The gendarme Ludovic Cruchot is an ambitious man. So, when he is transferred to the laid-back post of Saint-Tropez, he sees an ideal opportunity to advance his career. Everything goes as planned until his daughter has a little too much fun on the beach.

A butt-kicking quartet of female ninja assassins are hired by a ruthless magistrate to silence his past conquests. Three former courtesans could ruin his chaste reputation and discredit his bid for political glory, so he puts a contract out on them. A hearty hedonist who despises the sanctimonious hypocrite sends his own supernaturally powered thugs to capture the women, and they battle in an erotic series of superhero skirmishes that mix martial arts and magic spells, where the sexy ninja warriors repeatedly sacrifice their clothes for the greater glory of duty. They meet their equal in a feisty blonde Mata Hari who creates Japan's first blue movie when she displays the magistrate's sexual shenanigans across the sky like a heavenly drive-in film. The film straddles the line between spirited spoof and misguided action adventure, which the tongue-in-cheek English dubbing ably undercuts with painful puns and innuendo, but it never loses its outrageous sense of low-budget spectacle. Full of audacious violence and gratuitous nudity and logic-bending twists, it's wacky and weird and nearly incomprehensible, but it's never dull. -Sean Axmaker.

Georges Franju brings a haunting poetry to this lyrical and horrifying 1959 French classic. Dr. Genessier (Pierre Brasseur), a famed plastic surgeon, lures a young woman to his secluded mansion with the help of his mistress Louise (Alida Valli), where he proceeds to remove their faces in an attempt to restore his daughter's scarred visage. Christiane (Edith Scob), disfigured in car accident caused by her guilt-ridden father, hides behind a spooky blank mask that exposes only her sad, lonely eyes, which seem to lose a little more life after each failed graft. Franju's cool presentation gives an unsettling edge to the picture, from the uncomfortably quiet family dinners to Christiane's hesitant explorations of her father's laboratory to the unflinching views of Genessier's bloody operations. Reminiscent of Cocteau's fantasy imagery in Beauty and the Beast, Franju creates an eerie poetry of the doctor's sadistic experiments, culminating in an astonishingly brutal and beautiful finale. The screenplay was cowritten by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, authors of the novels which became Les Diaboliques and Vertigo. Originally titled Les Yeux Sans Visage upon its original French release, the film was cut, dubbed, and renamed The Horror Chamber of Doctor Faustus for American distribution in 1962, but was restored years later for American re-release. -Sean Axmaker.

In 1965 six French New Wave directors took a Paris neighborhood and concocted a short sketch around it. The results sometimes favor character and story, and sometimes local flavor, but almost all are engaging in their own right. Jean Douchet and Jean-Luc Godard (repsectively) offer gloriously French slices of romantic comedy in the sexually open 1960s with "Saint Germain des Prés" and "Montparnasse et Levallois. " Jean Rouch's "Gare du Nord" is slight of substance but beautifully explores the neighborhood in a gorgeous tracking shot. Jean-Daniel Pollet's "Rue Saint-Denis" offers two delicious characters in a witty comedy of a mousy dishwasher who brings a brassy streetwalker to his dumpy apartment. Eric Rohmer's "Place de l'Étoile," a sometimes silly but deftly managed little comedy of a man who strikes a panhandler and is terrified he killed him, displays a giddy goofiness unseen in his later work. Claude Chabrol's shiver-inducing slice of urban life "La Muette" ventures outside the oppressive hallways and tiny rooms only once, at the end, as if to celebrate the escape of the rebellious boy from his bickering parents. The strongest of a solid collection, Chabrol's chilly view of dead-end relationships in a splintered upper class family concludes the otherwise lighthearted collection on a devastating, dark note. Released in France under the more evocative title Paris Vu Par. [+]

Who but Max Ophüls would recast the shot that started World War I as a romantic tragedy? Archduke Franz Ferdinand (John Lodge), heir to the court of Austria, is a young man entering the 20th century with new ideas-democracy figuring chief among them-much to the consternation of the king, who constantly sends him to the empire's farthest reaches. While in Czechoslovakia he meets the beautiful, strong-willed Princess Sophie (Edwige Feuillère) and falls deeply in love. The match is rejected by the court, but their love prevails through diplomatic compromise, social snubbing, and royal insult (in classic Ophüls fashion, we learn of their fate through conversations in opera boxes and servants gossiping behind closed palace doors). They are deliriously happy, until one fateful day, when Franz is sent to Sarajevo on the eve of their Independence Day in 1914. This is a classic Ophüls romantic tragedy: true love colliding with affairs of state and the cruel diplomacy of courtly behavior and royal hierarchy. As the tensions and angry uprisings spreading through the Austrian Empire explode into the first shots of World War I, Ophüls leaves us with the tragic story of innocent young lovers of the 20th century crushed by 19th-century intolerance. This was Ophüls's last film in France before fleeing for Switzerland and ultimately Hollywood, but he returned in 1950 to create his bittersweet romantic confection La Ronde. -Sean Axmaker.

Often considered the real beginning of the French New Wave movement, this 1958 film, the first feature by Claude Chabrol, is also-strangely-underrated on its own terms. The story of a theology student (Jean-Claude Brialy) who returns to his provincial home town for convalescence and reunites with his unhappy childhood friend (Gerard Blain), the film introduces many of Chabrol's pet themes and interests, particularly the Hitchcockian relationship between two characters who transfer or implicitly share a private experience or fate. Chabrol's consideration of that idea would naturally deepen and become more complex over the years (brilliantly in 1969's La Femme Infidele and Le Boucher), but at this career flashpoint it is a little overstated and obvious in religious allusions. Still, Le Beau Serge is an engrossing film with no shortage of dramatic momentum. The final act, driven by the main character's efforts at self-sacrifice, is as affecting as ever. -Tom Keogh.

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).

This controversial 1969 film directed by rebellious Russian filmmaker Sergei Paradzhanov (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors) chronicles the life of the 18th-century poet Sayat Nova, but in a most unconventional way. Paradzhanov seeks to portray the poet by different actors at various stages of his long life, from a poor childhood working on farms through early celebration as a poet to his self-imposed isolation as a cloistered monk. The unorthodox stream-of-consciousness style of the film highlights character over plot, using the poet's own words as a springboard for sumptuous images that chart the course of his life from birth until death, from his youth and the great love of his life through his struggles with religion and philosophy and the despair of old age. The loose, evocative style not only brings to life the poetry of Sayat Nova's body of work, but also brings great weight to the poetry of his life. Challenging, defiant, and unconventional, The Color of Pomegranates is a must for those searching for new and different forms of filmmaking. -Robert Lane.