Africa, a vacation haven for consenting adults. This sexy comedy is a side-splitting take-off on Club Med as it started out - where having a good time depended on how many partners you had, no matter who they were!.

Helene is a good mother with a checkered past as a stripper and barmaid. She divorces her ne'er-do-well husband and her in-laws blame her for causing her husband's addiction and set out to remove their grandchild from Helene's custody. Thwarted by the courts, they hire a seedy penniless operative, Paul, to destroy her reputation. He moves into her rooming house and begins to insinuate himself into her life, hatching darker and more convoluted plots to implicate Helene. A harrowing thriller from France's master of suspense, LA RUPTURE ranks among Chabrol's finest works.

A curtain blows near an open window. A limp, crooked arm lays on the street, followed by motionless hands and the back of a head. Finally we see the dead body of a young woman (Dominique Sanda) and the crowd of feet that have gathered around, the scene of a suicide. Her story is related in flashback by her husband (Guy Frangin), a guilt-ridden pawnbroker who paces around her body lying in state. A couple like any other, they attend movies and theater, argue, make up, and make love. But director Robert Bresson shows us only the girl's sadness and systematic smothering under her husband's greed, jealousy, and increasing control. Even when the soundtrack erupts in peals of joy and laughter, such moments are left offscreen. It's Bresson's first color film and he mutes the colors to such a dull flatness that the interiors are like a dark, suffocating prison. Only in the sun do the screen and the girl spark to life. It's as rigorous as any of Bresson's works-the characters, tellingly, are not given names and there's a marvelous tension between the claustrophobic home life and the busy world of city streets and art galleries outside-but the picture lacks the understated beauty of his previous films until the climax. [+]

Noel Coward's favorite play was certainly a departure for David Lean, best known for adapting Dickens in the '40s. While it's the director's only comedy, the result is a delightful gem. Rex Harrison is an acerbic author haunted by the ghost of first wife Elvira (Kay Hammond), who tries to seduce him all over again. This throws his second wife (Constance Cummings) into a panic, second-guessing her lack of passion. It's a celestial sex romp that hasn't lost its bite. Margaret Rutherford, as always, steals the show as the sardonic medium. -Bill Desowitz.

Paul (François Cluzet) and Nelly (Emmanuelle Béart) have what seems to be a storybook marriage. They love each other madly and have worked together to turn their little lakeside inn into a gorgeous resort getaway while raising an adorable son. But there's a problem: Paul is convinced Nelly is having an affair and his jealousy spins to insane proportions. Hallucinations and nightmares twist his dementia until he imagines her sleeping with every man in sight, and his obsessive spying turns Nelly's life into a living hell. Claude Chabrol (director of La Cérémonie, known as the Gallic Hitchcock for his cool thrillers of obsessive love and homicidal passion, created his film from an original unfilmed screenplay by Henri-George Clouzot (Les Diaboliques). He injects Clouzot's dark, misanthropic tale with a soupçon of Hitchcock's voyeuristic obsession, but ultimately makes the film his own with unexpected sympathy for Paul, whose pathological jealousy spins out of control in a chilling conclusion that leaves the viewers uncomfortably nestled in his madness. The film faced charges of misogyny upon release largely because Chabrol remained steadfast in his portrayal of Paul not as a monster but a victim of madness (somewhat at the expense of Nelly, an angelic sexpot whose loyalty and love is almost sacrificial), but ultimately that's what gives L'Enfer its unsettling power. -Sean Axmaker.

As the French New Wave was reaching its maturity and filmgoing had evolved as a favorite pastime of intellectuals and urban sophisticates, along came Jean-Luc Godard to shake up every convention and send highfalutin critics scrambling to their typewriters. 1965's Alphaville is a perfect example of Godard's willingness to disrupt expectation, combine genres, and comment on movies while making sociopolitical statements that inspired doctoral theses and left a majority of viewers mystified. Part science fiction and part hard-boiled detective yarn, Alphaville presents a futuristic scenario using the most modern and impersonal architecture that Godard could find in mid-'60s Paris. A haggard private eye (Eddie Constantine) is sent to an ultramodern city run by a master computer, where his mission is to locate and rescue a scientist who is trapped there. As the story unfolds on Godard's strictly low-budget terms, the movie tackles a variety of topics such as the dehumanizing effect of technology, willful suppression of personality, saturation of commercial products, and, of course, the constant recollection of previous films through Godard's carefully chosen images. For most people Alphaville, like many of the director's films, will prove utterly baffling. For those inclined to dig deeper into Godard's artistic intentions, the words of critic Andrew Sarris (quoted from an essay that accompanies the Criterion Collection DVD) will ring true: "To understand and appreciate Alphaville is to understand Godard, and vice versa. " -Jeff Shannon.

Kevin Whately (Inspector Morse, Peak Practice) stars as David Bruce, a newly prosperous gas Inspector who moves to London with his new wife and their infant daughter. Their new station in life affords them the luxury of a live-in maid named Jane.

One of Italy's most commercially successful films, Bitter Rice packed theaters around the world despite being banned by the Legion of Decency in the United States. Though intended as a scathing indictment of harsh conditions endured by women laboring in Italy's rice fields, the film's enormous popularity was largely attributed to the erotic appeal of young Silvana Mangano. The former Miss Rome became a star overnight for her sultry debut as an impoverished yet voluptuous laborer who turns down the chance to emigrate to a better life in South America in favor of a steamy affair with her best friend's lover. Ironically, Marxist writer and director Giuseppe De Santis, one of the founders of Italy's post-World War II neorealist movement, virtually brought the genre to an end with Bitter Rice by demonstrating that sex was a far greater draw than social criticism.

All singing! All dancing! All proletariat! Who knew the Soviets made musicals? The evidence is there in Dana Ranga's giddy documentary, which offers clips from dozens of musicals made between 1930 and 1970 from the Communist bloc. From rural Russian ditties with synchronized tractors and overall-clad farmers singing about the five-year plan to backstage melodramas and East German beach movies, this documentary reveals an entire hidden genre of Communist cinema. What makes them so fascinating is the Soviet bloc's uneasy truce with the musical, by its very nature a celebration of love and romance and plenty. How do to you turn that into a message of service and sacrifice? They tried, certainly-Stalin loved musicals-and throughout the 1930s and '40s Soviet studios created Busby Berkeley-like production numbers on assembly lines and sent field hands into song with synchronized pitchforks (no dancing allowed on the job, according to the censors) while harvesting their fields. Later musicals show more cinematic sophistication and even a winking playfulness with the genre. The clips are marvelous-some surreal, some dynamic and delirious, and some simply absurd-but to Ranga they are more than simply kitsch. Interviews with the creators and the audiences of these films reveal how much these utopian bursts of energy and joy were treasured in dreary times. Ranga creates a nostalgia for a giddy, goofy genre that this country never even knew existed. Film history has rarely been so much fun. -Sean Axmaker.

The life of an English schoolmaster may sound like dry stuff, but To Serve Them All My Days finds engrossing drama and dry wit in the most ordinary of circumstances. David Powlett-Jones (John Duttine), a young Welshman, returns from the trenches of World War I disillusioned and suffering from shellshock. Accepted as a teacher at an elite boy's boarding school called Bamfylde, Powlett-Jones fears he won't last-but the faith of the headmaster who hired him (Frank Middlemass) proves well-founded. Powlett-Jones immediately flies in the face of convention, fighting with a pompous science teacher (Neil Stacy), speaking out in favor of socialist reforms, and finding a mixture of discipline and empathy with the boys he teaches. Over the course of his 20-year rise through the ranks of Bamfylde, he finds and loses love with several women (Belinda Lang, Kim Braden, and Susan Jameson); one of the greatest strengths of To Serve Them All My Days is how fully realized these women are, each strikingly individual and self-directed. The writing and acting are impeccable, always cutting to the most engaging aspect of every scene, yet grounding every conflict in a rich understanding of character and circumstance. Even the minor characters are made vivid and distinct, and the realities of life-politics, sex, mortality-are handled frankly and honestly. In fact, To Serve Them All My Days demonstrates the best aspects of a miniseries, taking the scope of 13 episodes to map in detail a human life, with all its victories and disasters. Truly a pleasure to watch; of particular note is Alan MacNaughtan as a sardonic fellow teacher, whose ironic observations and close friendship with Powlett-Jones give the series a good dose of both humor and compassion. Based on the classic novel by R. [+]

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.