Michael Gambon recreates his celebrated role as best-selling author Georges Simenon's famous pipe-smoking Parisian sleuth. Set against the bars, boulevards and back streets of post WW II Paris, the cases Maigret must solve are more varied than ever, ranging from murder in a sleazy nightclub, to an intense political thriller and even a macrabe force. Once again, Chief Inspector Maigret is backed by his hand picked team of detectives, but above all, his own acute observation of people and matchless understanding of human nature are the keys to success.

An extraordinary and deeply moving film that retains much of its power since its original release in 1959, Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour is the story of a French woman (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese man (Eiji Okada) who become lovers in the city of Hiroshima, where the U. S. dropped a nuclear bomb to end World War II in the Pacific. Written by Marguerite Duras and juggled, as if by wandering thoughts, in chronology and setting by Resnais, the film reveals the miserable and mortifying experiences of each character during the war and suggests the obvious healing properties of their relationship in the present. An emotional allusion or two can certainly be made with the more recent The English Patient, but nothing can quite prepare one for Resnais's extreme yet intuitively accessible experiments in fusing the past, present, and future into great sweeps of subjectively experienced memory. Yet audiences have never had trouble relating to this bold milestone of the French New Wave, largely because at its heart is a genuinely affecting, soulful love story. -Tom Keogh.

The Oscar®-nominated film Tristana continues a devastating critique of social convention by director Luis Buñuel (Belle de Jour, That Obscure Object of Desire). Beautifully photographed in Toledo, Spain, the story is splendidly acted by Catherine Deneuve (The Last Metro, Belle de Jour) and Fernando Rey (The French Connection), in perhaps their finest roles. Rey is Don Lope, a liberated but hypocritical aristocrat who seduces his beautiful young ward, Tristana (Deneuve). Given the opportunity, she flees with her lover (Franco Nero, Camelot), but illness forces her to return and, later, marry Don Lope. The result is a tense union in which Tristana slowly gains the upper hand.

Here's the triumphant, true-life story of an Olympic hero. and just how far he came in order to become the fastest Olympic long-distance runner the world has ever seen! Raised under oppressive conditions in one of the world's poorest countries, the Ethiopian boy named Haile Gebrselassie was born to run! When he wasn't laboring in his father's fields, young Haile would be running: the six miles to school and back, while doing chores, or simply for pleasure at the end of a long, hard day! In an inspirational and artfully crafted motion picture from heralded filmmaker Leslie Woodhead, the climactic moment comes as the unstoppable Haile chases down his lifelong dream in a stirring Gold Medal performance at the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games! This film about Ethiopian distance runner Haile Gebrsellasie, who won gold at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and is considered one of the greatest runners of all time, is a dramatization that often appears to be a documentary. Beautifully photographed, the footage shot in Haile's native land is often spectacular enough to make you think you're watching a National Geographic special. Haile's young life, such as a scene when his family is listening to a news report about warfare in Ethiopia and a report comes on about the 1980 Olympics, is portrayed with apparent accuracy, but not without a great deal of drama. There are many scenes of Haile running, past wildlife in the countryside or through crowded city slums, and while this gives what must be an accurate idea of him developing his athletic regimen, this is also not terribly dramatic on camera. Eventually, Haile is shown racing in Atlanta, valiantly overtaking all competition; his family back in Ethiopia is shown gathered around a television set, jubilantly watching his triumph. And while there's no denying that this is a touching and inspiring human story, the slow pace of the presentation tends to work against the inherent drama. -Robert J. [+]

John Boorman's 1985 South American epic never quite gets all of its gears working simultaneously, but it remains an often startling work with an extraordinary performance by the director's own son, Charley Boorman. Powers Boothe plays an American engineer working on a dam project in Brazil. When his young son is seemingly absorbed one day into the dense perils and beauty of the Amazon rain forest, Boothe's character goes on a protracted, 10-year search for him. In the interim, Boorman puts his full storytelling powers to work by characteristically exploring the arcane rhythms and dangers of an indigenous world hidden from ordinary view. Specifically, Boorman leads us into the life of a forest tribe who have assimilated the missing child and who will ultimately send him back with the opposite of his father's pro-development sensibility. The movie is gorgeous to behold, and it's great fun watching Boorman find ever-novel ways of making the same film again and again. But the environmental message and the emotion of the core relationship get in each other's way a bit, preventing the film from uniting on every front. Still, this is a must for Boorman fans. -Tom Keogh.

John Schlesinger's solid adaptation of Thomas Hardy's novel sees three rival suitors vying for the affections of the beautiful Bathsheba Everdene (Julie Christie decked out in a variety of bonnets and frilly dresses), who has just inherited a farm. The men in her life are stout, whiskered yeoman Gabriel Oak (Alan Bates), an impoverished local farmer; neurotic, repressed squire William Boldwood (Peter Finch); and handsome rascal Sgt. Troy (Terrence Stamp), who breaks women's hearts for a hobby. Thanks to cameraman Nicolas Roeg and production designer Richard MacDonald (who also worked for Joseph Losey), 19th-century Dorset looks as pretty and as picturesque as a John Constable reproduction on top of a cookie tin. Not that Schlesinger or screenwriter Frederic Raphael underplays the duress of rural life. We see the hardship of the farm workers' lives as the seasons turn. The film opens with a spectacular sequence in which Gabriel Oak's dog drives his flock of sheep over a cliff, thereby forcing him into penury. Whether hunger or heartbreak, every character here suffers. Bathsheba (like the model Christie plays in Darling) is a free spirit in a society in which women's rights are severely restricted. -Geoffrey Macnab.

Filmed on location in Russia and England, this informative and entertaining full-length feature film presents the fascinating life of the great ballerina, Anna Pavlova. This film presents her early years at the Imperial Ballet School, her work with dance world legends Diaghilev and Fokine, and highlights her triumphant world tour with her own ballet troupe. This is a lavish re-creation of the incredible life of the world's greatest ballerina. Starring Galina Beliaeva as Anna, with James Fox, Martin Scorsese, Roy Kinnear, and Bruce Forsyth.

One of the most ferociously iconoclastic and experimental films of the French New Wave, Alain Resnais's 1961 feature, winner of the grand prize at that year's Venice Film Festival, is based on a script by Alain Robbe-Grillet. At its center is what seems to be a simple but unanswerable puzzle: Did its protagonist (Giorgio Albertazzi) have an affair the year before with a woman (Delphine Seyrig) he just met (or possibly re-met) at his hotel? The inquiry becomes an unsettling experiment in flattening the dimensions of past, present, and future so that any difference between them becomes meaningless, while Resnais's coldly formal but oddly dreamlike geometric compositions make space itself seem a function of subjective memory. Add to that Resnais's trademark tracking shots-long, smooth, a visual correlative of a wordless feeling-and this is a film that truly gets under the skin in almost inexplicable ways. One of the most influential works of its time. -Tom Keogh.

Helvio Soto's dramatic re-creation of the military overthrow of Chile's freely elected leftist government in 1973 is a cousin to Alain Resnais's La Guerre Est Finie, Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers, and Costa-Gavras's Z and Missing; it's an unapologetically angry piece of political cinema decrying the brutal suppression of human freedom. Beginning with Allende's 1970 election, Soto painstakingly documents the conspiracy to end Chile's social reforms with a military coup headed by General Augusto Pinochet. It's hardly subtle: The pure-of-heart Marxist activists, idealistic students, and salt-of-earth working-class peasants heroically stand up to a conspiracy of corrupt businessmen, fascist military officers, and the American CIA in a fight that, we know from history, dooms them to martyrdom. Soto's tangled narrative timeline jumps back and forth without warning, a confusing design to say the least, and his portraits of the heroes and villains are little better than agitprop. Then again, this is less a history lesson than a political statement, and he pulls no punches in his damning accusations, from the greed of multinationals and American interests to the vicious executions of leftists, intellectuals, and artists in the wake of the coup. It's a gripping true story that will have most viewers just as angry by the final frames. As the ailing Pinochet tries to sidestep responsibility of human-rights violations under his rule, the film couldn't be more timely. The title, by the way, is a code used by the leftist defenders. -Sean Axmaker.