Helene is a good mother with a checkered past as a stripper and barmaid. She divorces her ne'er-do-well husband and her in-laws blame her for causing her husband's addiction and set out to remove their grandchild from Helene's custody. Thwarted by the courts, they hire a seedy penniless operative, Paul, to destroy her reputation. He moves into her rooming house and begins to insinuate himself into her life, hatching darker and more convoluted plots to implicate Helene. A harrowing thriller from France's master of suspense, LA RUPTURE ranks among Chabrol's finest works.

Kevin Whately (Inspector Morse, Peak Practice) stars as David Bruce, a newly prosperous gas Inspector who moves to London with his new wife and their infant daughter. Their new station in life affords them the luxury of a live-in maid named Jane.

Jeremy Irons gives another superb and underrated performance in M Butterfly, an elegant adaptation of the Broadway hit by playwright David Henry Hwang. Irons plays a French diplomat in China in 1964 who falls in love with a star of the Beijing Opera, not realizing that the entrancing performer holds secrets that will ruin his life-that the singer is a spy for the Communist government is only the beginning of the diplomat's troubles. Though M Butterfly may seem like a departure for director David Cronenberg (best known for horror and science fiction flicks like The Fly and Scanners), the themes of desire and self-deception fit comfortably into his oeuvre, alongside his adaptations of difficult novels like Naked Lunch and Crash. M Butterfly, like the more popular movie The Crying Game, is a cunning examination of love and denial. Also featuring John Lone (The Last Emperor). -Bret Fetzer.

The life of an English schoolmaster may sound like dry stuff, but To Serve Them All My Days finds engrossing drama and dry wit in the most ordinary of circumstances. David Powlett-Jones (John Duttine), a young Welshman, returns from the trenches of World War I disillusioned and suffering from shellshock. Accepted as a teacher at an elite boy's boarding school called Bamfylde, Powlett-Jones fears he won't last-but the faith of the headmaster who hired him (Frank Middlemass) proves well-founded. Powlett-Jones immediately flies in the face of convention, fighting with a pompous science teacher (Neil Stacy), speaking out in favor of socialist reforms, and finding a mixture of discipline and empathy with the boys he teaches. Over the course of his 20-year rise through the ranks of Bamfylde, he finds and loses love with several women (Belinda Lang, Kim Braden, and Susan Jameson); one of the greatest strengths of To Serve Them All My Days is how fully realized these women are, each strikingly individual and self-directed. The writing and acting are impeccable, always cutting to the most engaging aspect of every scene, yet grounding every conflict in a rich understanding of character and circumstance. Even the minor characters are made vivid and distinct, and the realities of life-politics, sex, mortality-are handled frankly and honestly. In fact, To Serve Them All My Days demonstrates the best aspects of a miniseries, taking the scope of 13 episodes to map in detail a human life, with all its victories and disasters. Truly a pleasure to watch; of particular note is Alan MacNaughtan as a sardonic fellow teacher, whose ironic observations and close friendship with Powlett-Jones give the series a good dose of both humor and compassion. Based on the classic novel by R. [+]

Paul (François Cluzet) and Nelly (Emmanuelle Béart) have what seems to be a storybook marriage. They love each other madly and have worked together to turn their little lakeside inn into a gorgeous resort getaway while raising an adorable son. But there's a problem: Paul is convinced Nelly is having an affair and his jealousy spins to insane proportions. Hallucinations and nightmares twist his dementia until he imagines her sleeping with every man in sight, and his obsessive spying turns Nelly's life into a living hell. Claude Chabrol (director of La Cérémonie, known as the Gallic Hitchcock for his cool thrillers of obsessive love and homicidal passion, created his film from an original unfilmed screenplay by Henri-George Clouzot (Les Diaboliques). He injects Clouzot's dark, misanthropic tale with a soupçon of Hitchcock's voyeuristic obsession, but ultimately makes the film his own with unexpected sympathy for Paul, whose pathological jealousy spins out of control in a chilling conclusion that leaves the viewers uncomfortably nestled in his madness. The film faced charges of misogyny upon release largely because Chabrol remained steadfast in his portrayal of Paul not as a monster but a victim of madness (somewhat at the expense of Nelly, an angelic sexpot whose loyalty and love is almost sacrificial), but ultimately that's what gives L'Enfer its unsettling power. -Sean Axmaker.

En esta divertida y realista historia Jorge Negrete representa el papel de un vagabundo con doble personalidad quien se encuentra con una necia y rica escultora (Gloria Marín) quien decide tratar de moldear a este hombre a su gusto como lo haría con cualquier obra suya, pero no se imagina las sorpresas que le esperan con este "Charro Mexicano" IN SPANISH NO SUBTITLES

All singing! All dancing! All proletariat! Who knew the Soviets made musicals? The evidence is there in Dana Ranga's giddy documentary, which offers clips from dozens of musicals made between 1930 and 1970 from the Communist bloc. From rural Russian ditties with synchronized tractors and overall-clad farmers singing about the five-year plan to backstage melodramas and East German beach movies, this documentary reveals an entire hidden genre of Communist cinema. What makes them so fascinating is the Soviet bloc's uneasy truce with the musical, by its very nature a celebration of love and romance and plenty. How do to you turn that into a message of service and sacrifice? They tried, certainly-Stalin loved musicals-and throughout the 1930s and '40s Soviet studios created Busby Berkeley-like production numbers on assembly lines and sent field hands into song with synchronized pitchforks (no dancing allowed on the job, according to the censors) while harvesting their fields. Later musicals show more cinematic sophistication and even a winking playfulness with the genre. The clips are marvelous-some surreal, some dynamic and delirious, and some simply absurd-but to Ranga they are more than simply kitsch. Interviews with the creators and the audiences of these films reveal how much these utopian bursts of energy and joy were treasured in dreary times. Ranga creates a nostalgia for a giddy, goofy genre that this country never even knew existed. Film history has rarely been so much fun. -Sean Axmaker.

One of Italy's most commercially successful films, Bitter Rice packed theaters around the world despite being banned by the Legion of Decency in the United States. Though intended as a scathing indictment of harsh conditions endured by women laboring in Italy's rice fields, the film's enormous popularity was largely attributed to the erotic appeal of young Silvana Mangano. The former Miss Rome became a star overnight for her sultry debut as an impoverished yet voluptuous laborer who turns down the chance to emigrate to a better life in South America in favor of a steamy affair with her best friend's lover. Ironically, Marxist writer and director Giuseppe De Santis, one of the founders of Italy's post-World War II neorealist movement, virtually brought the genre to an end with Bitter Rice by demonstrating that sex was a far greater draw than social criticism.

Noel Coward's favorite play was certainly a departure for David Lean, best known for adapting Dickens in the '40s. While it's the director's only comedy, the result is a delightful gem. Rex Harrison is an acerbic author haunted by the ghost of first wife Elvira (Kay Hammond), who tries to seduce him all over again. This throws his second wife (Constance Cummings) into a panic, second-guessing her lack of passion. It's a celestial sex romp that hasn't lost its bite. Margaret Rutherford, as always, steals the show as the sardonic medium. -Bill Desowitz.