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.

"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. Serking melds right in with the littered streets and lost souls, a real man of the people. Suddenly you see it: he's got style. -Sean Axmaker 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. [+]

Shiro is a bondage master of exquisite skill who takes pride in his unique form of art. But when one of his models is found strangled and bound in his trademark style, he must track the killer to his lair - and escape the vengeance of the victim's lover, the leader of the treacherous Blue Dragon Gang!.

Marco Ferreri's greatest international success, "La Grande Bouffe" scandalized audiences when it was released in 1973. Audiences were shocked by its tale of four world-weary middle-aged men (superbly portrayed by Marcello Mastroianni, Ugo Tognazzi, Michel Piccoli and Philippe Noiret) who decide to gorge themselves to death in one final orgiastic weekend full of gourmet food, call girls and a hefty, lusty schoolteacher. This blackly humorous parable of modern society's collapse won the Cannes Film Festival's International Critics Award. The New York Times called it "vulgar vaudeville on an epic scale. a mordant, chilling, hilarious dirty movie. " Nearly 30 years later, it continues to challenge audiences' sensibilities and test the limits of shockability.

A statue of The Virgin has been stolen, and the girls of Police Branch 82 are on the case! When the thief offers them a cut of the ten million to join him, their response is rather pointed - like a knife in the back. Then again, their methods usually lack a certain subtlety. Shooting through a maze of civilians isn't exactly a maxim of law-enforcement handbooks. Neither is their combination of high heels and hair triggers, but as long as they keep the sizzle in their stakeouts, no one will question their results. Handcuffs aren't just for justice anymore.

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".