Not for the faint-hearted. Baise-Moi defies categories-it features pornographic sex scenes and violent shootings, but it won't fit anyone's definition of an erotic thriller. After separately committing murders, two French women join together in a spree of crime and sex. Because both have endured abuse at the hands of men, the movie seems to start as a self-righteous parable-but the women's actions quickly degenerate into amoral, near random killings, with women shot as casually as men. One reviewer described Baise-Moi as "Thelma & Louise with actual penetration," but it's actually Thelma & Louise without Hollywood sentiment. By refusing to condemn or justify the protagonists' actions, and by depicting both sex and violence with unglamorous realism, Baise-Moi forces the viewer to respond in the most contradictory and basic ways. You may find the lead characters surprisingly sympathetic. Jarring, unsettling, and well worth watching. -Bret Fetzer.

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.

The third of Eric Rohmer's Four Seasons romances follows the indecision of a young man who juggles three women during his final summer between school and work. Drifting along the beaches of Brittany while waiting for his commitment-shy girlfriend, Lena, to meet him, Gaspard (Melvil Poupaud of Diary of a Seducer) becomes fast friends with pretty waitress Margot (Amanda Langlet, the grown-up Pauline of Pauline at the Beach a decade earlier) and has a fling with Margot's aggressive and sexy friend Solene before Lena finally shows. By then, Gaspard has inadvertently committed himself to all three women. It's a lovely portrait of awkwardness and ambivalence set against the gorgeous land and seascape of Brittany, and populated by pretty young performers. This, the most understated of Rohmer's sex farces, carries a bittersweet sting, but little of the emotional effervescence of his best films. While these characters are no less pretentious or vulnerable than his other lovers (who all seem to be emotionally at sea), Rohmer just skims the surface of their emotional revelation. His greatest achievement is the evocation of young adults caught between their teens and 20s, with little real experience but full of easily sidelined ideals. In the best Rohmer tradition, the circular conversations and solipsistic monologues are neither glib nor pretentious, merely the immature but sincere ramblings of vulnerable youth playing adult games. -Sean Axmaker.

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!.

Up Down Fragile is a luminously unique romantic musical set in summertime Paris. In beautiful sun drenched streets, cafes and parks three young lives intersect and are changed by an artist, a mystery, and a gun. Three of today's most talented young French actresses (Laurence Cote, Marianne Denicourt, Nathalie Richard) sing, dance and romance their way through Paris in this cinematic triumph directed by Jacques Rivette (La Belle Noiseuse", "Out 1", "Gang of Four") Up Down Fragile is a joyful burst of true cinema from one of the greatest French filmmakers of all time.

Little known stateside but long esteemed in Europe, The Crime of Monsieur Lange is simply one of the very greatest films directed by Jean Renoir (it was made a few years before Grand Illusion and Rules of the Game). René Lefèvre (Le Million) takes the title role of a nebbish who clerks for a penny-press publisher by day, and by night writes feverish potboilers about a Western hero named "Arizona Jim. " Lange's encyclopedically venal boss (Jules Berry) discovers his secret and immediately starts exploiting it, as he exploits everybody and everything within range. Life sublimely imitates pulp fiction and vice versa in the brilliant screenplay by Jacques Prévert (who would later write Children of Paradise). The movie blends sociopolitical protest, tender satire, and astonishing poetry without breaking a sweat, and its climax-an amazing synthesis of theme, dramatic emotion, and inspired camerawork-is one of the transcendent moments in screen history. -Richard T. Jameson.

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. [+]

In the 1960s and early '70s, Claude Chabrol was celebrated as the Gallic Hitchcock for his crisp, character-rich thrillers. La Cérémonie, his 1997 hit adapted from Ruth Rendell's novel A Judgement in Stone, is a return to form, an assured domestic drama set in the upper-class household of the kind but condescending Lelievres family. Sandrine Bonnaire, excellent in an enigmatic, uncommunicative role, stars as their new, neurotically silent maid Sophie. She performs her duties efficiently and emotionlessly, staring out from behind an implacable, mask-like face born of loneliness and defensiveness. Isabelle Huppert is the town's gleefully misanthropic postmistress Jeanne, a gossipy, energetically insolent misfit who hates the Lelievres. When she becomes Sophie's best friend, her pathological game of taunts and gossip goes into overdrive with her sudden access to their house, and an already simmering class conflict boils over in unleashed anger. Chabrol charts the cascade of mischief and misunderstandings to its shattering conclusion, with a sensitivity to character and an eagle-eyed remove that makes the explosive climax all the more chilling. It's a devastating thriller, one of Chabrol's best, and a powerful portrait in hate and psychosis pushed over the edge in misunderstanding, manipulation, and mistrust. Jacqueline Bisset is the fumbling but sincere Mme. Lelievres, Jean-Pierre Cassel her complacent husband, and Virginie Ledoyen (A Single Girl) their sensitive young daughter. [+]