This is not a movie to see on an empty stomach. Writer-director Ang Lee's 1994 Oscar nominee tells a family story about a chef and his three daughters through the meals the chef prepares and serves his family. This touching, dryly funny story of a family coping with personal lives and the way those lives intersect with the family relationships captures a shift in generations in Taipei. The father, a famous chef who has lost his taste buds, still cooks, though he draws no pleasure from eating. His daughters, meanwhile, deal with both the disappointments and surprises of daily living and the way their adult lives compare to the expectations the widowed father had for them. A subtle, amusing-and mouth-watering-comedy of impeccable manners. -Marshall Fine.

An extraordinary and deeply moving film that retains much of its power since its original release in 1959, Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour is the story of a French woman (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese man (Eiji Okada) who become lovers in the city of Hiroshima, where the U. S. dropped a nuclear bomb to end World War II in the Pacific. Written by Marguerite Duras and juggled, as if by wandering thoughts, in chronology and setting by Resnais, the film reveals the miserable and mortifying experiences of each character during the war and suggests the obvious healing properties of their relationship in the present. An emotional allusion or two can certainly be made with the more recent The English Patient, but nothing can quite prepare one for Resnais's extreme yet intuitively accessible experiments in fusing the past, present, and future into great sweeps of subjectively experienced memory. Yet audiences have never had trouble relating to this bold milestone of the French New Wave, largely because at its heart is a genuinely affecting, soulful love story. -Tom Keogh.

Helvio Soto's dramatic re-creation of the military overthrow of Chile's freely elected leftist government in 1973 is a cousin to Alain Resnais's La Guerre Est Finie, Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers, and Costa-Gavras's Z and Missing; it's an unapologetically angry piece of political cinema decrying the brutal suppression of human freedom. Beginning with Allende's 1970 election, Soto painstakingly documents the conspiracy to end Chile's social reforms with a military coup headed by General Augusto Pinochet. It's hardly subtle: The pure-of-heart Marxist activists, idealistic students, and salt-of-earth working-class peasants heroically stand up to a conspiracy of corrupt businessmen, fascist military officers, and the American CIA in a fight that, we know from history, dooms them to martyrdom. Soto's tangled narrative timeline jumps back and forth without warning, a confusing design to say the least, and his portraits of the heroes and villains are little better than agitprop. Then again, this is less a history lesson than a political statement, and he pulls no punches in his damning accusations, from the greed of multinationals and American interests to the vicious executions of leftists, intellectuals, and artists in the wake of the coup. It's a gripping true story that will have most viewers just as angry by the final frames. As the ailing Pinochet tries to sidestep responsibility of human-rights violations under his rule, the film couldn't be more timely. The title, by the way, is a code used by the leftist defenders. -Sean Axmaker.

"Thoughtful, provocative, and highly original!"-Chicago ReaderA woman picks up men by threatening suicide. A man builds an airplane on his terrace. Another man is gradually eliminating words from his vocabulary. Welcome to the world of Last Images of the Shipwreck, from acclaimed filmmaker Eliseo Subiela (The Dark Side of the Heart, Man Facing Southeast). An insurance agent in a mid-life crisis is trying to finish a novel. Her stops a woman he thinks is about to commit suicide by throwing herself onto the tracks. They share a meal and he finds out that the suicide act is practiced to find customers. Believing that he has found the subject of his novel, he tries to pay for her story, and becomes emerged in her family's life. Last Images of the Shipwreck is an eye-opening film about the force of dreams and imagination. END.

Filmed on location in Russia and England, this informative and entertaining full-length feature film presents the fascinating life of the great ballerina, Anna Pavlova. This film presents her early years at the Imperial Ballet School, her work with dance world legends Diaghilev and Fokine, and highlights her triumphant world tour with her own ballet troupe. This is a lavish re-creation of the incredible life of the world's greatest ballerina. Starring Galina Beliaeva as Anna, with James Fox, Martin Scorsese, Roy Kinnear, and Bruce Forsyth.