With the long-take experiment of Rope still fresh in his mind, Alfred Hitchcock turned his attention to romantic melodrama: Under Capricorn, a novel of 1830s Australia. Having little of the usual suspense to rely on, Hitchcock used the elegant long-take method to draw out Ingrid Bergman's harrowing performance. As a fallen aristocrat who married a former stable boy (Joseph Cotten) and moved Down Under, Bergman gives a fine portrayal of a woman hemmed in by a sour marriage and a guilty secret. The actress also felt hemmed in by Hitch's elaborate camera movements; she hated them. This expensive picture flopped on its first release, but it has a hypnotic flow despite a tendency toward talkiness. Hitchcock fans will recognize, beyond the details of plot, a couple of the director's key motifs: the jaundiced view of marriage, and the anxieties underlying social status. And, of course, the worship of an actress. -Robert Horton.

Frequently given short shrift as a blue movie (which it is) and as mindless (which it isn't), director Adrian Lyne's follow-up to Flashdance (insert own joke here) is a thoughtful, smutty film about a bad sexual relationship. It follows the two-month affair between Elizabeth, an art-gallery dealer, and John, a Wall Street exec. The relationship spirals downward into raunchier sex (filmed, by the way, quite nicely) but principally is about two adults doing adult things but not acting anything like real adults. Attempts at actual human connection, about the longing to be "good," are present here and make this an above-average erotic film. Rourke is just honing his scumbag, bad-boy persona; but it doesn't overwhelm. Lots and lots of Kim Basinger. -Keith Simanton.

Lovely to look at, this story reveals little more than the characters' nude bodies. Like couples whose only attraction is physical, this has little to offer once it leaves the bedroom. We never learn the interests or inner workings of the lovers in question. They become nothing more than attractive bodies, which makes this little more than a shallow exercise in sexuality. The story is based on the controversial, and supposedly autobiographical, bestseller by experimental French novelist Marguerite Duras. It tells the story of a young French schoolgirl who becomes sexually involved with a sophisticated, older Asian man. Set in Indochina in the late 1920s, this is stunningly photographed and artfully directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud. That said, the lack of a more satisfying plot means this is merely tastefully produced soft porn. -Rochelle O'Gorman.