In 1965 six French New Wave directors took a Paris neighborhood and concocted a short sketch around it. The results sometimes favor character and story, and sometimes local flavor, but almost all are engaging in their own right. Jean Douchet and Jean-Luc Godard (repsectively) offer gloriously French slices of romantic comedy in the sexually open 1960s with "Saint Germain des Prés" and "Montparnasse et Levallois. " Jean Rouch's "Gare du Nord" is slight of substance but beautifully explores the neighborhood in a gorgeous tracking shot. Jean-Daniel Pollet's "Rue Saint-Denis" offers two delicious characters in a witty comedy of a mousy dishwasher who brings a brassy streetwalker to his dumpy apartment. Eric Rohmer's "Place de l'Étoile," a sometimes silly but deftly managed little comedy of a man who strikes a panhandler and is terrified he killed him, displays a giddy goofiness unseen in his later work. Claude Chabrol's shiver-inducing slice of urban life "La Muette" ventures outside the oppressive hallways and tiny rooms only once, at the end, as if to celebrate the escape of the rebellious boy from his bickering parents. The strongest of a solid collection, Chabrol's chilly view of dead-end relationships in a splintered upper class family concludes the otherwise lighthearted collection on a devastating, dark note. Released in France under the more evocative title Paris Vu Par. [+]

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.

The gendarme Ludovic Cruchot is an ambitious man. So, when he is transferred to the laid-back post of Saint-Tropez, he sees an ideal opportunity to advance his career. Everything goes as planned until his daughter has a little too much fun on the beach.

This version of Jean-Luc Godard's 1968 One Plus One caused a legendary confrontation at a film festival when the director became infuriated at his producer's decision to attach the Rolling Stones' completed song "Sympathy for the Devil" at the film's end. Godard's own original plan had been to make a film of the Stones' construction of the tune in rehearsal, and intercut that with a story line about a white revolutionary who becomes suicidal when her lover embraces black separatism. Production problems caused Godard to give up that idea and just allow scenes to fall where they would, allowing viewers to construct the film in their own minds. Be that as it may, this slightly shorter and more commercial producer's cut does not lack in satisfaction by closing things out with the song as Stones fans know it. Overall, the film is a bewildering affair, and that's not at all a bad thing: one's orientation is whatever one makes of Godard's enthralling mess here. Even if a viewer is just interested in seeing the Stones at their peak and at work on their brilliant 1968 album Beggars Banquet, this is a highly rewarding experience. Astute watchers and listeners will note that in an early take of the song, Mick Jagger sings the lyric, "I shouted out, 'Who killed Kennedy?'/When after all, it was you and me. " Later, with no mention of a particularly tragic 1968 event in American politics, Jagger has revised the line to "I shouted out, 'Who killed the Kennedys?'" Talk about a startling moment. -Tom Keogh.

The police squad of Saint-Tropez has been chosen to represent France at the International Police Convention in New York City. But the daughter of the squad's sergeant stows away on their ship and turns the trip into an unforgettable nightmare for her father.

A pioneer couple struggles to settle in Minnesota and start a new life.

Henry, a doctor from Cracov, Ludwig, a popular lawyer from Lodz and Jarek. They have money, social position. but also serious troubles. The three men think up the perfect crime. Is it possible? English subtitles. Cast/Obsada: Marian Kociniak, Jan Peszek, Leonard Pietraszak. 1989, color. 99 mins.

Jacques Rivette's exciting and delightful romantic comedy finds the French New Wave giant on familiar territory. Namely: theater as life, life as theater, and the junction where both fold together in an expansive universe of cinematic space and time. The director of such remarkably modernist classics as Celine and Julie Go Boating and La Belle Noiseuse here takes on a story of romantically entangled Parisian actors mounting a production of Luigi Pirandello's play As You Desire Me. As lovers hop in and out of ever-shifting relationships, the production comes together and opens to mixed success. The dynamics on and off the stage, between real life and theater, begin to fuse as Rivette breaks the narrative into disjointed pieces and lifts them to a higher plane of passionate resonance. An enjoyable ride and a tremendous accomplishment from a master filmmaker. -Tom Keogh.

Before Velvet Goldmine, there was Buddha of Suburbia. The coming of age story of Karim, an assimilated Indian in London during the swinging seventies. Winner of seven international film awards. Soundtrack by David Bowie.

VHS- format NTSC ; will play in all american VCRS