This 1982, 180-minute television remake of the original MGM feature, produced 30 years before, is the rare makeover of a classic that works quite well under its own steam. Anthony Andrews plays the disinherited knight who returns from the Third Crusades and is determined to raise the ransom to free a kidnapped King Richard (Julian Glover). With his bid rebuffed by his estranged father (Michael Hordern), and the affection of the latter's ward, Rowena (Lysette Anthony), compromised, Ivanhoe looks toward the generosity of the beautiful Rebecca (Olivia Hussey)-whose father (James Mason) he rescued from anti-Semitic Normans-for help. But a plot by faithless friends to discredit Ivanhoe, and his subsequent partnership with Robin Hood (David Robb) to save the day, keep this story from slowing down even for a minute. Originally a miniseries, this production has enough breadth to provide lots of breathing room for the script and cast to mine all the drama they can from Sir Walter Scott's novel. This is also a great-looking movie, with wall-to-wall pageantry, superb costumes-the works. -Tom Keogh.

A landmark title in the evolution of CinemaScope, Bhowani Junction is a fascinating but exasperating instance of a provocative film running head-on into studio interference and censorship. This would be the next-to-last project in George Cukor's long history as an MGM director, and despite its rejection at the time, admirers regard it as one of his most personal achievements. What's irreducibly admirable is Cukor's sensuous embrace of India as both the film's location and its "major character. " With F. A. Young as cinematographer (six years before Young shot David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia), this director chiefly associated with intimate settings and soundstage productions created rich, gold-brown canvases surging powerfully with vast crowds and unrest. Ava Gardner plays a half-British, half-Indian woman trying to find an identity for herself at that moment in 1947 when Great Britain was preparing to withdraw from the country it had ruled for two centuries. Her dilemma is focused through her relationships with several men: a fellow half-caste (Bill Travers) who's been her longtime lover, a slimy British junior officer (Lionel Jeffries), a pure-blood Indian aspiring to make her his bride (Francis Matthews), and the senior British officer (Stewart Granger) whose fierce ambivalence must inevitably mutate into passionate love. If it's sensuousness you're after, you can do a lot worse than having the luscious Gardner at the center of your movie, and the actress responded beautifully to both the exotic setting and Cukor's direction. Alas, Granger was mostly a stick (Cukor wanted Trevor Howard), and the script is awful-structurally incoherent and endlessly recycling bald-faced declarations of the divided-ethnicity theme. [+]

This brilliant film manages to reinterpret the story of Victor Hugo's classic novel, critique it, and investigate the nature of art and life on top of that-all in three hours that zip past, fueled by the dynamic performance of French icon Jean-Paul Belmondo (Breathless, Le Doulos). In 1900, Henri Fortin (Belmondo) is wrongfully imprisoned for murder; his loyal wife is forced into menial labor and prostitution; then in the beginning of World War II, Fortin's son (Belmondo again) helps a Jewish family elude the Nazis, setting in motion his own imprisonment, escape, and adventures as a criminal. Not only is that just the first half of the movie, there are also the story lines of the husband, wife, and daughter of the Jewish family, who each have their own struggles. The conclusion is joyous and heartbreaking. Director Claude Lelouch (A Man and a Woman) handles the entire movie with supreme skill, humor, and compassion. -Bret Fetzer.

The third of a series of Swedish mysteries featuring small-town Police Inspector Kurt Wallander (based on the novels of Henning Mankell), this one drops the doughy, middle-aged crime solver in the midst of an international conspiracy. It all starts in South Africa, when a pro-apartheid conspirator sends a gaunt, steely-eyed former KGB assassin (icy Jesper Christensen) and a black hit man to Sweden to train for a unnamed killing. The sleepy little town gets a jolt when their hideout is destroyed in a fireball and the remains found in the ashes-a precision firearm, a sophisticated, high-powered radio, and a severed human thumb-lead Wallander back to South Africa. The scenes of beefy Nordic Wallander in a sea of black faces, appalled at the poverty and a little out of his element but always the egalitarian Swede, are among the best of the movie. Rolf Lassgård plays Wallander as a modest, amiable everyman and a dogged investigator tossed into an extreme situation, fumbling at a shootout and clumsily giving chase through frozen city streets but never shirking duty or danger. Director Pelle Berglund sets a deliberate, at times dawdling pace hampered by obscure side trips into Wallander's private life, but fills the film with a combustible conspiracy and terrific characters, notably Christensen's arrogant, icy killer and Basil Appollis's cool, charismatic South African police detective, John September. -Sean Axmaker.

A professional assassin from Chicago of Polish origin is commissioned by the Mafia to go to Odessa to kill a traitor who fled there. Enthusiastic welcome from the various Soviet authorities makes his mission almost impossible. After many adventures, shoot-outs, chases and brawls, his victim lands in prison, and he in a psychiatric hospital. English subtitles. Cast: Jerzy Stuhr, Galina Pietrowa, Liza Machulska 1989, Color. Running time: 108 mins.

Often referred to as one of the most beautiful movies ever made, this lushly photographed film established Agnes Varda (Vagabond, Cleo from 5 to 7) as one of France's most important directors. Upon its original release, Le Bonheur (which translates as "happiness") sparked controversy with the story of an amiable young carpenter who decides that he will be happiest with both a wife and a mistress. Though Francois adores his wife and children, his passion for a beautiful postal clerk leads to an adulterous affair and tragedy for his wife. Filled with warm colors, Renoir-inspired bucolic images, and Mozart music, Le Bonheur is a sensuous poem of a film that illustrates how the search for personal happiness can lead to gratification or destruction. Set in the Paris suburbs, this lovely tale of a tragic love triangle looks like an impressionist painting come to life, the delicately hued colors of the picturesque French countryside creating an impossibly idyllic existence belied by the churning drama underneath. A young carpenter with a loving wife and family falls for a pretty postmistress. To his bohemian philosophy it's perfectly natural to enter into an affair because it will only increase his happiness, but his wife is not so understanding. Agnes Varda creates a strange tension between her happy, smiling characters in their sun-drenched Eden and the melodrama and emotional conflict played out in that paradise, even transforming tragedy into an oddly happy ending, keeping her distance from her characters, neither judging nor encouraging them. The playful style echoes her New Wave compatriots with startling flashcuts, out-of-focus portraits, and silly word games played by both the characters and the director, but her aloofness creates a disconnection between the characters and their actions, as if they are not really responsible for the tragedies of their lives. Controversial at the time of its release, Le Bonheur remains one of the most visually beautiful films of the 1960s and a work that still offers a troubling but tantalizing dissonance. [+]

Following the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro's trusted comrade Ernesto Che Guevara found himself becoming a bureaucrat. Seeking a return to action, Che eventually traveled in secret to Bolivia in 1966, hoping to foment a revolution on the South American mainland that would spread throughout all of Latin America. This documentary, which relies greatly on a journal Che kept during his time in Bolivia, as well as interviews with contemporaries who fought in the hills with him, provides an insightful look at his thoughts during the last year of his life. Che's apparent intent in Bolivia was, of course, to copy the success of the Cuban Revolution, but the words of his journal, as read in the documentary, betray his increasing hopelessness. His band of guerrillas was tiny and hungry, often more concerned with killing birds for food than with any principles of global revolution. According to those who appear on camera to speak of Guevara's final days, it seems the peasants were terrified of getting involved. Tracking Guevara's movements through the Bolivian mountains, the documentary proceeds at a leisurely pace, but it also provides a great deal of information about Guevara's final days, leading up to his execution by Bolivian troops acting, some say, under the direction of the CIA. -Robert J. McNamara.