Three strangers brutally murder the inoffensive manager of an Amsterdam boutique, but the case is less straightforward than it seems. Told in flashback via the investigation of a criminal psychiatrist brought in to certify insanity, the film convincingly shows the motive behind the killing as intolerable male oppression of various kinds, the twist in this thriller/courtroom drama being that the muggers - and their psychiatrist - are very ordinary women and their victim a man. The story is told with an astonishing assurance and visual flair that belie the small budget and debutant director Gorris' lack of experience. Her feminism is uncompromising, but of a disarmingly undogmatic kind. The result is at once accessible and deeply unsettling: the upbeat ending, for instance, has the male way of looking at the world literally laughed out of court, with a cathartic laughter that explodes out of the women's earlier silent isolation, and goes on echoing long after the film is over. SJo

Genre: Drama . Movie Type: Period Film, Social Problem Film. Themes: Fighting the System, Miscarriage of Justice, Unlikely Criminals. Director: Mike Leigh. Main Cast: Imelda Staunton, Philip Davis, Peter Wight, Adrian Scarborough, Heather Craney. Release Year: 2004. Country: UK . Run Time: 125 minutes. MPAA Rating: R.

Genre: Drama . Movie Type: Musical Drama, Melodrama. Themes: Mothers and Sons, Down on Their Luck, Saintly Fools. Director: Lars von Trier. Main Cast: Björk, Catherine Deneuve, David Morse, Peter Stormare, Joel Grey. Release Year: 2000. Country: DK/SE/FR . Run Time: 137 minutes. MPAA Rating: R.

Darwin's Nightmare is a tale about humans between the North, about globalization, and about fish. Some time in the 1960's, in the heart of Africa, a new animal was introduced into Lake Victoria as a little scientific experiment. The Nile Perch, a voracious predator, extinguished almost the entire stock of the native fish species. However, the new fish multiplied so fast, that its white fillets are today exported all around the world.

How to Get Ahead in Advertising sets in with a scabrous brilliance. It is a black comedy conducted with the savage cruelty that only the British manage in a way that really hurts. The first half is a scathingly brilliant jab into the underbelly of the advertising industry - an easy target one may think, but director/writer Bruce (Withnail and I) Robinson has clearly spent some time in the advertising industry and fires barbs at his target with an unerring precision. The film also features Richard E. Grant, also from Withnail, in a full flight of dementia. In lesser films Grant comes out either as a prissy fop or merely wimpish - his best parts are, like here, those which allow him to take centre stage and launch forth with full sarcastic bite. The scenes with he savaging a Greenie dinner party guest as being 'a closet meat eater' or an hysterical metaphoric rant about the advertising industry - "I'm a drug pusher" - to a train carriage full of uptight types who take the scene at face value prove positively hysterical. In the latter half the film launches off into a variant on the Beast Within theme familiar to Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde et al - although it's sort of a Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde if one can imagine Jekyll as a comedy straight man and Hyde as a completely amoral capitalist. This is a slight jump of tracks from the wonderfully black, hysteric savagery of the advertising industry satire that takes up the first half but soon builds with its own equal hilarity. There are all the deadpan reactions to the news of a talking boil by the people around Grant - Grant to psychologist: "I'm not interested in what it [the boil] has to say ... if it wants to join in it can pay its own bill." One scene with the good Grant trapped as the boil pleading with a woman that the evil Grant is dancing with (thinking that she is his wife Rachel Ward) and trying to tell her of the evil boil's plans to impregnate her only to have it misinterpreted as a torrent of obscenities is absolutely hilarious.

Melanie DeMore Mp3's

Melanie DeMore Sings Love And Affection Written by Joan Armatrading

I had the wierdest reaction to Dancer in the Dark. I have been -for as long as I can remember- obsessed with the cinema. And never have I loved a movie so much that it made me feel like not going to the movies for a while. Never have I loved a movie so much that I didn't want to tell people about it. Both of these things happened after I had this cinematic experience. I don't feel like going back to the theater until I have completely absorbed this movie (I'm sorry but anything else at this point is going to feel pointless). I don't know how to talk to people about it because the film is such a personal experience that you can end up completely unhinged by someone else's response. I stopped myself from talking about it to several people already. I knew they might not get it and I thought to myself (rather snobbishly) "the unwashed masses do not deserve this movie!"

Lar's von Trier's musical, shot in raw, jumpy digital video, is a fascinating exercise in brutality, mitigated by the otherworldy charisma (and the music) of the Icelandic pop star Bjork. As Selma, a Czech immigrant factory worker going blind in the early 1960's in Washington State (the film was shot in Sweden), Bjork seems to be inventing a whole new style of film acting, and her performance is miraculous. von Trier, continuing his campaign to rescue the art of film from complacency and convention, follows Selma's utter annihilation with sadistic relish. "Dancer in the Dark" is both stupefyingly bad and utterly overpowering; it can elicit, sometimes within a single scene, a gasp of rapture and a spasm of revulsion. Come to the theater prepared, with a handkerchief in one hand and a rotten tomato in the other. -- A. O. Scott , The New York Times

An Interview with Ray Nayler