A fitfully amazing, frequently disheartening hodgepodge of action, farce, and romance, slapped together as a costarring vehicle for three of Hong Kong's major movie stars: Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung (who also directed), and Yuen Biao. Its light-footed, try-anything spirit makes it consistently enjoyable, but these wonderful performers are working (to put it kindly) beneath their gifts. Chan plays a womanizing attorney who recruits arms-dealer Hung and madcap inventor Biao to dig up dirt on the corporate sleaze balls he's supposedly defending-industrial polluters (and heroin smugglers) whose effluents threaten the bucolic fish farm of a handsome widow woman. The trio doesn't have many collective scenes, so their Three Musketeers act never really gets off the ground. As always, the fights and stunt work are mind-boggling; the jaunty details are fun: Chan's flick-of-the-wrist trick with a fancy briefcase; Hung's deft run- through of a few choice Cantonese opera moves; and Yuen Biao's Olympic-level acrobatics on, around, and within an industrial steel-tube staircase. -David Chute.

In the Soviet Union it was forbidden to shoot home movies, but noted director Nikita Mikhalkov (who won an Oscar® for Burnt by the Sun) ignored that prohibition and secretly filmed his daughter Anna across a span of 13 years. Every year Mikhalkov would ask the child the same five questions, and the film from their casual interviews would be secretly processed. This intimate look at a little girl's growing consciousness became the backbone of what turned out to be a startling and brilliant documentary. Mikhalkov happened to be surreptitiously filming his daughter during a span of time when the Soviet Union would change enormously, as Leonid Brezhnev died and his successors gradually began making changes that would lead to the dismantling of the USSR and the emergence of a new Russia. Footage of a young Anna smiling and answering her father's questions are deftly contrasted with newsreel footage of a Communist youth rally presided over by the aged Leonid Brezhnev. And at one point, as Anna gets older, she mentions her fear of "giving wrong answers," and the stifling atmosphere created by the Soviet state becomes apparent. As things begin to change profoundly in the late 1980s, a loosening society is shown, and Anna's own development into a thoughtful young woman becomes an analogue for changing attitudes in Russia itself. This film is a profound and powerful meditation on both family and nationhood, and it stands as a remarkable work of art. -Robert J. McNamara.

There actually is no naked killer in Naked Killer, but that's about all this mad, adults-only comic book action roller coaster is missing. Flirty, feral Chingmy Yau gives an abusive jerk an impromptu vasectomy in front of cop Simon Yam, an impotent detective who vomits whenever he draws his gun. He's tracking a series of sex murders where all the male victims are missing their private organs when he falls in love with chief suspect Chingmy. She's subsequently recruited by the real killer, a hit woman who targets rapists at large and practices on drooling sex-mad psychos chained up in the attic. When they finally head out for the real thing, they take out victims in a display of midair somersaults, cracking whips, flying ropes, and flashing guns. This kind of foreplay attracts the lustful attentions of rival assassin Carrie Ng, a lesbian killer ready to abandon her purring sex kitten for the savage Chingmy. This is one of the most energetically gonzo Hong Kong logic bombs ever made, a crazy melodrama that revels in absurd extravagance, sick humor (you may never eat link sausage again), and pure adrenaline-driven displays of gymnastic action and orgiastic gunplay. Incoherence is a small price to pay for such guilty delights. -Sean Axmaker.