In French director Jean Becker's tensely directed film, an advertising executive savages family, friends, and complete strangers with brutal honesty on the eve of his 42nd birthday,

Starring Daniel Auteuil and Jean-Pierre Darroussin. In French with English subtitles. Rated PG. Opens Friday, August 8 at the Park Theatre

Japanese cinema doesn’t begin and end with Akira Kurosawa. Although its art-house product is second to none, the Land of the Rising Sun has never limited itself to the manufacture of celluloid masterpieces.

Starring Mathieu Amalric and Cécile de France. In French with English subtitles. Rated PG. Opens Friday, August 1, at the Park Theatre

Starring Asia Argento and Fu’ad Ait Aattou. In French with English subtitles. Rated 18A. Opens Friday, July 25, at the Park Theatre

Starring Ann Savage and Louis Negin. Rated PG. Opens Friday, July 25, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

Starring Guillaume Depardieu and Jeanne Balibar. In French with English subtitles. Rated G. Opens Friday, July 18, at the Park Theatre

Crispin Glover isn’t just the “oddball” who pretended to karate kick David Letterman in the head on TV. He also costarred in Back to the Future, and, in Poland, starred in Jerzy Skolimowski’s Ferdydurke.

In French with English subtitles. Starring Benoit Regent and Johanna ter Steege. At the Pacific Cinémathèque from July 9 to 12, and on July 17.

Starring Gad Elmaleh and Audrey Tautou. In French with English subtitles. Rated PG. Opens Friday, July 4, at the Park Theatre

Starring Riccardo Scamarcio and Elio Germano. In Italian with English subtitles. Unrated. Plays Monday to Thursday, June 30 to July 3, Saturday to Monday, July 5 to 7, and Wednesday, July 9, at the Vancity Theatre

When Manoel de Oliveira was born, silent cinema existed but silent features did not. Indeed, he was in kindergarten when movies lasting more than an hour made their somewhat belated debut.

With Amiri Baraka, Robert Creeley, and Anne Waldman. Unrated. Plays Friday to Sunday, June 13 to 15, at the Vancity Theatre

Starring Cornelio Wall, Maria Pankratz, and Miriam Toews. In Plautdietsch with English subtitles. Unrated. Plays Thursday to Thursday, June 5 to 12, at the Vancity Theatre

In Italian with English subtitles. Starring Xenia Rappoport, Claudia Gerini, and Clara Dossena. In Italian with English subtitles. Rated 18A. Opens Friday, May 23, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

When asked by the Straight about the upcoming Leo Awards Film Festival (May 15 to 19) at the Pacific Cinémathèque (www.cinematheque.bc.ca/ ), Leo Awards president Walter Daroshin had this to say: “Our industry is very efficient at pounding its chest and making the economic argument: we’re the third largest producer in North America; we do a billion dollars a year in economic activity; we employ 20,000 people. The list goes on.

Most of the filmmakers appearing in Next: Documentary Perspectives in Contemporary Art will be more familiar to gallery-goers than cinephiles (except, perhaps, for local artist Jeff Wall).

Starring Ewan McGregor, Hugh Jackman, and Michelle Williams. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, April 25, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

Directed by Jean-Luc Godard. Starring Anne Wiazemsky and Jean-Pierre Léaud. In French with English subtitles. Unrated. Plays Thursday to Saturday, April 24 to 26, at the Pacific Cinémathèque

Consider the case of the Ostdeutsch. Even though not all of these German settlers in Central Europe were either Nazis-come-lately or even men of military age, I find it hard to get teary-eyed when I think about them, even though millions were killed or dispersed in 1945. So, apparently, does everybody else. That’s why they so rarely appear in the history books.

London to Brighton is an almost neorealistic piece of work. Although the chronology is somewhat complex, the plot is very simple.

Compared to Père-Lachaise, Westminster Abbey is a dumping ground for provincial nobodies.

Starring Naomi Watts and Tim Roth. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, March 14, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

If the Russian film industry had never existed, world cinema would still have a language, but it would be considerably less sophisticated than it currently is.

Thanks to a misunderstood direction, a travelling Egyptian police band winds up in the Israeli equivalent of a turnpike trailer park in this rollicking Middle Eastern comedy.

Starring Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson, and Ralph Fiennes. Rated 18A.

Starring Rutina Wesley and Tre Armstrong. Rated PG. Opens Friday, January 25, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

Starring Ice Cube and Tracy Morgan. Rated PG.

Few recent motion pictures have been so fully imbued with a spirit of place, and codirectors Peter Brosens and Jessica Hope Woodworth do a great job of showing us what only the initiated know is still there

The Three Gorges Dam drama suggests you can drown everything but hope

A simple plot summation would make Brian De Palma's reality-based fiction sound very like the director’s 1989 anti-Vietnam War drama, Casualties of War, but stylistically it could not be more different. Shot mainly on digital video by various "embedded" personalities (a Latino soldier who hopes his images will get him into film school; French, U.S., and Arabic TV journalists), Redacted comes very close to recapturing the up-close-and-personal realism of America’s ongoing occupation of Iraq. Without being crudely propagandistic (the U.S. infantrymen that we see are basically good-natured boys when they’re not machine-gunning pregnant women at roadblocks or putting violent moves on 15-year-old Arab girls), this is the most unflinching critique of an American conflict that has been made before said conflict has been resolved

This film is Alain Resnais's third adaptation of an Alan Ayckbourn semi-comedy (the first two being Smoking and No Smoking). Private Fears in Public Places (in French, Coeurs, or Hearts) is about six people (seven, if you count the off-screen curmudgeon whose voice is provided by Claude Rich) whose hearts beat for themselves alone, although this situation makes them thoroughly miserable

Set in 1987, 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days describes the desperate attempts of two young female students to obtain an illegal abortion. Because Gabita's (Laura Vasiliu) pregnancy is so advanced (hence the title), the sinister Viarel Bebe (Vlad Ivanov) will face murder charges if he performs the procedure

There are so many things superficially wrong with this alleged period piece, it's all too easy to overlook the fact that Goya's Ghosts is actually one of contemporary cinema's most accurate portraits of the modern world.

Starring Joaquin Phoenix, Mark Wahlberg, Robert Duvall, and Eva Mendes. Rated 14A.

Starring Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Jim Lovell. Rated G. Opens Friday, October 5, at the Cinemark Tinseltown

Shake Hands with the Devil Starring Roy Dupuis and Deborah Kara Unger. In English and French with English subtitles. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, September 28, at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas

While Ken Eisner ran a review of Lady Chatterley in our print edition, movie reviewer Mark Harris also saw the movie and wrote a review of the film as well. Here it is as a special Web exclusive.

Starring Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti, and Monica Bellucci. Rated 18A.

Starring Zoltán Miklos Hajdu. In English and Hungarian with English subtitles. Unrated. Plays Thursday to Monday (August 30 to September 3), and next Thursday, September 6, at the Vancity Theatre

Starring Romain Duris, Fabrice Luchini, and Ludivine Sagnier. In French with English subtitles. Rated PG.

Directed by Lars von Trier. Starring Peter Gantzler and Jens Albinus. In Danish and Icelandic with English subtitles. Rated 14A.

Starring Sunny Deol. In Hindi with English subtitles. Rated PG. Now playing at the Granville 7

Starring Colin Firth, Ben Kingsley, and Thomas Sangster. Rated PG.

Of all the decades of the 20th century, the 1960s is the most difficult to pin down. Politically, it started with either the U.S. civil-rights movement, the Cuban Missile Crisis, or the (trumped-up) Gulf of Tonkin Incident. Culturally, its origins lie in the invention of the birth-control pill, the unprecedented popularity of psychedelic drugs, and the appearance of the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. Figuring out when the era ended is equally problematic.

Starring Daniel Auteuil and Dany Boon. In French with English subtitles. Rated PG. Opens Friday, July 27, at the Ridge Theatre

Starring Gad Elmaleh, Alice Taglioni, and Daniel Auteuil. In French with English subtitles. Rated PG.

How many Vancouverites have Hong Kong roots? The answer is more complicated than you might think. Statistics Canada is content to let us know that 80 percent of the region's Chinese population in the 2001 census was foreign-born. Statistics Canada can also determine that 342,665 Greater Vancouverites identified themselves as Chinese-affiliated in the 2001 census.

Starring Gad Elmaleh, Alice Taglioni, and Daniel Auteuil. In French with English subtitles. Rated PG.

Starring Marion Cotillard, Gerard Depardieu, and Pascal Greggory. In French with English subtitles. Rated PG. Opens Friday, June 15, at the Ridge Theatre