Many anime fans acclaim writer-director Hiroyuki Yamaga's Wings of Honneamise as a masterpiece, but general audiences may react less enthusiastically. Honneamise is a small country in a parallel world very similar to Earth. Shiro Lhadatt, the least impressive cadet in the air force flight school, volunteers to become the first astronaut in a controversial space program. Training toughens his body, while the priggish evangelist Riqunni challenges him to discipline his spirit. In one distasteful sequence, Shiro attempts to rape her. The next morning he starts to apologize, only to have her apologize for braining him with a candlestick, a scene certain to infuriate feminists. Despite an invasion by a hostile country, Shiro gets into space and delivers a ponderous homily from his capsule. Wings was made by a group of young artists in 1987, and with a record- setting budget. Art director Hiromasa Ogura's lavish designs blend '80s high-tech with art nouveau, and Yamaga's leaden pacing gives viewers the time to study every detail. Fans of Honneamise acclaim it as a critical meditation on the illusions and follies of the human race, which suggests that profundity, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. [+]

Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall made screen history together more than once, but they were never more popular than in this 1946 adaptation of Raymond Chandler's novel, directed by Howard Hawks (To Have and Have Not). Bogart plays private eye Philip Marlowe, who is hired by a wealthy socialite (Bacall) to look into troubles stirred up by her wild, young sister (Martha Vickers). Legendarily complicated (so much so that even Chandler had trouble following the plot), the film is nonetheless hugely entertaining and atmospheric, an electrifying plunge into the exotica of detective fiction. William Faulkner wrote the screenplay. -Tom Keogh.

Something like a perfect artistic union is achieved in the major components of Paris, Texas: the twang of Ry Cooder's guitar, the lonely light of Robbie Muller's camera, the craggy landscape of Harry Dean Stanton's face. In his greatest role, longtime character actor Stanton plays a man brought back to his old life after wandering in the desert (or somewhere) for four years. He has a 7-year-old son to get to know, and his wife has gone missing. The material is much in the wanderlust spirit of director Wim Wenders, working from a script by Sam Shepard and L. M. Kit Carson. If the long climactic conversation between Stanton and Nastassja Kinski renders the movie uneven and slightly inscrutable, it's hard to think of a more fitting ending-and besides, the achingly empty American spaces stick longer in the memory than the dialogue. Winner of the top prize at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival. -Robert Horton.

Lawrence Kasdan's 1983 big-budget variation on John Sayles's The Return of the Seacaucus Seven finds a cluster of old college radicals-who have since gone on to sundry professions and various degrees of materialism-reuniting over the death of a friend. Both playful and thoughtful, the film represents Kasdan (Body Heat) at his most astute. The attractive cast meshes perfectly into a group of characters for which a former closeness is out of synch with their current lives, yet their warmth is enviable and inviting. The script may be a bit too glib, with many one-liners, but it is still a perfectly designed story with telling irony and no little passion. -Tom Keogh.

What is it about hitchhikers that makes them such a sure-fire bet for horror? This question is addressed in the final segment of Creepshow 2, another Stephen King-George Romero collaboration. "The Hitchhiker" is the simplest and best of the three tales on display here, with Lois Chiles as a cheating wife who just can't seem to get rid of a hitchhiker. no matter how hard she tries. The collection gets off to a slow start with "Old Chief Wood'n Head," a sleepy story of Native American justice. "The Raft" is a passable teens-in-peril number, but it worked better on the page than on screen. Romero adapted the King stories but emphatically did not direct, which accounts for the drop-off from the kicky fun of the first Creepshow. King appears as a dimwitted truck driver-a foreshadowing of Maximum Overdrive? In any case, this one's for diehard fans only. -Robert Horton.

The two most famous episodes of Kieslowski's 10-part series, "Decalogue V" ("Thou Shalt Not Kill") and "Decalogue VI" ("Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery"), were expanded to feature length for release as A Short Film About Killing and A Short Film About Love, but these original hour-long versions stand on their own as the most potent episodes of the series. In "Decalogue V," the faith of a young lawyer is shaken when he defends a man accused of the violent murder of a taxi driver. Like Tim Robbins's Dead Man Walking, it's a provocative attempt to reconcile the gap between murder and state-sanctioned execution, and Kieslowski pulls no punches on either side: the murder scene is excruciating in its relentless intensity. But as he looks through the eyes of the troubled attorney who suffers a crisis in faith, the film turns inward and becomes contemplative and personal. "Decalogue VI" is a touching and troubling story of a young, emotionally unstable postal worker who becomes obsessed with a promiscuous older woman. He steals her mail and peeps through her apartment window with a telescope, but when she returns the gaze the one-way relationship becomes much more complicated. Kieslowski gets under the skin of both characters as the older woman confronts the boy and shames him with loveless sex-and they come out the other end of the tale as humbled humans who take a harder look at themselves and a sympathetic second look each other. -Sean Axmaker.