Comedy

Amelie

Quiet and reserved, Amelie Poulin spends her days as a waitress at a Paris cafe and entertains herself by playing kindhearted practical jokes on her neighbors, finding love in the meantime.
Genre: Foreign Film - French
Rating: R
Release Date: 14-JAN-2003
Media Type: DVD

Perhaps the most charming movie of all time, Amélie is certainly one of the top 10. The title character (the bashful and impish Audrey Tautou) is a single waitress who decides to help other lonely people fix their lives. Her widowed father yearns to travel but won't, so to inspire the old man she sends his garden gnome on a tour of the world; with whispered gossip, she brings together two cranky regulars at her café; she reverses the doorknobs and reprograms the speed dial of a grocer who's mean to his assistant. Gradually she realizes her own life needs fixing, and a chance meeting leads to her most elaborate stratagem of all. This is a deeply wonderful movie, an illuminating mix of magic and pragmatism. Fans of the director's previous films (Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children) will not be disappointed; newcomers will be delighted. --Bret Fetzer

Run Lola Run

It's difficult to create a film that's fast paced, exciting, and aesthetically appealing without diluting its dialogue. Run Lola Run, directed and written by Tom Tykwer, is an enchanting balance of pace and narrative, creating a universal parable that leaps over cultural barriers. This is the story of young Lola (Franka Potente) and her boyfriend Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu). In the space of 20 minutes, they must come up with 100,000 deutsche marks to pay back a seedy gangster, who will be less than forgiving when he finds out that Manni incompetently lost his cash to an opportunistic vagrant. Lola, confronted with one obstacle after another, rides an emotional roller coaster in her high-speed efforts to help the hapless Manni--attempting to extract the cash first from her double-dealing father (appropriately a bank manager), and then by any means necessary. From this point nothing goes right for either protagonist, but just when you think you've figured out the movie, the director introduces a series of brilliant existential twists that boggle the mind. Tykwer uses rapid camera movements and innovative pauses to explore the theme of cause and effect. Accompanied by a pulse-pounding soundtrack, we follow Lola through every turn and every heartbreak as she and Manni rush forward on a collision course with fate. There were a variety of original and intelligent films released in 1999, but perhaps none were as witty and clever as this little gem--one of the best foreign films of the year. --Jeremy Storey

Lola receives a frantic phone call from her boyfriend Manni, who's lost a small fortune belonging to his mobster boss. If Lola deosn't replace the money in twenty minutes, Manni will surely suffer severe consequences.
Genre: Foreign Film - German
Rating: R
Release Date: 1-MAY-2007
Media Type: DVD

Barbarella: Queen of the Galaxy

Barbarella makes a forced landing on the planet Lythion in the year 40,000 where she vanquishes robots and monsters.
Genre: Science Fiction
Rating: PG
Release Date: 8-AUG-2006
Media Type: DVD

Jane Fonda's memorable, zero-gravity striptease during the opening credits of this 1968 Roger Vadim movie is the closest the film comes to a liberated marriage of wit and sex. Based on a French comic strip, the story concerns the adventures of a 41st-century woman, who pretty much gets it on with whomever asks. The sci-fi sets were pretty interesting at the time, though they look rather anachronistic now. Appreciated today mostly as a camp classic, the movie is actually more trying than anything else. --Tom Keogh

La Dolce Vita (2-Disc Collector's Edition)

At three brief hours, La Dolce Vita, a piece of cynical, engrossing social commentary, stands as Federico Fellini's timeless masterpiece. A rich, detailed panorama of Rome's modern decadence and sophisticated immorality, the film is episodic in structure but held tightly in focus by the wandering protagonist through whom we witness the sordid action. Marcello Rubini (extraordinarily played by Marcello Mastroianni) is a tabloid reporter trapped in a shallow high-society existence. A man of paradoxical emotional juxtapositions (cool but tortured, sexy but impotent), he dreams about writing something important but remains seduced by the money and prestige that accompany his shallow position. He romanticizes finding true love but acts unfazed upon finding that his girlfriend has taken an overdose of sleeping pills. Instead, he engages in an ménage à trois, then frolics in a fountain with a giggling American starlet (bombshell Anita Ekberg), and in the film's unforgettably inspired finale, attends a wild orgy that ends, symbolically, with its participants finding a rotting sea animal while wandering the beach at dawn. Fellini saw his film as life affirming (thus its title, The Sweet Life), but it's impossible to take him seriously. While Mastroianni drifts from one worldly pleasure to another, be it sex, drink, glamorous parties, or rich foods, they are presented, through his detached eyes, are merely momentary distractions. His existence, an endless series of wild evenings and lonely mornings, is ultimately soulless and facile. Because he lacks the courage to change, Mastroianni is left with no alternative but to wearily accept and enjoy this "sweet" life. --Dave McCoy

L'Auberge Espagnole (The Spanish Apartment)

An absolute delight, L'Auberge Espagnole captures a moment in a life, seemingly about nothing and everything all at once. Xavier (Romain Duris), a young Parisian not sure what his life is about, decides to spend a year in Barcelona studying economics--leaving behind his unhappy girlfriend (Audrey Tautou, Amélie) but joining an international mix of students in a hectic, crowded apartment. Arguing and partying with his British, German, Danish, and Italian roommates--not to mention getting lessons in love from a Belgian lesbian (Cecile De France) so that he can seduce a friend's wife (Judith Godreche, Ridicule)--Xavier learns more about life than economics. The movie, beautifully shot on digital video, has a freshness and spontaneity that make its simple events--a series of arguments and flirtations--feel like a miniature portrait of the European Union as it comes into focus (the title can be translated as "Euro pudding"). Vibrant, charming, and all-around entertaining. --Bret Fetzer

Seven sexy co-eds. One Spanish apartment. No rules. A single year of learning turns into an outrageous adventure of a lifetime in this "fresh, captivating comedy" (Newsday) that has audiences and critics cheering around the world! Xavier (Romain Duris) is a straight-laced French college senior who moves to Barcelona as part of a exchange program, much to the dismay of his beautiful Martine (Audrey Tautou). But sharing cramped quarters with students from all over Europe quickly leads to multi-cultural chaos as Xavier gets a hilarious, eye-opening lesson on how to live, love, laugh?and party!

A Little Romance

Sandwiched between Slap Shot and The World According to Garp, George Roy Hill made this effervescent film about first love. A sharp American girl (Diane Lane, in her debut) and a film-loving Parisian boy (Thelonious Bernard, in his only film) fall innocently in love. When the girl's zealous mother (Sally Kellerman) goes ballistic, the young couple fall under the spell of a curious gentleman (none other than Laurence Olivier), who plants the seed to make their love last forever: to kiss under a Venetian bridge at sunset. As the love story becomes an adventure with the young lovers crossing France and Italy, Allan Burns's Oscar-nominated script and Hill's deft touch turn this into a romance for the ages and a movie to smile about. George Delerue's Oscar-winning score and the picturesque European scenery don't hurt either. Ages 7 and older. --Doug Thomas

An American teenager living in Paris meets and falls in love with a French teenager. Encouraged by an old con man, the two decide to elope.

Muriel's Wedding

Ever since the late '70s when the Australian New Wave was in full surge, Down Under directors have delivered movies that often hit you like news from another planet. Offbeat characters, weird narrative twists, and a tart mixture of laughs and catastrophe--this is the juice that fuels such flicks as Proof, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Strictly Ballroom, Heavenly Creatures, and most certainly Muriel's Wedding. Directed by P.J. Hogan (who would go on to helm the Hollywood hit My Best Friend's Wedding), this little gem follows tradition by featuring an authentic misfit: Muriel (Toni Collette), a great overweight horse of a girl obsessed with getting married and the music of ABBA. Appropriately, we first meet Muriel at a wedding, all trussed up in a leopardskin number she's boosted for the occasion. When her snotty peers insist that she give up the bridal bouquet to someone who might actually get hitched, when one of the guests turns out to be a clerk in the very store where Muriel ripped off her outfit--you gotta laugh, she's such an unmitigated mess. A loser, her philandering politician father (Bill Hunter) calls her--along with his doormat wife and his other couch-potato offspring. But this movie's no exercise in geek-bashing. As Muriel takes up with feisty Rhonda (Rachel Griffiths) and moves from Porpoise Spit to the big city, her good-hearted grin and zest for life draw us in despite hilarious gaffes and mishaps. (Making out with a boy for the first time, Muriel suddenly finds herself awash in styrofoam: the oaf has unzipped the beanbag chair instead of her skin-tight leather pants.) Muriel's Wedding covers territory Hollywood would banish from a comedy--Rhonda's cancer, the suicide of Muriel's mother, a marriage of convenience to an arrogant athlete--yet, like its heroine, it never loses its sense of humor, its will to move on to whatever good thing might happen next. Everyone in the idiosyncratic cast is terrific, but it's Toni Collette's Dancing Queen who makes Muriel's Wedding a cinematic celebration you won't forget. --Kathleen Murphy

Hysterically funny, fresh, and brimming with wit, MURIEL'S WEDDING is the comedy hit celebrated by critics nationwide! No one ever paid much attention to Muriel and her humdrum small-town life, so she and her best friend, Rhonda, decide to leave it behind and head for the big city ... where they end up having the exciting adventure of their lives! What's more, soon everyone takes notice when Muriel becomes engaged to a handsome and popular sports hero! You'll love every hilarious minute as Muriel discovers that even when it seems all her dreams are coming true, the path to the altar still has plenty of surprising twists!

The Legend of Drunken Master

Wong Fei-Hong (Chan) is inadvertently caught up in a fight between foreign exporters and those who don't want ancient Chinese artifacts to leave the country.
Genre: Feature Film-Action/Adventure
Rating: R
Release Date: 6-APR-2004
Media Type: DVD

Tampopo

Contempt - Criterion Collection

With his aptly titled Contempt, Jean-Luc Godard embraced the widescreen splendor of Hollywood while thumbing his nose at Hollywood itself. A rebel with a cause, Godard pursues an iconoclast's agenda, using the Franscope format (expertly controlled by cinematographer Raoul Coutard) to undermine the grandeur of widescreen melodramas. The story ostensibly concerns an innovative production of Homer's Odyssey and the struggle of a respected screenwriter (Michel Piccoli) to please a pugnacious producer (Jack Palance), a veteran director (Fritz Lang, essentially playing himself), and a petulant wife (Brigitte Bardot) who's grown tired of their turbulent relationship. It's all pretense, however, for Godard's mischievous (and yes, contemptuous) deconstruction of commercial Hollywood filmmaking, potently infused with film-buff in-jokes, astute observations about love, stardom, and artistry, and enough glossy style to suggest that Godard had mastered the craft he so willfully rejects. Contempt is one of his most accessibly fascinating films. --Jeff Shannon

Jean-Luc Godard's subversive foray into commercial filmmaking is a star-studded Cinemascope epic. Contempt (Le M pris) stars Michel Piccoli as a screenwriter torn between the demands of a proud European director (played by legendary director Fritz Lang), a crude and arrogant American producer (Jack Palance), and his disillusioned wife, Camille (Brigitte Bardot) as he attempts to doctor the script for a new film version of The Odyssey.