Made in 1975 and directed by Paul Verhoeven, Katie Tippel ("Katie the Streetwalker") is a handsome period drama set in 19th-century Holland, based on a true story. The second eldest daughter in a poor, Friesland family who move to Amsterdam, Katie (Monique Van de Ven) must find whatever work is going to make ends meet. She has already learnt to have no faith in her weak father. Now, as she enters a succession of jobs in which she experiences both exploitation and sexual harassment, she learns that men want her for only one thing. Duly, at the behest of her own mother, she enters prostitution. However, when she becomes model to an artist she is finally able to escape the poverty trap and ascend the social ladder, particularly when banker Hugo (Rutger Hauer) takes her as his lover. All this is set against a backdrop of social foment as the workers' impatience at poor social conditions increases. Although director Verhoeven, as well as Hauer and cinematographer Jan De Bont eventually became involved in mainstream American movies, Katie Tippel is very much of the European school of film-making, episodic and harsh in its depiction of everyday poverty. The dead puppy at the beginning definitely marks it as contrary to Hollywood's near-zero canine mortality rate. The sexual scenes are graphic to the point of gratuitousness but always grimly non-titillating. [+]

The best part of the video game Tekken has always been an animated prelude that sets the stage before you start drop-kicking your opponent's head. So it seemed natural to extend it into a movie, brought to life with artful anime illustration and an alt-rock soundtrack. All of your favorite Tekken characters are here as they battle their way through each other to win the Iron Fist tournament, where fighters of unequaled strength from around the world gather to test their strength in the gladitorial arena. Of course, intrigue and danger abound, with professional assassins, champions of justice, and those whose prowess earns them fear and respect facing off. Also, many opponents have deadly hidden agendas. Watching this film is perhaps not as visceral as actually executing a flying face-smash on your own, but an anime thrill nonetheless. -Tod Nelson.

Pedro Alomodóvar made this misfired, rambling comedy about a romance novelist (Marisa Paredes) whose crumbling marriage has left her depressed and unable to work. At a low point, she writes a scathing indictment of her own books (which are penned under another name), with no one realizing critic and author are one and the same. Almodóvar (Law of Desire) has the start of a great idea here, and for once, he's direct about his sympathy for a character. But nothing else about The Flower of My Secret is so clear. Despite its unusual allegiance to the straightforward "women's films" of the 1950s, this movie blows it by becoming needlessly complicated over extraneous junk, forcing one to grope in the dark for Almodóvar's point. -Tom Keogh.

Stacey Keach does a star turn as "Papa" Hemingway in this 1988 made-for-television saga, working his way through nearly five on-screen hours of womanizing, drinking, and big-game hunting-and even manages to squeeze in time to write a few canon-bound books. Although director Bernhard Sinkel's epic look at the writer suffers from a lethargic pace and highly suspect (read: glamorized) portrayals of such luminaries as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound, the film, based in part on Hemingway's letters, does offer abundant biographical glimpses into Hemingway's fabled history. Keach's portrayal, while well short of inspired, suits the medium, and won him a Golden Globe Award to boot. The film was shot on location around the globe, so Hem enthusiasts will at least be treated to a visual survey of the legendary writer's many habitats. Unfortunately, the extra features on this two-disc set are extraordinarily meager; the "Hemingway Biography" and "Keach on Hemingway" segments are merely a few screens of text outlining a scanty overview of these subjects. Nonetheless, as the only biopic available, Hemingway will no doubt be of interest to insatiable Hemingway and Modern Lit aficionados. But for a livelier, more entertaining look into the writer's life, a beaten paperback copy of A Moveable Feast will do. -Karl Wachter.

In the hands of Kenji Mizoguchi (Ugetsu, Sansho the Bailiff), the simple story of a man redeemed by a woman's love is no less than profound. The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum pulls the viewer into a world of pure love, intense hear.

Tom is T. S. Eliot (Willem Dafoe), the St. Louis-born poet who tried to turn himself into an Englishman. Viv is his wife, Vivienne Haigh-Wood (Miranda Richardson). She's got money, which allows him to give up his job and focus on poetry. She urges him on, promotes him to the Bloomsbury group (which adopts him but looks down its nose at her), and begins to go slightly crazy. Is it Eliot's chilly demeanor (in a terrific repressed performance by Dafoe) that's driving her nuts, or something else? In fact, she suffers from misdiagnosed physical ailments, and a combination of drugs and alcohol send her around the bend. It's hard to get emotionally involved in Dafoe's Eliot or to really plug into this story, though Richardson's passion nearly pulls you in. -Marshall Fine.

This film contains graphic violence and brief nudity. Known as Gunnm in Japan and then Battle Angel Alita to Western manga readers, Battle Angel (in all of its incarnations) is now part of the canon of Blade Runner-inspired anime cyberpunk. The film version follows a "Hunter Warrior" and cyborg healer named Ido. Ido formerly lived in the floating land of Zalem (Tiphares in the book), the paradise that hovers over the refuse heap of Scrap Iron City in which he now resides with his former lover, Chiren. In his travels as a bounty hunter (killing spine thieves in a world in which human nerve tissue has become the most precious commodity), Ido one day discovers and repairs the remnants of a cyborg whom he names Gally (Alita in the manga). Though possessing the body of a young woman, Gally embodies Ido's most sophisticated and lethal cybernetic skill. In the first episode on the DVD, "Rusty Angel," Gally challenges Chiren's own creation, Greweicia-a brain-eating gladiator-to a death match. In "Tears Sign" Gally discovers that her first love, Yugo, has put himself in the employ of the spine trader Vector so that he can earn his way, he thinks, to Zalem. Gally confronts her fellow bounty hunters to protect Yugo, only to watch him horribly wounded in a plot to capture her for Vector. Yukito Kishiro's finely detailed line drawings in the original manga (like a cleaner version of Miyazaki's style in the Nausicaa books) are impossible to translate into film. [+]

Originally released in 1991, the three-part OAV Detonator Orgun plays like a mixture of several popular sci-fi films. Tomoru, a teenage boy in the 24th century, is haunted by weird dreams partially based on the computer games he plays with his friends. He soon discovers he's telepathically linked to the mysterious mecha Orgun. Meanwhile, at the Earth Defense Force Intelligence Headquarters, Dr. Michi Kanzaki and supercomputer I-Zak decrypt a message from deep space that turns out to be the blueprint for Orgun's physical being. As they make these discoveries, an advanced race of aliens nears the Earth with plans to destroy it. Naturally only the combination of Tomoru, Kanzaki, and Orgun can defeat them. Director Masami Obari (Fatal Fury) handles the action sequences, space battles, and fist fights between giant robots with his usual skill. He's less successful at presenting Hideki Kakinuma's convoluted story, a needlessly complicated mixture of flashbacks, fantasies, quasi-religious mysticism, and warnings about the dangers of tampering with human evolution that is simultaneously too complicated and too simple for its two-and-a-half-hour length. There also seem to be problems with the translation: although Tomoru sees himself as a World War I-style pilot in his fantasies, he refers to his leather jacket as a "Luftwaffer uniform" (the Luftwaffe was the German air corps in World War II). [+]