated Bob le Flambeur, Le Doulos is an absorbing tale of a world that seems to exist between light and shadow. -Tom Keogh.

Thelma & Louise is a feminist manifesto writ large on the big screen, a smart and funny gender reversal of the standard Hollywood buddy formula, a road movie extraordinaire, with characters who became instant cultural icons. No matter how you define it, Ridley Scott's 1991 box-office hit pinched a nerve and made the cover of national news magazines for tweaking gender politics like no movie before or since. Callie Khouri's screenplay overhauls the buddy formula with its story about two best friends (Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis) who embark on a liberating adventure that turns into an interstate police chase after a traumatic incident makes both women into fugitives; they are en route to a destiny they could never have imagined. The perfect casting of Sarandon and Davis makes Thelma & Louise a movie for the ages, and Brad Pitt became an overnight star after his appearance as the con-artist cowboy who gives Davis a memorable (but costly) night in a roadside motel. -Jeff Shannon Directed by action master Ridley Scott (Hannibal, Gladiator, Black Hawk Down) from an Oscar(r)-winning* screenplay by Callie Khouri, Thelma & Louise is an "exhilarating" (The Washington Post), full-throttle adventure hailed as one of the best road movies of all time! Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis star as accidental outlaws on a desperate flight across the Southwest after a tragic incident at a roadside bar. With a determined detective (Harvey Keitel) on their trail, a sweet-talking hitchhiker (Brad Pitt) in their path and a string of crimes in their wake, their journey alternates between hilarious, high-speed thrill ride and empowering personal odyssey even as the law closes in. *1991: Original Screenplay.

Lone-wolf gangster and yakuza outcast Riki Takeuchi decides to form his own mob: the Tokyo Mafia, a renegade outfit with a collective structure that thrives on the outskirts of the underworld. Takeuchi is a curious kind of thug with a peaceful approach to solving problems. Removing the engine of a rival's prize automobile, for example, is a unique way to send a message. In this direction, of course, lays madness as the city is divided into yet one more patch of territory and "Why can't we all just get along" becomes "This means war!" This slick but impersonal gangster thriller kicks off with a completely gonzo yakuza power struggle in a high-rise office that reaches its bloody climax when the offending soldier bites off his own finger, a rather savage twist on the traditional show of respect, but the movie quickly settles into just another production ground out to meet a quota. It's full of the requisite shootouts and gang fights, but the generic revenge plot lacks dramatic punch and memorable (or for that matter distinguishable) characters. It does, however, feature the swaggering confidence and smoldering star power of Japanese action heartthrob Takeuchi, who commands the screen whenever he appears. -Sean Axmaker New from Asia Pulp Cinema! It^Rs suicide to defy Japan^Rs traditional yakuza. But a former mobster has founded the Tokyo Mafia, a renegade crime syndicate dedicated to vengeance and a new brand of lawlessness. Blood and bullets will explode over Tokyo tonight! Stars Riki Takeuchi (Blowback: Love & Death).