Johnny To, whose cool, precise gangster thriller The Mission is one of the best Hong Kong films since the Chinese takeover, brings a stylish flair to Running Out of Time, an absurdly plotted but compelling cat-and-mouse crime drama that became a box-office smash in Hong Kong. Criminal genius Wah (pop star Andy Lau) is given only a few weeks to live by his doctor, so he embarks on an elaborate heist and strings along hostage negotiator and unconventional supercop Sang (Lau Ching Wan) as part of the fun. "I just want to play a game with you for 72 hours," Wah confesses. "Great," responds Sang's blustery boss, "it's lunatic against lunatic. " The elaborate scheme has something to do with a bald badass mobster (an almost unrecognizable Waise Lee, of John Woo's Bullet in the Head and A Better Tomorrow), a priceless gem, and a debt of honor. There's a hint of Woo's warrior bonding as cop and crook develop a respectful adversarial friendship in their running battle of wits: "If you can get me to the police station, you win. " It all hinges on some far-fetched twists and the Hong Kong cops are little more than buffoons for most of the film, but To's steely seriousness, sleek style, and runaway pacing keep the film flying through most of the improbabilities. -Sean Axmaker.

Acclaimed director Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Cure Pulse) departs from the horror genre for this mystical story of urban ennui. Friends Mamoru and Yuji played by Tadanobu Asano (Zatoichi Last Life In The Universe) and Joe Odagiri (Out Of This World Azumi) are aimless young men stuck in dead-end jobs in a dreary factory in Tokyo. Mamoru the more antisocial of the two is obsessed with his pet project of acclimating a poisonous jellyfish to fresh water by gradually changing the water in its tank. One night he inexplicably murders the boss' family and is sentenced to death. Yuji left to continue the jellyfish experiment befriends Mamoru's estranged father Tatsuya Fuji (In The Realm Of The Sense The Man In White) and the two form a bond. But Yuji's attachment to the jellyfish is even stronger and problems arise when he accidentally releases the poisonous creature into the canals of Tokyo. System Requirements:Running Time 83 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: FOREIGN/LATIN Rating: NR UPC: 660200310820 Manufacturer No: PALMDV3108.

This film kicks off as a docudrama exploring the final years of Bruce Lee life, featuring all-new revealing interviews with those who worked with him. The second half is the unseen Game of Death footage in its explosive entirety. Overview: Bruce Lee In G. O. D. kicks off as a docudrama which explores the final years of Bruce Lee life, featuring all-new revealing interviews with those who worked with him. The second half of the film is the real treat: Bruce Lee unseen Game of Death footage in its explosive entirety. Raw, uncut and masterfully edited. [+]

SCHOOL OF THE HOLY BEAST Japan's most notorious Nun-Exploitation film: School Of The Holy Beast (Sei Juu Gakuen) directed by sexploitation guru, Norifumi Suzuki, plunges into a maelstrom of hidden torture, secret masochistic desires, and blasphemous rites as Yumi Takigawa takes religious vows to find out what terrible things happened to her mother inside the Sacred Heart Convent. When she finds out - with the help of a lecherous archbishops, a lesbian mother superior and a line-up of fellow nuns ready to whip her (in the films most deliriously over the top scene)with a gauntlet of rose-thorns - hell is loose. Beautifully shot, a shocking unforgetable Masterpiece by the director of "Beautiful Girl Hunter" - Dario Argento meets the Marquis de Sade. CULT EPICS MOST ANTICIPATED RELEASE OF THE YEAR.

Finishing up an important case, the beautiful bounty hunter Iria returns to Earth. Along with her computer, Bob, and her assistant, Fujicrow, she is also assigned an android trainee. The research team charged with building the combat android decided to implant the android's brain with the most cunning combat life form in the universe, a vicious Zeiram unit!.

Starring: ANIL KAPOOR, AISHWARYA RAI, SONALI BENDRESynopsis:This is a story of Avinash (Anil Kapoor) and Priti (Aishwarya Rai) who are living happy lives with their children, until one day the Police show up at their front door, arrest Priti, and charge her with "Prostitution without license". This accusation against Priti has been levied by Rajguru, Avinash's own father. It all started one day when Priti witnessed a stabbing on the streets - in front of a passive crowd. Nobody comes to the aid of the victim, Master Parmanand, except for Avinash. She stands as witness against the assailant Bhawani Pandey, who is put behind bars. In order to take revenge Babloo Pandey, Bhawani's brother, rapes Priti. Due to this Priti is unjustly ostracized by society and family. Nobody but Avinash accepts her and invites her to come and live in his house with the two children that belong to his father's illegitimate wife, who has since died. Priti treats the children like her own children. Avinash's liking for Priti fosters into love, and soon he proposes to her. [+]

In Last Hero in China, Jet Li reprises the role of Wong Fei-hung, a legendary figure in China. Both a doctor and a teacher of martial arts, Wong has just moved his school in Canton, only to discover that the neighboring house is a brothel. Though Wong's students are delighted and the earnest brothel master only wants to study with him, Wong feels he has lost face. But this becomes the least of his troubles: soon he's fighting a corrupt police chief, a temple of slave-trading monks, and a deafness-causing medicine sold to children-and that's just in the first hour. Last Hero in China is a grand melodrama, featuring exaggerated heroes and villains, goofy humor, and hyperbolic kung fu action. The plot takes some hard-to-follow turns, but the action is so nonstop it hardly matters. The lion vs. centipede dance/fight has to be seen to be believed, to say nothing of the priest with a floating lotus chariot and a flying claw. Jet Li is in fine form, Gordon Liu (as the venal top cop) is maniacal and despicable, and the lovely Cheung Man plays an expert martial artist looking for her kidnapped sister. The character of Wong Fei-hung also appears in the Once upon a Time in China series (where he was first played by Li) and in Jackie Chan's Drunken Master movies. [+]

RahXephon: The Motion Picture retells the story of the 2002 broadcast series with some minor changes. After a subway accident, high school student Ayato Kamina discovers the city he knows has been hidden by Mulian invaders inside "Tokyo Jupiter," a huge sphere in which time passes slowly. Ayato's half-human/half-Mulian blood makes him the "Instrumentalist" who can pilot the giant mecha RahXephon and "tune the world," which will somehow defeat the Mulians. Ayato undertakes this mission only to save Haruka Mishima, his former high school sweetheart. Condensing the plot of the 26-episode series into just under two hours proves a daunting task for executive director Yutaka Izubuchi and his artists. They leave big chunks of the story unexplained and send characters into the past to visit themselves, creating some thorny, unresolved paradoxes. The results feel like yet another unsuccessful Evangelion imitator. (Rated 15 and older: violence, brief nudity, sexual situations) -Charles Solomon Return to the world of RahXephon, where humans and Mu fight for dominance over a shattered Earth, and giant statues are the ultimate weapons. Where music forms the fabric of the universe and the link between two hearts is the thread upon which the fate of humanity hangs. It is still a love story, but it is not the same story. [+]

They were destined, if not doomed, to be together. She was the mill owner's battered bride; he was his overworked nephew. Out of their plight grew a profound and powerful secret love. Their hearts were free, but only murder could free the lovers from the tyranny of the mill owner. Or could it? Acclaimed throughout the world, this film almost didn't come to the screen at all. Chinese officials tried to hide Ju-Dou behind a wall of censorship - an act that prompted Martin Scorsese, Woody Allen and other major filmmakers to speak out in support of this remarkable film.

In Iron Monkey 2 (only loosely related to its predecessor), Hong Kong martial arts star Donnie Yen plays Iron Monkey, who's a cross between Robin Hood and a superhero. However, it's hard to determine what exactly his goals are because the movie is virtually incomprehensible. The story line-something to do with revolutionaries battling arms smugglers-is disjointed, the camera work is excessively wild, scenes change abruptly and without explanation ("Iron Monkey! What are you doing here?" "Never mind. Let's get the weapons. "), the characters are broad and cartoonish, and the dubbing is unusually bad. Only the frequent appearance of astonishing hyperkinetic fight scenes-choreographed by the endlessly inventive Yuen Ho Ping, who came to fame as the fight choreographer of The Matrix-keep the viewer engaged. But the curious thing is that, after a while, this choppy movie starts to exert a perverse fascination. It doesn't become campy; instead, as it lurches from kung fu spectacle to strange moral pronouncements to out-of-nowhere high emotion, Iron Monkey 2 grows strangely compelling. It's as if, through directorial incompetence, the movie has been distilled to the basic elements of cinematic storytelling. While avant-garde directors like Jean-Luc Godard struggle to discover just this kind of raw, jagged, yet potent narrative, Iron Monkey 2 achieves it without even trying. [+]

This strange fable of a movie, like other movies by Japanese director Shohei Imamura (The Eel, Dr. Akagi), is both enchanting and perplexing. After being laid off, a salesman (Koji Yakusho) travels to a small town to seek out a treasure hidden by an elderly friend of his. Instead, he finds a young woman who has a peculiar condition: she releases gushes of water when she has orgasms. Meanwhile, her grandmother waits for the man who left her years ago to return; an African marathon runner passes their house every day; and three fishermen cast their lines into the nearby river, for the water the young woman vents attracts an abundance of fish. The baffling significance of the movie's more fantastic elements doesn't keep Warm Water Under a Red Bridge from also being charming, strangely sincere, and surreally comic. -Bret Fetzer From legendary filmmaker Shohei Imamura comes this comic fable for adults. A frustrated unemployed architect learns of a treasure hidden inside an old house near a red bridge in a remote fishing village. Upon arriving he encounters a beautiful young woman with an unusual condition who lives with her grandmother in the old house. The relationship that builds between them becomes both vital and volatile. [+]

(Horror) Seeking the much-desired quality of ul-jjang (the Perfect Face), 17-year-old Hyunsu's friends are envious that she has a plastic surgeon for a mother. On their summer vacation together, she watches as her friends get plastic surgery and then one by one begin to die mysterious deaths. Hyunsu's mother holds the key to the dark secrets that have been tucked away up to now.

In this sexy and sassy story, Naomi pays the bills by directing lesbian porn. Her male bosses think her work is too gay; her friends think she's a sellout. For comfort, Naomi confides in a secret online soul mate called Sugar. Then Naomi gets a chance to direct a popular and daring girl-meets-girl matchmaking show. She casts her bubbly pal Azusa, whose love life at home is suffering, and no-nonsense executive Miki, whose outlet by night is exotic dancing. When their scripted TV romance flares into some hot off-screen action, even Naomi finds herself caught in the flame. Directed by Desiree Lim, Sugar Sweet is the first Japanese film to be made by and about lesbians.

The first feature film from Taiwanese director Tsai Ming-Liang, Rebels of the Neon God has more conventional "action" than most of this director's films, yet still features his unique cinematic style. A pair of petty hoodlums rob payphones and play video games at an arcade; one of them flirts with a girl who works at a roller rink. While taking her home on his motorcycle, the hoodlum smashes the side mirror of a taxi-which may be what inspires the taxi driver's son, a student who has just quit school, to follow the hoodlum around in pursuit of revenge. Rebels of the Neon God is told through a series of beautifully composed tableaux; the camera rarely moves, and most scenes are a single sustained shot. Yet the movie's measured pace and subdued but compelling visuals become strangely mesmerizing, as in the director's other films (Vive L'Amour, The Hole). -Bret Fetzer.