While The Godfather was making moviegoers an offer they couldn't refuse, La Vallée was wowing art-house crowds with its flower-powered search for paradise in the jungles of New Guinea. It's there that an adventurous diplomat's wife (Bulle Ogier), hoping to find the forbidden feathers of a rare exotic bird, embarks on a deeper, more personal quest when she encounters a makeshift family of hippies seeking an unmapped valley from which visitors are said never to return. Like the structurally similar cult films from its era (including Walkabout and Aguirre: The Wrath of God), La Vallée dazzled the post-'60s subculture with free-spirited adventure and enigmatic beauty, captured here through the peerless lens of cinematographer Néstor Almendros. The hippie vibe seems mildly dated but its sensual context is timeless, and a climactic encounter with the primitive Mapuga tribe retains an intense cross-cultural mystique. Pink Floyd's celebrated soundtrack is mostly heard as background ambience, but it effectively enhances the film's compelling atmosphere of mystery and expectation. -Jeff Shannon Lush, sensual, and aurally hypnotic, this renowned cult classic from Barbet Schroeder (Barfly, Reversal of Fortune, More, Maitresse) was shot by the legendary Nestor Almendros, and scored by Pink Floyd. Set in the rainforest of New Guinea, a restless diplomat's wife, played by Bulle Ogier (Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Maitresse), goes in search of a rare bird's priceless feathers. In the process she meets up with a group of hippies seeking spiritual and sexual enlightenment. Together they are transformed when they encounter the indigenous Mapuga tribesman and the secret "valley of the gods".

Jeremy Irons gives another superb and underrated performance in M Butterfly, an elegant adaptation of the Broadway hit by playwright David Henry Hwang. Irons plays a French diplomat in China in 1964 who falls in love with a star of the Beijing Opera, not realizing that the entrancing performer holds secrets that will ruin his life-that the singer is a spy for the Communist government is only the beginning of the diplomat's troubles. Though M Butterfly may seem like a departure for director David Cronenberg (best known for horror and science fiction flicks like The Fly and Scanners), the themes of desire and self-deception fit comfortably into his oeuvre, alongside his adaptations of difficult novels like Naked Lunch and Crash. M Butterfly, like the more popular movie The Crying Game, is a cunning examination of love and denial. Also featuring John Lone (The Last Emperor). -Bret Fetzer.

One wouldn't recognize Amazon Jail as being directed by the same man who made Bare Behind Bars, Oswaldo De Oliveira, as it has none of the campy charm inherent in the prequel. Edgar and Valena (Mauricio de Vallen and Elizabeth Hartman) run a slave trade peddling ladies who they've imprisoned in a corral. Deep in the Amazon, they are visited only by men who pay top dollar for these women, making it easy for this sleazy couple to lure females in by promising them jobs as tourist guides. Four prisoners gang up to destroy the entire enterprise, but that is where the similarities between Amazon Jail and Bare Behind Bars end. Bare Behind Bars flaunts sexy female prison guards, while the guards in Amazon Jail are obese, hairy, drunken, sweaty men. Prisoners in Bare Behind Bars wear no underwear and constantly strip for sex, while prisoners in Amazon Jail are dressed 90% of the time and are hardly ever aroused. Removing sex and nudity leaves little to get excited about. Impossible not to compare the two films, Amazon Jail measures up sadly against its predecessor, making it easy to choose when in the mood for a cheeky women-in-prison flick. -Trinie Dalton.

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.