The exquisite circularity of the roundelay has always been an attractive cinematic device, but never has it been used with more delicacy and canny insight than in La Ronde, Max Ophüls's adaptation of the Arthur Schnitzler play Reigen. The camera glides, swirls, and delicately dances around fleeting moments between lovers, from chance meetings and secret trysts, to the sincere but hopeless courtship by a besotted admirer, to the relaxed banter of cuckolding married couples. Ophüls's wry glimpses behind closed doors and pulled curtains are both cynical and sweet, generous of character but suspect of motive. As one scene ends, we waltz along as the characters change partners and dance again and again; we follow streetwalkers and soldiers, courtesans and counts, until we come full circle. Returning to the superb metaphor of the carousel, where dapper Anton Walbrook wanders about as host and commentator (a sort of literary ringmaster, like Peter Ustinov in Lola Montes), Ophüls plays at the game of love with a cocked grim and a sly jab, though he never belittles or judges. What could easily have descended into farce is lifted into loving satire by Ophüls's elegant touch and sparkling wit. A huge success in Europe, its continental attitude wasn't embraced by American audiences at the time. But it has come to be regarded one of Ophüls's finest and most beautifully visualized films. Everyone is somebody's fool, and isn't it wonderful? -Sean Axmaker Ophuls presents his amused view of the rituals of love and lovemaking in ten timeless sketches full of humor and tenderness. Set in half-lit, turn-of-the-century Viennese interiors, La Ronde is an elaborate satire on sexual behavior, a panoramic display of illicit love in old Vienna that comments on the futility of transitory relationships in which the deceivers are always deceived.

Nagisa Oshima's sensational, 1976 film concerns a woman (Eiko Matsuda) whose obsessive sexual relationship with her husband (Tatsuya Fuji) crosses the line from passion into the territory of life and death. One of the most sexually explicit films ever to play in mainstream theaters (though it did run into legal trouble both in the U. S. and Japan), it has an air of palpable doom, suggesting that sex can be a doorway to suicide. Lest this sound like grunge-era noodling over dreams of self-destruction, be assured that the Kyoto-born Oshima (Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence) takes a somewhat formal, middle-aged perspective on the conjunction of various mysteries of existence. -Tom Keogh.

A charming comedy thriller about an unconventional female police detective investigating the murders of three senate deputies. A film full of inventive gags, serious 'policier' undertones, and touching romance.

Often considered the real beginning of the French New Wave movement, this 1958 film, the first feature by Claude Chabrol, is also-strangely-underrated on its own terms. The story of a theology student (Jean-Claude Brialy) who returns to his provincial home town for convalescence and reunites with his unhappy childhood friend (Gerard Blain), the film introduces many of Chabrol's pet themes and interests, particularly the Hitchcockian relationship between two characters who transfer or implicitly share a private experience or fate. Chabrol's consideration of that idea would naturally deepen and become more complex over the years (brilliantly in 1969's La Femme Infidele and Le Boucher), but at this career flashpoint it is a little overstated and obvious in religious allusions. Still, Le Beau Serge is an engrossing film with no shortage of dramatic momentum. The final act, driven by the main character's efforts at self-sacrifice, is as affecting as ever. -Tom Keogh.

Liang Jing's diary is stolen and the pages re faxed back to her forcing her to review this difficult period in her life. The pain of 2 generations are visited upon her: she is preparing to play the part of an anti-Japanese guerrilla in 1940's China in a movie entitled "Good Men, Good Women" and the pages from her diary evoke her past as a drug-addicted barmaid involved with a gangster.