This majestic, French-made film wishes viewers a "latcho drom"-a safe journey-as it follows the roots of the Rom, traveling people better known as Gypsies. Stunning and evocative, it transcends language and culture, bringing together the best elements of National Geographic-style documentary and music video in a kind of anthropological MTV. Using only music and image, without any steady characters or plot, award-winning director Tony Gatlif (himself of Rom descent) tells a compelling story of Rom migrations from Northern India to Europe and the rest of the world. Beginning with a gathering of lavishly dressed nomads singing across the harsh deserts of Rajasthan, viewers are transported through the lush oases of Egypt into the ghettoes of Turkey, from the muddy lanes of Eastern Europe through lush French fields to the windswept coastal cities of Spain. Every step of the way, there are hypnotic reminders of the harshness and beauty of the Rom lifestyle: the rhythms of labor pounding into vibrant dance, the songs of Turkish flower sellers merging with the plaintive political satires of a gray-haired Romanian violinist. Music is everywhere-children barely able to walk dance alongside great-grandmothers-and covers all styles and subjects-from the wintry strains of an Auschwitz lament to a flamenco devotional in a Spanish shrine to a festive Dixieland number that borrows as much from New Orleans as from northern India. And wordless stories abound, told in the smiles of strangers waiting for a train or in the frowns of rifle-toting farmers come to evict travelers from their land. -Grant Balfour.

A photographer in the rain forest is captured by wild natives, and after months of living with them, he marries the chief's daughter and helps protect the village from a vicious cannibal tribe. Dubbed in English.

The second of Eric Rohmer's Tales of the Four Seasons series is not the chilly story its title would imply. Felicie (Charlotte Véry) is a single mother with two lovers, neither of whom she feels much passion for-and Felicie knows passion. In the opening scene she frolics with youthful abandon with Charles (Frédéric van den Driessche), an American she falls head-over-heels for while on holiday. Through a careless mistake-she gives him the wrong address and doesn't have his-they never reconnect in spite of her best efforts, but his presence continues to permeate her life as she raises their child. The sunny warmth of carefree youth and the emotional ecstasy of the opening turn to the cool colors of winter as Felicie resigns herself to a life without her one true love. She tries to make the best of it by choosing one of her lovers but, in the best tradition of willful Rohmer women, she discovers she simply cannot settle for second best. Felicie is a delightfully contradictory character, lively under her somber front, headstrong and petulant, indecisive and flighty, dedicated to her search for true love. Véry invests Felicie with a spark that enlivens her even at her most exasperating, a spark that Rohmer finally allows to light up in his most emotionally magical conclusion since Summer. -Sean Axmaker.

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. [+]

It's long been one of the revered classics of international cinema, but there is no fine layer of dust over La Grande Illusion. Jean Renoir's film is just as vibrant, exciting, and wise as it has ever been. The story is set during World War I, mostly in a couple of German POW camps, where two very different French prisoners plot to escape: the working-class officer Maréchal (Jean Gabin, the French Spencer Tracy) and the upper-class de Boieldieu (Pierre Fresnay). The suspenseful backbone of the story is formed by these escape attempts, but Renoir is primarily concerned with the way people treat each other, and especially with how class and nationality inform human relations. Most compelling of all the film's characters is the aristocratic German officer von Rauffenstein, unforgettably incarnated by stiff-backed Erich von Stroheim; although he runs a prison camp, von Rauffenstein cannot help but strike up a friendship with de Boieldieu, a kindred spirit from the doomed nobility. There is nothing dewy or naive about Renoir's vision (and two years after the release of this antiwar film, Europe was plunged into another world war), yet Grand Illusion is one of those movies that makes you feel good about such long-outmoded ideas as sacrifice and brotherhood. After it won a prize at the Venice Film Festival in 1937, the Nazis declared the film "Cinematographic Enemy Number One. " There can be no higher praise. -Robert Horton.

TV serial based on a famous novel by a Soviet writer Mihail Bulghakov. Soviet bureaucracy and satanic feast. Brilliant acting. Cast: Gustaw Holoubek, Zbigniew Zapasiewicz, Anna Dymna. 1989, color. English subtitles. Set of 4 Tapes. 370 min.

A group of Polish officers, liberated from a German P. O. W. camp, find that freedom is not what they expected. Study of human reaction in the face of danger. Cast: Beata Tyszkiewicz, Tadeusz Lomnicki, Tadeusz Fijewski, Ryszard Barycz. Aleksander Ford. 1964. Black/White. 90 mins. [+]

Margarethe von Trotta, the most audible female voice of the New German Cinema, had acted for film, written screenplays, and even codirected (The Lost Honor of Katrina Blum with her former husband Volker Schlondorff) before finally embarking on her first solo project in 1977. The Second Awakening of Christa Klages, based on the true story of a social worker who robs a bank to fund a failing day-care center, is an uncompromising work that tackles politics and social issues with a radical fervor and feminist perspective unseen in the work of her contemporaries. Tina Engel plays Christina, a militant revolutionary who becomes a fugitive hunted as much for her politics as her crime, while the young woman she held hostage tries to track her down for her own personal reasons. Von Trotta brings an impassioned intensity to Christina's voyage of self-discovery, which pulls the film through slow passages, blunt political messages, and an occasionally clumsy style, creating a dramatically powerful work that builds to a climactic epiphany at the film's mesmerizing conclusion. After this remarkable debut, von Trotta built on her work in her stylistically assured second film, Sisters, or the Balance of Happiness. Be forewarned that the poor print source results in a muddy-looking tape well below the quality of most commercial tapes. -Sean Axmaker.