Nora Davis (Leticia Roman) jets away to Rome to vacation with Edith, an old friend of her family. Unfortunately, her trip is anything but relaxing On the first night, Edith dies-and as Nora runs into the night for help, she becomes an eyewitness to murder as she sees a woman stabbed to death on the Piazza di Spagna! Being a young woman with an insatiable appetite for murder mysteries, Nora can't get anyone to believe her story, but with the help of the attentive Dr. Marcello Bassi (John Saxon), she learns that a murder did occur on that very spot-10 years earlier-when Emily Craven fell victim to the "Alphabet Murderer"! What did Nora Davis really see, and who is stalking her through Rome? Could it be the Alphabet Killer, looking for Victim D? Mario Bava's "The Girl Who Knew Too Much" is a stylish homage to the "Americans Abroad" thrillers of Alfred Hitchcock. Originally released in America (in greatly revised form) as "Evil Eye," Bava's innovative thriller is presented here-for the first time-in its original director's cut.

When Neil Jordan is really on his game, as he is with The Good Thief, his directorial skill is a marvel to behold. In the character-driven mode of Jordan's Mona Lisa and The Crying Game, this smooth, underrated caper provides an abundance of cinematic riches, not the least being Jordan's peerless knack for dialogue and a tailor-made role for Nick Nolte. For better or worse, Nolte's off-screen drug abuse served him well in portraying Bob Montagnet, ace thief, recovering heroin addict, and beloved denizen of the French Riviera, where his luck is about to take some very clever turns. The elegant plot is yours to discover: In loosely remaking the French classic Bob le Flambeur, Jordan crafts what one reviewer aptly called "the underbelly of Ocean's Eleven," involving an impenetrable vault full of priceless art, a rescued Russian prostitute, an eccentric band of accomplices, and high-stakes poker in Monte Carlo. Nolte's right at home in this rich-and-risky milieu, and the combined talents of Jordan and ace cinematographer Chris Menges make The Good Thief a pleasure from start to finish. -Jeff Shannon.

Though he had forced his way into French film culture by working entirely outside his country's studio system in the 1940s and 1950s, by the 1960s director Jean-Pierre Melville was working with larger budgets and well-known actors such as Jean-Paul Belmondo, star of Le Doulos. An extension of Melville's fascination with the existential milieu of American gangster films, Le Doulos presents New Wave icon Belmondo as Silien, a man newly released from prison and by reputation a professional informer. A figure, then, of possible duplicity and ambiguity, Silien is the perfect Melvillian hero, difficult to read but propelled by internal forces manifested as direct action. Maintaining friendships with both cop and crook, Silien's notoriety as a "finger man" who informs on the latter is underscored when one acquaintance, a police inspector (Daniel Crohem), waits in ambush for another, a burglar (Serge Reggiani), to perform his next job. But did Silien actually rat out the fellow? Melville pushes the envelope of our perceptions by making it appear Silien did, and then goes through the tale again to reveal another story. A much darker film than his celebrated Bob le Flambeur, Le Doulos is an absorbing tale of a world that seems to exist between light and shadow. -Tom Keogh.

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.

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.

The director of Dead or Alive, Takashi Miike, made his name on the international scene with Audition, a chilling psychological thriller that builds from a quiet start towards a prolonged torture sequence almost too unbearable to watch. But such deliberate pacing isn't typical of Miike, whose movies often assault the viewer with an onslaught of slam-bang action that makes John Woo look like Eric Rohmer. Dead or Alive, his most successful cops-vs-yakuza thriller to date, kicks off with six nonstop minutes of machine gun-paced violence, sex, and slaughter, all set to a pounding heavy-metal beat. Thereafter things calm down a little, though not much. Given Miike's penchant for murky, livid-toned visuals and skewed camera angles, it's not always too easy to work out exactly who's doing what to whom, but the general outline's clear enough. The Tokyo underworld is being torn apart by a turf war between the yakuza gangs and the invading Chinese triads. Ambitious yakuza member Ryuichi (Riki Takeuchi) isn't above playing both sides off against each other in his bid for power, while police detective Jojima (Sho Aikawa), himself none too scrupulous in his methods, is out to destroy the gangs. Into this conventional plot framework Miike piles enough warped characters and bizarre, twisted happenings to fuel half-a-dozen Tarantino movies, while cheerfully borrowing-and inflating-key moments from such hard-boiled gangster-noirs as The Big Heat and Kiss Me Deadly. One character deep-fries his own hand, a stripper is drowned in a paddling-pool filled with her own excrement, and the literally apocalyptic finale, the showdown to end all showdowns, will leave you gasping. The appallingly prolific Miike, who regularly makes about five movies a year, has since directed two sequels-the first only three months after the original. [+]

There are several occasions when this rousing Australian thriller from 1987 should have ended with a well-placed shot from a speargun or a stronger knot of rope, but you don't think about these nit-picky details when you're being scared out of your wits. In a role that catapulted her to international stardom, Nicole Kidman plays a young wife who's joined her husband (Sam Neill) on a yachting trip to recover from the tragic death of their son. Far out to sea, they encounter a sinking ship with one survivor (Billy Zane, ten years before Titanic), but inviting him aboard turns out to be a very bad mistake. While Neill attempts to salvage the sinking boat, Kidman is fighting for her life against the psychotic Zane-a villain so creepy that you eagerly look forward to his demise. By the time that moment arrives director Phillip Noyce has resorted to a typical slasher-movie climax (proving that no boat should be without a flare gun), but until then Dead Calm is a nail-biting thriller that's guaranteed to keep you in a state of nail-biting suspense. To accommodate the widescreen compositions on the open ocean, the DVD offers the film in its original 2. 35:1 aspect ratio. -Jeff Shannon.