Fall in love with the sexy comedy The Oakland Tribune says has "more chuckles than The Wedding Planner." It's a wild blend of big laughs, high fashion and foul play. Ordinary single girl Amanda Pierce (Monica Potter) unexpectedly finds herself sharing an awesome Manhattan apartment with four sexy supermodels. Determined to bring Amanda into their world, the models give her the ultimate makeover. The plan works fabulously as Amanda connects with next door charmer Jim Winston (Freddie Prinze, Jr.). That is, until one night while spying on him, Amanda thinks she sees the man of her dreams committing a cold blooded crime. Life then unravels as Amanda and her four loopy roomies must take to the streets to try and solve this mystery with style!

This courtroom drama pits a small-town lawyer against a big-city one in the defense of a jealous army lieutenant for the murder of his wife's rapist.
Genre: Mystery
Rating: UN
Release Date: 11-JUL-2000
Media Type: DVD

Decadent, subversive, and bristling with artistic invention, the myth-born cinema of Jean Cocteau disturbs as much as it charms. Cocteau was the most versatile of artists in prewar Paris. Poet, novelist, playwright, painter, celebrity, and maker of cinema-his many talents converged in bold, dreamlike films that continue to enthrall audiences around the world. In The Blood of Poet, Orpheus, and Testament of Orpheus, Cocteau utilizes the Orphic myth to explore the complex relationships between the artist and his creations, reality and the imagination. The Criterion Collection is proud to present the DVD premiere of the Orphic Trilogy in a special limited-edition three-disc box set.

Blood of a Poet
"Poets . . . shed not only the red blood of their hearts but the white blood of their souls," proclaimed Jean Cocteau of his groundbreaking first film-an exploration of the plight of the artist, the power of metaphor and the relationship between art and dreams. One of cinema's great experiments, this first installment of the Orphic Trilogy stretches the medium to its limits in an effort to capture the poet's obsession with the struggle between the forces of life and death. Criterion is proud to present The Blood of a Poet (Le Sang d'un poète).

Orpheus
Jean Cocteau's 1940s update of the Orphic myth depicts Orpheus (Jean Marais), a famous poet scorned by the Left Bank youth, and his love for both his wife Eurydice (Marie Déa) and the mysterious Princess (Maria Casarès). Seeking inspiration, the poet follows the Princess from the world of the living to the land of the deceased through Cocteau's trademark "mirrored portal." As the myth unfolds, the director's visually poetic style pulls the audience into realms both real and imagined in this, the centerpiece to his Orphic Trilogy. Criterion is proud to present Orpheus (Orphée) in a gorgeous new digital transfer.

Testament of Orpheus
In his last film, legendary writer/artist/filmmaker Jean Cocteau portrays an 18th-century poet who travels through time on a quest for divine wisdom. In a mysterious wasteland, he meets several symbolic phantoms that bring about his death and resurrection. With an eclectic cast that includes Pablo Picasso, Jean-Pierre Leáud, Jean Marais and Yul Brynner, Testament of Orpheus (Le Testament de Orphée) brings full circle the journey Cocteau began in The Blood of a Poet, an exploration of the torturous relationship between the artist and his creations. Criterion is proud to present the last installment of the Orphic Trilogy in a new digital transfer.

Dissatisfied in marriage and life, Ferdinand (Jean-Paul Belmondo) takes to the road with the babysitter, his ex-lover Marianne Renoir (Anna Karina), and leaves the bourgeoisie behind. Yet this is no normal road trip: genius auteur Jean-Luc Godard s tenth feature in six years is a stylish mash-up of consumerist satire, politics, and comic-book aesthetics, as well as a violent, zigzag tale of, as Godard called them, the last romantic couple. With blissful color imagery by cinematographer Raoul Coutard and Belmondo and Karina at their most animated, Pierrot le fou is one of the high points of the French new wave, and one last frolic before Godard moved ever further into radical cinema

Special Features

* - SPECIAL EDITION DOUBLE-DISC SET FEATURES:
* - New, restored high-definition digital transfer, approved by cinematographer Raoul Coutard
* - New video interview with actor Anna Karina
* - A "Pierrot" Primer, a new video program with audio commentary by filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin
* - Godard, l'amour, la poésie, a fifty-minute French documentary about director Jean-Luc Godard and his work and marriage with Karina
* - Archival interview excerpts with Godard, Karina, and actor Jean-Paul Belmondo
* - Theatrical trailer
* - New and improved English subtitle translation
* - PLUS: A booklet featuring a new essay by critic Richard Brody, a 1969 review by Andrew Sarris, and a 1965 interview with Godard

Naomi, the brilliant and pious daughter of an ultra orthodox rabbi finds herself at a crossroads of life choices when her mother dies and she is expected to immediately marry her father's prodigy. Distressed yet determined, she begs that her father allow her one year to study at a women's religious seminary in Safed, the birthplace of the Kabala in order to prepare herself for the sacrifices she will make as a wife. Her father relents and Naomi's life begins to take an unexpected turn.

Devote but lively, Naomi and her new friend Michelle befriend a beautiful, mysterious older woman, Anouk, (Fanny Ardant) who is ill and living nearby who may or may not be Jewish, and may have committed a crime of passion. Naomi devises a series of rituals which will somehow purify Anouk and purge her of her sins, but as these stretch the borders of Jewish law they must be kept secret. Eventually this journeys into the forbidden and leads to a growing attraction between the two girls and more crossroads are faced.

The Secrets presents the complexities of a religious lifestyle in a vibrant environment of youth, rebellion and desire.

Over the past four decades, Belgian director Chantal Akerman (Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles) has created one of cinema’s most distinctive bodies of work—formally daring, often autobiographical films about people and places, time and space. In this collection, we present the early films that put her on the map: intensely personal, modernist investigations of cities, history, family, and sexuality, made in the 1970s in the United States and Europe and strongly influenced by the New York experimental film scene. Bold and iconoclastic, these five films pushed boundaries in their day and continue to have a profound influence on filmmakers all over the world.

La Chambre (1972, Silent, 11min) : In this early short film, we see the furniture and clutter of one small room in an apartment become the subject of a moving still life—with Akerman herself staring back at us. This breakthrough formal experiment is the first film the director made in New York.

Hotel Monterey (1972, Silent, 62 min): Under Akerman’s watchful eye, a cheap New York hotel glows with mystery and unexpected beauty, its corridors, elevators, rooms, windows, and occasional tenants framed as though part of an Edward Hopper tableau.

News From Home (1976, French w/ English Subs, 89 mins): Letters from Akerman’s mother are read over a series of elegantly composed shots of 1976 New York, where our (unseen) filmmaker and protagonist has relocated. Akerman’s unforgettable time capsule of the city is also a gorgeous meditation on urban alienation and personal and familial disconnection.

Je, Tu, Il, Elle (1974, B/W, French w/ English Subs, 86 min): In her sexually provocative first feature, Akerman stars as a nameless, rootless young woman who leaves self-imposed isolation to embark on a road trip that leads to lonely love affairs with a male truck driver and a former girlfriend. With its famous real-time sexual encounter and its daring minimalist plot, Je Tu Il Elle is Akerman’s most audaciously erotic film.

Les Rendez-vous d'Anna (1978, French w/ English Subs, 127 min): In one of Akerman’s most penetrating character studies, Anna, an accomplished filmmaker (played by Aurore Clément), makes her way through a series of anonymous European cities to promote her latest movie. Through a succession of eerie, exquisitely shot brief encounters—with men and women, family and strangers—we come to see her emotional and physical detachment from the world.

Eclipse is a selection of lost, forgotten, or overshadowed classics in simple, affordable editions. Each series is a brief cinematheque retrospective for the adventurous home viewer.

Jacques Tati's gloriously choreographed, nearly wordless comedies about confusion in the age of technology reached their creative apex with Playtime. For this monumental achievement, a nearly three-year-long, bank-breaking production, Tati again thrust the endearingly clumsy, resolutely old-fashioned Monsieur Hulot, along with a host of other lost souls, into a bafflingtly modernist Paris. With every inch of its superwide frame crammed with hilarity and inventiveness, Playtime is a lasting testament to a modern age tiptoeing on the edge of oblivion.

An ex-mercenary turned smuggler (Leonardo DiCaprio). A Mende fisherman (Djimon Hounsou). Amid the explosive civil war overtaking 1999 Sierra Leone, these men join for two desperate missions: recovering a rare pink diamond of immense value and rescuing the fisherman's son, conscripted as a child soldier into the brutal rebel forces ripping a swath of torture and bloodshed across the alternately beautiful and ravaged countryside. Directed by Edward Zwick (Glory, The Last Samurai), this urgent, intensely moving adventure shapes gripping human stories and heart-pounding action into a modern epic of profound impact.

A classic tale of intrigue and forbidden love, QUEEN MARGOT is the powerful hit universally acclaimed by critics! Thrown into a political marriage of convenience by her ruthlessly power-hungry family, the beautiful Margot (Isabelle Adjani -- DIABOLIQUE) soon finds herself hopelessly drawn into their murderous affairs. It's then she realizes that her only hope of escape lies somewhere between the heroic soldier who loves her and the enemy husband who could save her! Triumphant winner of 5 Cesar Awards the pretigious Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize -- you're sure to be entertained by this vivid portrayal of passion, revenge, and extraordinary courage!

Academy Award®-winner Juliette Binoche (1997, Best Supporting Actress, The English Patient) stars in CACHÉ, a psychological thriller about a TV talk show host and his wife who are terrorized by surveillance videos of their private life. Delivered by an anonymous stalker, the tapes reveal secret after secret until obsession, denial and deceit take hold of the couple and hurl them to the point of no return. CACHÉ is director Michael Haneke's dark vision of a relationship torn mercilessly apart by the camera's unblinking eye.