SERGE LUTENS AMBRE SULTAN by Serge Lutens

Overwhelming in scope and magnificent in visual style, Ran is less an adaptation of Shakespeare's King Lear than an amplification of its themes of greed, betrayal, and honor. Though set during the turbulent Muromachi period in Japan, the film achieves a surprising universality by perfectly marrying style and content. Master director Akira Kurosawa distilled the play and stripped it of its numerous lengthy speeches (Kurosawa accused Shakespeare of being too wordy). In their stead, he packed the film...

Maybe it's the fact that star Vanessa Paradis was once a model for Chanel, but the arty black-and-white film Girl on the Bridge has the look and feel of a TV commercial for Calvin Klein's Eternity. This is not to mock acclaimed French director Patrice Leconte, who also directed Monsieur Hire (1989) and The Hairdresser's Husband (1990), but rather to suggest that everything he films is awash in stylized beauty -- even the grizzled Daniel Autueil is suffused with erotic mystery under Leconte's lens...

Cult director Jesus Franco had his greatest popular success with this horrific variation on George Franju's classic Les Yeux sans Visage. Set in 1912, the film concerns the efforts of mad surgeon Dr. Orloff (Howard Vernon) to reconstruct the face of his disfigured daughter Melissa (Diana Lorys). Helped by a freakish assistant named Morpho (Ricardo Valle), Orlof kidnaps several women including Dany (Maria Silva), a cabaret singer whose forgotten necklace is the clue which leads dedicated Inspector...