Reviewed by David Levinson

OPENING with a pretty ordinary-looking house suspended in darkness, Maria Full of Grace hardly skips a beat before the titular lady is thrown headfirst – within a matter of minutes – from a muted familial goodbye into the throngs of factorywork. Taken from a literal grab-bag, it's an open-air endorsement of Marson's considerable control over material that could've easily ended up in the junkyard for films about socioeconomic underachievers: he tends to keep things both narratively and emotionally concise, trafficking in several time leaps to get to the destination, and deflecting almost all of its turmoil onto the hard, matter-of-fact greys that accompany the bus ride. And, perhaps most importantly, he ditches context.

Richard Linklater/USA/1995+04; R4
Warner Bros, NZ$14.95/$24.95 | Reviewed by Kim Lesch

THE remarkable thing about Before Sunrise and Before Sunset is their simplicity – two characters in conversation, the first relying slightly more on their interactions with others, the second purely dependent on the creativity of language between two people with a past.

Robert Altman/USA/1993; R1 (2-disc)
Criterion, US$39.95 | Reviewed by John Spry

IT'S HARD to believe more than 10 years have passed since the Robert Altman-directed film Short Cuts – the mesmerising follow up to The Player (1992) – was released into cinemas and available on general release worldwide (and not just in art-house cinemas). I thought it timely to revisit this film released recently in the United States by The Criterion Collection. Over the past 12 months many classic Altman films have found their way onto DVD, and recently three films have received the "Director Approved" treatment on the Criterion label. Besides Short Cuts, the other titles are Tanner '88 (1988) and Secret Honour (1984), both of which were released in time for the U.S. general election, and timed quite appropriately so, although they probably did not have the effect that Altman would have liked.

What to say? Where does one begin? I'll never get this two hours of my life back. In this 'pro-feminist' film the men are portrayed one dimensionly, and worse – the relationships in this film are practically paint by numbers bad. I believe the intention of the filmmaker/writer Sue Heel was to follow the lives of four working women throughout a basic training in seduction in the form of a cheesy class run by an Italian model. However, these 'classes' mainly seem to focus on caressing inanimate objects and sitting without looking at one's chair.

What's love got to do, got to do with it? Plenty, according to Zhang Yimou. His breezy follow-up to the windswept Hero feels like a light northerly by comparison: there's less foliage blowing around, people can't walk on water and everything is primarily set in Matrix green. Yet the film revels immensely in having fun with its new laissez-faire self, propped up by a leafy paperback narrative loaded with the kind of love trigonometry and triple-crossing normally associated with a Hollywood B-film noir.

Masahiro Shinoda/Japan/1969; R1
Criterion, US$29.95 | Reviewed by Mubarak Ali

JAPANESE performance art expresses itself so rarely on film – especially as distilled as it is in Masahiro Shinoda's experimental film – that it becomes an almost alien but undeniably rich, culturalist experience in itself. The sixties witnessed many Japanese directors influenced by the daring narrative structures of the French New Wave, and their attempts to combine intrinsic Japanese stories with a more European style of filmmaking created works which are fascinatingly antithetical to the classicist masterworks of earlier directors like Ozu and Mizoguchi.