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.

A curtain blows near an open window. A limp, crooked arm lays on the street, followed by motionless hands and the back of a head. Finally we see the dead body of a young woman (Dominique Sanda) and the crowd of feet that have gathered around, the scene of a suicide. Her story is related in flashback by her husband (Guy Frangin), a guilt-ridden pawnbroker who paces around her body lying in state. A couple like any other, they attend movies and theater, argue, make up, and make love. But director Robert Bresson shows us only the girl's sadness and systematic smothering under her husband's greed, jealousy, and increasing control. Even when the soundtrack erupts in peals of joy and laughter, such moments are left offscreen. It's Bresson's first color film and he mutes the colors to such a dull flatness that the interiors are like a dark, suffocating prison. Only in the sun do the screen and the girl spark to life. It's as rigorous as any of Bresson's works-the characters, tellingly, are not given names and there's a marvelous tension between the claustrophobic home life and the busy world of city streets and art galleries outside-but the picture lacks the understated beauty of his previous films until the climax. [+]

The Oscar®-nominated film Tristana continues a devastating critique of social convention by director Luis Buñuel (Belle de Jour, That Obscure Object of Desire). Beautifully photographed in Toledo, Spain, the story is splendidly acted by Catherine Deneuve (The Last Metro, Belle de Jour) and Fernando Rey (The French Connection), in perhaps their finest roles. Rey is Don Lope, a liberated but hypocritical aristocrat who seduces his beautiful young ward, Tristana (Deneuve). Given the opportunity, she flees with her lover (Franco Nero, Camelot), but illness forces her to return and, later, marry Don Lope. The result is a tense union in which Tristana slowly gains the upper hand.

Marco Ferreri's greatest international success, "La Grande Bouffe" scandalized audiences when it was released in 1973. Audiences were shocked by its tale of four world-weary middle-aged men (superbly portrayed by Marcello Mastroianni, Ugo Tognazzi, Michel Piccoli and Philippe Noiret) who decide to gorge themselves to death in one final orgiastic weekend full of gourmet food, call girls and a hefty, lusty schoolteacher. This blackly humorous parable of modern society's collapse won the Cannes Film Festival's International Critics Award. The New York Times called it "vulgar vaudeville on an epic scale. a mordant, chilling, hilarious dirty movie. " Nearly 30 years later, it continues to challenge audiences' sensibilities and test the limits of shockability.

Widely regarded as Kenji Mizoguchi's (Sansho the Bailiff, Ugetsu) best pre-war film, Sisters of the Gion marks the beginning of the acclaimed director's mature style. Filled with compositions as exquisite as they are realistic, the s.

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.

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.