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. [+]

Let's face it: No one is usually checking a Jet Li movie for the verbal sparring. In Kiss of the Dragon, Chinese undercover agent Li chops his way through Paris after he's framed in some sketchily defined drug sting operation. The fight sequences are tough and quite brutal, and the over-the-top finale is arguably worth the price of admission, wherein an implacable Li takes on the entire Paris Police Bureau, working his way up toward police chief Tchéky Karyo's office through cops, a pair of peroxide-blond twin henchmen, and a whole class of kung fu cadets. Co-screenwriter Luc Besson (La Femme Nikita) should know by now what makes for a nifty genre piece, but the woeful dialogue is a shame, and there aren't nearly enough action sequences to get your blood boiling. Poor Bridget Fonda gives it the old school try in a thankless role as an ex-junkie prostitute from the Midwest whose young daughter is being held captive by duplicitous police chief/drug lord/pimp Karyo (who fairly inhales the scenery). Director Chris Nolan might have pushed further the strangers-in-a-strange-land camaraderie between Li and Fonda, but the script still would've sunk him. -Steve Wiecking.

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.

Few directors polarize audiences like Peter Greenaway, a filmmaker as influenced by Jacobean revenge tragedy and 17th century painting as by the French New Wave. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover is both adored and detested for its combination of sumptuous beauty and revolting decadence. A vile, gluttonous thief (Michael Gambon, The Singing Detective) spews hate and abuse at a restaurant run by a stoic French cook (Richard Bohringer, Diva), but under the thief's nose his wife (the ever-sensuous Helen Mirren, Prime Suspect) conducts an affair with a bookish lover (Alan Howard, Strapless). Clothing (by avant-garde designer Jean-Paul Gaultier) changes color as the characters move from room to room. Nudity, torture, rotting meat, and Tim Roth (Reservoir Dogs) at his sleaziest all contribute the atmosphere of decay and excess. Not for everyone, but for some, essential. -Bret Fetzer.

Abel Gance's 1927 masterpiece is absolutely indispensable for silent-film buffs or anyone interested in classic world cinema. From the future emperor's first strategic victory, a schoolyard snowball fight, to the climactic invasion of Italy, Napoleon truly rules! This is no static, antiquated relic. Among Gance's innovations was to free the camera (for one battle scene, he had it mounted on horseback!). The film's justly celebrated climax features a triptych of synchronized images that anticipates by more than 30 years Cinerama and widescreen. But more than a triumph of filmmaking, Napoleon is a triumph of film restoration and was a boon to the vital cause of film preservation. Gance's movie was long thought lost. But historian Kevin Brownlow, with the cooperation of film archives from around the world, spent more than a decade painstakingly reassembling it. Francis Ford Coppola's name (not to mention a reported quarter of a million of his dollars) helped find Napoleon the audience this film so richly deserves. The rousing score was composed by Coppola's father, Carmine. Viva la Gance! -Donald Liebenson.

Charles Serking, loosely based on the infamous poet Charles Bukowski, rejects a conventional lifestyle to journey through the underbelly of Los Angeles in "Tales of Ordinary Madness. " He indulges an insatiable appetite for sex and booze in what the Hollywood Reporter calls "a cinematic walk on the wild side. " Directed by Marco Ferreri, this 1981 film won four Italian Academy Awards and the San Sebastian Film Festival Grand Prize. Compelling, sometimes shocking, and explicit. "Style is the answer to everything," intones skid row poet Charles Serking, played by the suitably grizzled and worn Ben Gazarra, to his somnambulistic audience. Serking is, of course, a not-at-all veiled stand-in for beat legend Charles Bukowksi, whose autobiographical short stories were the basis for this film. But Serking, in many ways, comes off more like a gin-soaked fantasy of a skid row Hemingway whose sports of choice are alcohol, women, and sex. Behind the salt-and-pepper beard and rummy eyes lies an actor too poised to allow himself to fully sink into the alcoholic sloppiness that Mickey Rourke so easily brought to the screen in the less pretentious and more concise Barfly, which Bukowski himself scripted. But if Italian-born director Marco Ferreri stumbles over the self-conscious dialogue, he's right at home capturing the seedy atmosphere of dim, run-down apartments and underlit bars in the real Hollywood Serking calls home. When Serking's fling with the stunning, self-mutilating Italian hooker Cass (Ornella Muti, who puts her oversized safety pin to some rather startling uses) becomes too emotional, he takes the anonymous safety of the streets-crashing in a flophouse, passing around a bottle with a listless knot of derelicts. [+]