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In Peter Weir's atmospheric film The Last Wave, we are brought into a world of Aboriginal witchcraft, dream reality, and disorientation; similar to his film Picnic at Hanging Rock, Peter Weir offers few clear cut clues and loads of mystery, creating a wholly mesmerizing viewing experience.

The film opens up with a scene from a school house in a rural area of the Australian desert. A sudden violent storm begins outside and, as a young boy is looking out the window, a heavy hail begins and a large chunk of ice crashes through the window, slashing the boy in the neck. During this scene we are treated to a montage of images from the city, showing gridlocked traffic and people running from the heavy rain of the freak storm.

What we see and what we seem are but a dream... a dream within a dream.

Picnic at Hanging Rock is one of the first Australian films to break through to an international audience, and it is also one of director Peter Weir's earliest and most important works. Weir would later go on to direct such giants as The Year of Living Dangerously, Dead Poet's Society, and The Truman Show. Picnic at Hanging Rock, mysterious and dream-like, confusing and open-ended, provides a glimpse of this prolific director's early vision.

Beastmaster is classic of early '80s swords and sorcery films. Providing all of the staples of the genre, as well as providing some head scratchingly original material. Although it's one of those action films that you really need a sense of humor to appreciate, (Beastmaster is a total B movie) there is a coherent enough story line, interesting characters, and some pretty decent effects for the time, making it clear why this film has, over the years, gained a growing cult following. The Beastmaster begins with 3 disfigured witches peering into a cauldron and casting spells. After seeing a vision, they inform Maax, an evil high priest (Rip Torn) that he will be slain by the king's unborn child. Maax, in order to sacrifice the baby, sends one of his witches late at night to the child's bedside with a cow. The witch transfers the baby into the cow's womb with magic and escapes with the child to a remote place. Just as the witch is finishing her ritual, about to deal the killing blow, she herself is killed by a passing peasant with a bladed boomerang.

The peasant then returns to his village with the child and begins to raise the boy. In his childhood the boy, now named Dar, discovers that he has a telepathic ability to speak with animals and see through their eyes. Soon after the boy Dar becomes a fully grown Beastmaster, played by Marc Singer, his entire village is destroyed by savage, animalistic, barbarians. Dar then does the only thing any respectable Barbarian, animal controlling, orphan would do. He begins a quest for revenge.

Viy (Spirit of Evil) is a classic Russian horror film based on a story of the same name by the acclaimed Russian writer Nikolai Gogol. It is a dark, yet humorous film set in medieval times, in the Russian countryside, and it involves demons, witches, and wayward priests.

The story begins with three traveling priests who, after being on their journey for some time, decide that it would be better to find a house to sleep in instead of a field. They soon find an old farmhouse and knock on the gate. The call is answered by an old crone who instructs the priests that if they are to sleep in the farm they must all sleep in separate places.

Man With a Movie Camera is an experimental film directed by Dziga Vertov. In this film Vertov was attempting to create an "absolute language of cinema" that is "based on its total separation from the language of literature and theatre." Dropping the use of actors, story lines, sets, and inter-titles, the result is a video diary made up of very powerful imagery.

Although this is an experimental film, and Vertov used a wealth of cinematic trickery (variable camera speeds, dissolves, split-screen effects, the use of prismatic lenses, stop motion etc.). The subject matter is of the everyday sort, or rather, the exposure of some of the more esoteric aspects of day to day life. The viewer is taken to see the heart of factories, a salon, a childbirth, and many other places where we normally might not go, we are shown a snapshot of urban life in a Russian city in 1929.

Watership Down is a beautifully animated film, based on the novel of the same name, written by Richard Adams. It tells the story of a group of rabbits who, much like humans, has their own religion, language, and culture. It evokes a classic English gothic world of green meadows, hallucination, and the grim, shadowy, underbelly of human nature...errm, I mean, rabbit-nature.

The story begins when Fiver, a young rabbit with prophetic abilities, has a vision of the destruction of the peaceful warren in which the rabbits all live. Fiver and his older brother, a rabbit named Hazel, make an attempt to persuade the other rabbits to leave to warren and run for safety, but the chief rabbit of their warren dismisses their ideas and sends them away. Fiver and Hazel, both firm in their belief in Fiver's prophetic abilities, decide to leave the warren on their own with a small group of other like-minded rabbits.

Jean Cocteau, one of the great multi-talented artists of the 20th century is given free reign in his first film. His approach is whimsical and free improvisational; a childlike freedom hangs in the air of this film, even as it addresses rather dark subject matter. The result is a series of powerful images that still seem fresh nearly 80 years later.

Experimental and surrealistic in nature, Blood of a Poet is not a film for individuals who seek clear and definite story lines, to say the least. Rather this is a film that should be considered as a work of art, and not as a traditional movie. That is not to say that these are a series of meaningless images - this is essentially a poem in the form of a film. A series of Cocteau's own reflections...as Cocteau puts it ,"a descent into oneself, a way of using the mechanism of the dream without sleeping, a crooked candle, often mysteriously blown out, carried about in the night of the human body."

Network has cemented its place as one of the finest and most enduring examples of American cinema. A satirical look into the media industry and its effect on the human condition, a film that unflinchingly makes points and claims that, in 1976, may have seemed like comedic exaggeration, yet today are accepted norms. Prophetic and eloquent, a film whose undying relevance seems to resonate with growing intensity as time moves on...

"This story is about Howard Beale, who was the network news anchorman on UBS-TV." This is the narrated introduction to the film. Beale, played by Peter Finch, has recently learned of his imminent firing from the station and announces his plan to commit suicide in a future broadcast, live on television. This creates a huge uproar at the corporate level and, soon after Frank Hackett, the Executive Senior Vice President of the network, appears (played by Robert Duvall) to fire Beale on the spot.

This 1979 thriller is a frightening look into the threat of nuclear fallout, a concept that appears to have been somewhat marginalized in the current state of popular consciousness. Once in awhile I find that it is a swell idea to reinforce the state of one's own nuclear paranoia with an evening movie devoted to the subject. The China Syndrome is the perfect film for such an occasion.

Jane Fonda stars as Kimberly Wells, an ambitious "soft news" reporter who finds herself in the right place at the wrong time when an unexplained mishap occurs at a Southern Californian Nuclear Power plant while reporting on a series about energy production. It is here that her cameraman Richard Adams, who is played by Michael Douglas, secretly films the incident from an observation room as it takes place behind soundproof glass in the control room down below. As Wells and Adams embark on an investigation as to what actually happened in that control room and attempt to air their story they find themselves ensnared in a web of deception and resistance.