Argentine social realism mixes with stylized gunplay in this film from director Adrián Caetano. Oso (Julio Chávez) is an inexpressive, heavyset convict who tries to start a new life after being released from jail. His young daughter Alicia (Agostina Lage) has forgotten him and her mother (Soledad Villamil) has long since found a new man--the weak but faithful Sergio (Luis Machín)--with whom she and Alicia share a small home in a rundown Buenos Aires neighborhood. Oso tries to reestablish himself in Alicia's life, but his past keeps getting in the way, eventually causing him to take one final, dangerous job for his scheming old crime boss, the Turk. While the film's mythic western story arc of violence and redemption is nothing new, it's still powerful and moving thanks to Caetano's skill in capturing the subtle beauty of his rundown locations and struggling characters. As with his earlier BOLIVIA, this film provides a nonjudgmental window into Argentina's financial problems, revealing how a proud, richly cultured nation has been driven to extreme measures by economic depression. Performances are naturalistic and strong, with Chávez a standout as the quintessential loner, Oso. With almost no changes in his character's glum exterior, he manages to hint at a concealed wealth of deep emotion; his scenes with Lage are quietly heartbreaking.

In Vera Cruz in the 1940s, Nacho, an Indian, waits tables at Don Lázaro's café at Hotel Ofélia. He falls for Lola, an opium-addicted, alcoholic whore who's hopelessly in love with Gardenia Wilson, a masked wrestler who slept with her once but knows she's unbalanced. Don Lázaro warns Nacho about Lola, and Nacho knows his love will be unrequited, but he'll do anything, regardless of how degrading, to be near her. Lola, for her part, can be sadistic. Republican exiles who are regulars at the café encourage Lola's desire to assassinate Franco. Nacho in turn mixes this political mirage with his fascination with the plot of "The Mikado." Where do fantasies and obsessions lead?

Jaime Rosales beautifully consolidates the achievement of his distinguished debut, The Hours of the Day, with Solitary Fragments [La soledad], a leisurely but rewardingly intense dual narrative that delicately unpicks the secret lives of women. "La soledad radiates with the intensity yet the normality of daily life as few films do. It is Big Brother without the sensationalism, a soap without the artifice and a documentary without the wobbly camerawork and dark interiors."

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. This dreamlike fairytale captures the coming-of-age of a young Czechoslovakian girl. After receiving a pair of earrings, strange things begin to happen to Valerie. As her burgeoning sexuality sparks even more haunting escapades, Valerie must contend with an explosively surreal world that challenges and inspires her.

Crossing Borders. Spain, 1960. Two friends named Martin and Marcos decide to look for jobs in Switzerland. They leave their families behind in Spain and head off on their journey to the free, progressive part of Europe. They will have adapt to very different way of life there, working as mechanics at a factory and living in a small industrial town. The arrival of Martin´s wife Pilar and son Pablo, and Marcos´girlfriend Maria del Carmen, marks the end of the bachelor life they were living in a country with lost of freedom. Martin and Pilar´s everyday life is their work, while little Pablo starts going to school and making the new place his home. When Martin´s father dies, they realize they've already go what they went there for and it´s time to return. Much to their susprise, going home is much harder than leaving was.

A Portrait of Madame Yuki. The story of an unhappily married woman who is obsessed with physical love and uninterested in spiritual love. Yuki, the only daughter of a once-noble family, is married to a businessman whom she despises, though his sexual power attracts her hopelessly. The young assistant to whom she is drawn is too weak and indecisive to take any action of his own. In despair, she drowns herself in a mist-shrouded lake and it falls to a female servant to deliver an epithet of cowardice on her mistress.

Residents of an enclosed neighborhood in the middle of Mexico DF are shocked by a violent crime, and for one resident in particular, young Alejandro, the drama is ratcheted up when he encounters the lone kid who escaped the event and is hiding out within the neighborhood's borders.

Joe, a rootless young drifter, finds work on a barge travelling between Glasgow and Edinburgh, owned by Les and his wife Ella. One afternoon they discover the corpse of a young woman floating in the water. Accident? Suicide? Murder? As the police investigate and suspect is arrested, we discover that Joe knows more than he is letting on. Gradually we learn of Joe's past relationship with the dead woman. Meanwhile an unspoken attraction develops between Joe and Ella, heightening the claustrophobic tensions in the confined space of the barge.

What if someone offered you the chance to begin again, with a new life that was organized to be exactly what you wanted it to be? That's what the organization offers some wealthy people. They find a life that is what their clients would have wanted, artist, writer, politician, kill the person who is to be replaced and surgically alter their clients to take their places. We follow a new client from first contact, through his staged death, to surgery, recovery and replacement. Of course that's when things become complicated.

A man gets trapped inside a telephone box. Onlookers unsuccessfully try to free him. Then the men from the telephone company arrive, but relief turns into puzzlement, then horror, as it transpires what they have in store for him.

A Cock and Bull Story (released in the United States and Australia as Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story) is a film-within-a-film, featuring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon playing themselves as egotistical actors during the making of a screen adaptation of Laurence Sterne's 18th century novel Tristram Shandy. Gillian Anderson and Keeley Hawes also play themselves in addition to their Tristram Shandy roles. Coogan is playing the titular role in an adaptation of Tristram Shandy being filmed at a stately home. He constantly spars with actor Rob Brydon, who is playing Uncle Toby, and believes his role to be of equal importance to Coogan's, calling himself the "co-lead".

One of the best movies of the Brazilian Cinema Novo movement, as well as a key work by that movement's greatest auteur, How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman has been a favorite of film scholars since its 1971 release, when it was banned in its home country and rejected by the Cannes Film Festival for its "excessive nudity." Outside of film schools and cinematheques, however, this subversive satire has been relatively inaccessible in America, a situation that the indispensable New Yorker Video label has finally rectified with their DVD release of the film. Director Nelson Pereira dos Santos sets his outrageous comedy about cultural misunderstandings in the 16th century, but his gifts as a cinematic storyteller allow the movie to resonate with modern audiences as though it was set—and produced—yesterday.

The Lady of Musashino is the tragedy of a woman destroyed by sticking to her own personal values while all around her society is in moral decay. Intensely moving story about a woman trapped between her stoic/moral beliefs, and the changing times brought about by the end of WW2. A look at how upper middle class in Japan react to war and its aftermath, as well as to adultery and suicide. The movie's final image is a great cinematic representation of all that was gained and all that was lost in post-war Japan.

Giovanna is a bookeeper in a company which packs chickens. She is married to a man who has a precarious job. First she starts being curious about a young man who lives in the block opposite hers, and then she falls in love with him. The relationship between the two becomes much stronger when she starts to find out more about him from an old man who bursts into their lives. The old man, obsessed with the memories of some things that happened n the long past autumn of 1943, has lost his memory and finds refuge in Giovanna.

Showing events from the point of view of two minor characters from Hamlet, men who have no control over their destiny, this film examines fate and asks if we can ever really know what's going on. Are answers as important as the questions? Will Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (or Guildenstern and Rosencrantz) manage to discover the source of Hamlet's malaise as requested by the new king? Will the mysterious players who are strolling around the castle reveal the secrets they evidently know? And whose serve is it?