An extravagantly planned ceremony that reveals the unexpected reality. An ambitious writer, who uses sex without barriers to advance professionally, becomes engaged with the daughter of a well established editor to further his career. His fiancée is the perfect bride to be awaiting the magical day that she has dreamt of all her life, only to find herself suddenly faced with her partner's dark secret for everyone to see.

A terrific small-scale suspense thriller about a botched bank robbery and the hostage crisis that grows out of it. Two jittery kids (one a showy epileptic played by Hard Boiled's Tony Leung Chiu-wai) chicken out before they can finish knocking over a small branch bank; with their escape route cut off, they are forced to improvise. Ti Lung, from A Better Tomorrow, is a low-level mobster on the lam who tries to exploit the chaotic media circus that develops, first to extort a set of exit papers for himself, and then to bust his slatternly girlfriend out of the slammer. This is almost a one-set movie, skillfully orchestrated by director Yee Tung-sing: an exercise in synthetic tension. And the resemblance to Dog Day Afternoon is much too close for comfort. Ti Lung (a former kung fu superstar, here in his mid-40s) is a monumentally graceful actor. He doesn't flinch from the unsavory truth of his ruthless, stubborn, thin-skinned character, but he nevertheless makes us empathize with an aging bully's drive to get out from under. The hot-wired actor Tony Leung Kar-fai (the spineless husband in Lady in Black) plays a stressed-out cop bent on capturing the mobster. -David Chute.

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.