In late March 1944 a rebellious US Army Major is "volunteered" to train twelve convicted military criminals for a suicide mission - to parachute to a heavily-guarded Nazi general staff officers' retreat to try and assassinate German officers on leave. To get his unorthodox assignment done the Major must convince Army brass to grant pardons to the men, then try to mold the twelve recidivists into a functioning unit, a task made more daunting by the doubts of a by-the-book General and by the suicidal nature of the mission.

When a schoolteacher is sacked he projects his bad mood at his troubled teen son. He in turn buys a CD player from a pawnshop with counterfeit money. This causes a chain-reaction that wreaks havoc on many lives, as everyone transfers their problems to the next victim.

Very odd Russian film, with a modern, almost postmodern theme (concerning Siamese twins and pornography), but set in the early years of the twentieth century and shot in a faux-naive style that one might almost believe was that of films from this period, if one was not aware of what they were really like. There's much to enjoy: the beautiful sepia photography (of the Russian winter, and of eyeballs); great facial acting; the downright oddness of plot, scene composition characterisation and movement; the sudden discontinuities, and the semi-random, peculiarly worded captions. Hardly a movie in the traditional sense, but still a work of art.

Carl Franklin made his directorial bow with the story of three LA drug dealers who, after committing a rather messy murder, hide out in a rural Arkansas town. Assuming that the local "rubes" will offer them little interference, the criminals have not reckoned with sheriff "Hurricane" Dixon (Bill Paxton). Despite the arrogance of the LAPD agents sent to Arkansas to collar the crooks, it is down-home Dixon who puts the final bloody showdown into motion (the fact that the thieves have been falling out throughout the film doesn't hurt things either). Carl Franklin knows where he's going in every frenetic frame of One False Move, and his movie was one of the most acclaimed independent releases of 1991.

A ruthlessly ambitious Scottish lord siezes the throne with the help of his scheming wife and a trio of witches. Roman Polanski's version of Shakespeare's tragedy about a Scottish lord who murders the king and ascends the throne. His wife then begins hallucinating as a result of her guilt complex and the dead king's son conspires to attack Macbeth and expose him for the murderer he is.

Irena "the unknown" (Rappoport) is an Ukranian young woman living in a unidentified Italian city. Soon we discover she has an horrible past of violence and humiliations. To pursue a mysterious aim she manages, by any means, legal and illegal, to get the job as an house servant for a wealthy couple with a little girl. She grows closer and closer to the family, especially to the girl, who suffers from a rare neurological disease. But someone will come back from her past, bringing new horrors and violence.

Marie Latour (Isabelle Huppert) wants to be a singer, but she is a woman struggling against poverty in war-torn France, with two children to feed and a husband away fighting. When a neighbor becomes pregnant, Marie performs an abortion and is rewarded for her services with a Victrola. It's a small step from the Victrola to an income, and Marie finds that she likes to live comfortably and feed her children well. Her husband Paul (Francois Cluzet) returns and attempts to coerce her into being the type of wife he imagines he wants, but Marie insists on running things her way, and her husband is relegated to the role he imagined for her. She finds contentment in her power (merely the power to be herself and pursue her desires), but things are terribly out of balance in the world she was born into and eventually revenge is exacted.

When a humorous script-reader in her New York apartment sees an ad in the Saturday Review of Literature for a bookstore in London that does mail order, she begins a very special correspondence and friendship with Frank Doel, the bookseller who works at Marks & Co., 84 Charing Cross Road.

'Gallipoli' is the story of two young sprinters who join the war effort in Turkey during World War I. There have been countless war films in cinema history covering the different wars, the horrors of war, etc. What is unique about this story is its probing of two young friends and their journey into the military effort--unlike other war films, which deal directly with the war, 90% of this film follows the journey of these two young men before they transfer over to the war. The special quality of this is that the viewer gets to know these two protagonists very well and their humble lives in Australia--which makes the tragic ending all the more devastating. The last 20 or 30 minutes of the film is spent at the Gallipoli peninsula, inside the war trenches. The generals vainly send men running toward the enemy and they are swiftly slaughtered. These scenes demonstrate the horrible truth of war, that healthy young men with lives ahead of them are destroyed forever in a single, pointless instance.

We meet Marion and Gilles on the day they sign their divorce papers. And we move backwards in time. The film is composed of 5 sequences featuring 2 people, hence the title. The backwards time-line shows how their marriage fell apart, and creates nostalgia as we discover the happiness of the early days. The cinematography evolves from cold and static to warm and moving, as the actors actually seem to grow younger. Overall it is a rather dark and pitiless movie, one of its disturbing qualities being that it dares to feature a male protagonist who is an absolute jerk.

A ruthless court bailiff is found dead, and a young lawyer is the prime suspect. Told in a series of flashbacks, Jacob Katadreuffe tells the tale leading to the events of his final confrontation with bailiff Dreverhaven. What unfolds is the man's life story ... of his strained relationship with his mother, of his strong desire to make a better life for himself (largely self-taught), of his obsession with his father, and the bizarre battle of wills with Dreverhaven.

Alan Zweig investigates the wacky world of record collecting. An odd film made by a Toronto filmmaker who interviewed record collectors in their homes and in their favourite haunt - the record store. For those who enjoyed High Fidelity and thought that Nick Hornsby's novel was a rip off of their life story, wait until you see this one! The director's thesis is that record collectors are obsessive compulsive and are using this pursuit to make up for something that is inherently missing from their lives.

Jeffrey "The Dude" Lebowski is the ultimate LA slacker, until one day his house is broken into and his rug is peed on by two angry gangsters who have mistaken him for Jeffrey Lebowski, the LA millionaire, whose wife owes some bad people some big money. The Dude becomes entangled in the plot when he goes to visit the real Lebowski in order to get some retribution for his soiled rug, and is recruited to be the liason between Lebowski and the captors of his now "kidnapped" wife.

A US Army sergeant who participated in the First World War now leads a rifle squad in the same division in which he's served, the First Infantry. The squad participates in combat action from storming Vichy French Africa into the long seige of Sicily and Italy, into D-Day at Omaha Beach, and onward through the push to Germany. Along the way the squad gets involved in several incidents with civilians,such as a French woman about to give birth and also in a firefight in an insane asylum.Throughout the war the Sergeant has engaged in a mini-battle of wills with Pvt. Griff, a semi-pacifist whose convictions are destroyed in a horrific scene amid the human genocide of a concentration camp in 1945.

One of the Catholic Church's most infamous institutions is the focus of this controversial independent feature from Scottish actor and erstwhile director Peter Mullan. Set in 1964, The Magdalene Sisters hones in on the Magdalene convent, a place where purportedly wayward young women have been sent by their families for reform. Many of the girls are locked up in the institution for questionable "sins," and the movie presents several of them as case studies: Margaret (Anne-Marie Duff), who is sent away after being sexually assaulted by a cousin at a wedding; Rose (Dorothy Duffy) and Crispina (Eileen Walsh), who are both unwed mothers; and Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone), whose licentiousness has raised the ire of her former orphanage. It soon becomes clear that the reformatory is more of a manual-labor prison, however, as their girls are forced to work long hours and endure endless physical humiliation and abuse at the hands of the head nun, Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan). As their degradation at the hands of the convent's administrators increases, each girl plots her escape, but each finds that she's never far enough from the sisters' all-encompassing reach.