With Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, Paul Schrader constructs a puzzle-box portrait of the controversial author (1925-1970) who turned his life into a work of art. Presented by Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas, Schrader outdoes his benefactors in sheer audacity alone. In the opening sequence, which weaves throughout the film, Yukio Mishima (riveting Shohei Imamura regular Ken Ogata) prepares for death as the director cuts to pivotal moments from his past. Shot by American Gigolo's John Bailey and designed by The Cell's Eiko Ishioka, stately black and white footage alternates with eye-popping color sequences. With an assist from Leonard and Chieko Schrader, his brother and sister-in-law, the filmmaker blends Mishima's fiction into his biography, and splits the whole four ways: beauty, art, action, and harmony of pen and sword (the brothers also wrote Sydney Pollack's Japanese thriller The Yakuza). Encouraged by his controlling grandmother, Mishima becomes a conflicted figure, torn between mind and body, pain and pleasure-men and women. As he states, "All my life I have been acutely aware of a contradiction in the very nature of my existence. " (This collector's edition includes separate voice-over tracks by Ogata and Roy Scheider. ) The first disc houses a gorgeous transfer of the film, the theatrical trailer, and comprehensive commentary from Schrader and producer Alan Poul; the second offers a making-of featurette (with Bailey, Ishioka, and composer Philip Glass), audio and video interviews (including translator and biographer John Nathan), a 1966 chat with Mishima for French TV, and a 1985 John Hurt-narrated documentary for the BBC. Unlike Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima, which found favor in the East, Paul Schrader's risk-filled endeavor resulted in a ban in his subject's home country-and the director's crowning achievement. [+]

A chic-surfaced Hong Kong art movie about wasted youth, a sort of Crown Colony Less Than Zero. A group of spoiled Beautiful People (models, aspiring actresses, the languid young heir to a rice fortune) interact randomly until one of them-a Taiwanese woman who clings to her peasant origins-becomes the victim of a bloody murder. At which point, enter Chow Yun-fat, as a Columbo-esque rumpled police inspector, and we're back to HK movie business as usual. (Sigh of relief here. ) An eye-opening sequence (designed to show that the veneer of urban civilization is a sorry sham) has the victim-to-be cooking her mother's yummy peasant specialty, Pig Stomach Chicken. The survivors undertake a pilgrimage to their late friend's hometown in rural Taiwan toward the end, demonstrating their own shallowness in the process; an effective if not terribly subtle sequence. This 1988 film marked the big-screen debut of one of Hong Kong's premiere art movie directors, Stanley Kwan. He went on to better things, including Rouge and Centre Stage. -David Chute.

This engaging biopic is a fact-based story of three students from poor backgrounds who grew up as "martial brothers" at a draconian Peking Opera Academy in Hong Kong in the 1960s and early '70s. (Kids get their education free in exchange for a period of indentured servitude as novelty performers. ) For 12 years the lads stoically endure the harsh training, feeling as painfully out of step at the height of the swinging '60s as military school cadets. In the meantime the staunchly traditional Peking Opera style has fallen out of favor with the public; only old men show up for the boys' flamboyant shows. The youths finally graduate with prodigious skills that the society no longer has any use for. In real life the story had a happy ending: the three pals applied their hard-earned training to stunt work in martial arts movies, eventually evolving into the HK movie superstars Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, and Yuen Biao, who often appeared together in movies like Chan's exhilarating Project A. The young actors who play the future stars are amazing simulacra for their adult counterparts, and Hung himself turns in a textured, complex portrayal of the school's harsh taskmaster, Sifu Yu. Cheng Pei-pei, the high-flying swordswoman in '60s King Hu flicks like Come Drink with Me, is Sammo's love interest, a teacher at a nearby girl's school. Painted Faces isn't gracefully constructed (it shifts focus from the students to their teacher halfway through), but it's neat to see where some of the defining characteristics of HK cinema came from: the showmanship and the risk-anything physicality. -David Chute.

From one of the world's greatest directors of women comes a candid and revealing look at discrimination against women in 1930's Japan. The highly acclaimed film chronicles the heartbreaking fall of a young telephone operator who consents to become her boss' mistress in order to support her alcoholic father and put her brother through school. Isuzu Yamada is tremendous as the tough heroine condemned by society for behavior that would have been tolerated if she were a man.

Director Schorr's triumphant first feature, a universal story of life under war's shadow, opened the 1987 Jerusalem Film Festival to unanimous acclaim. Set in 1970 during the War of Attrition at the Suez Canal, Late Summer Blues chronicles events in the lives of seven Israeli students during the summer following high-school graduation-a summer clouded by their impending induction into the army.