Spectacular gun battles, epic-sized heroes and an all-star cast that includes Academy Award(r) winners Yul Brynner* and James Coburn**, together with Steve McQueen, Eli Wallach and Charles Bronson, make The Magnificent Seven a legend among westerns. Spawning three sequels and a successful television series, and featuring Elmer Bernstein's Oscar(r)-nominated*** score, thisstunning remake of The ...

Manufacturer: MGM (Video & DVD)
Starring: Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, Eli Wallach, Robert Vaughn
Directed By: John Sturges

A haunting, evocative film set in the barren wilderness of Northern Shaanxi province in 1939. The life of a fourteen year-old peasant girl is changed forever by the arrival of a communist soldier.

Manufacturer: Fox Lorber
Starring: Quiang Liu, Tuo Tan, Xueqi Wang, Bai Xue
Directed By: Kaige Chen

Manufacturer: Embassy Home Entertainment
Starring: Hideko Takamine, Hiroshi Akutagawa, Jukichi Uno
Directed By: Shiro Toyoda

True to its Sega video-game roots, this futuristic 60-minute movie includes a lot of yelling, crashing, and exploding on the way to saving the world. Sonic and his sidekicks are determined to thwart a plan that would turn their Land of the Sky into the equivalent of The Land of Darkness, which lurks beneath the surface (and is obviously the former planet Earth). So they plow through to the ...

Manufacturer: Adv Films
Starring: Martin Burke, Masami Kikuchi, Lainie Frasier, Hekiru Shiina, Yasunori Matsumoto
Directed By: Kazunori Ikegami

One of the best films of 1994, To Live is a bold, energetic masterpiece from Zhang Yimou, the foremost director from China's influential "fifth generation" of filmmakers. Continuing his brilliant collaboration with China's best-known actress Gong Li (their previous films include Ju Dou and Raise the Red Lantern), Zhang weaves an ambitious tapestry of personal and political ...

Manufacturer: Orion
Starring: You Ge, Li Gong, Ben Niu, Xiao Cong, Deng Fei
Directed By: Yimou Zhang

Artist-writer Katsuhiro Ôtomo began telling the story of Akira as a comic book series in 1982 but took a break from 1986 to 1988 to write, direct, supervise, and design this animated film version. Set in 2019, the film richly imagines the new metropolis of Neo-Tokyo, which is designed from huge buildings down to the smallest details of passing vehicles or police uniforms. Two disaffected orphan ...

Kurosawa's blackly humorous film, executed in the style of the American Western, is a sophisticated satire on greed, violence, paranoia, and human weakness. In a nonchalant manner reminiscent of a Bogart hero, a wandering samurai-for-hire (Mifune) turns the war between two clans fighting for control of a small town to his own advantage. One of the most popular Japanese films ever released in the ...

Manufacturer: Homevision
Starring: Toshirô Mifune, Eijirô Tono, Tatsuya Nakadai, Yôko Tsukasa, Isuzu Yamada
Directed By: Akira Kurosawa

This is not a movie to see on an empty stomach. Writer-director Ang Lee's 1994 Oscar nominee tells a family story about a chef and his three daughters through the meals the chef prepares and serves his family. This touching, dryly funny story of a family coping with personal lives and the way those lives intersect with the family relationships captures a shift in generations in Taipei. The father, ...

Manufacturer: Orion
Starring: Sihung Lung, Yu-Wen Wang, Chien-lien Wu, Kuei-Mei Yang, Sylvia Chang
Directed By: Ang Lee

Akira Kurosawa (Seven Samurai, Ikiru), perhaps the best known of all Japanese directors, made his extraordinary debut with this thrilling martial arts film. Though filming during World War II, Kurosawa avoided patriotic and propagandistic elements to create a judo saga as visually stunning as it is exciting. The story of Sanshiro Sugata, a talented yet headstrong judo student, ...

Manufacturer: Homevision
Starring: Denjirô Ôkôchi, Susumu Fujita, Yukiko Todoroki, Ryunosuke Tsukigata, Takashi Shimura
Directed By: Akira Kurosawa

Manufacturer: New Yorker Video
Starring: Li Gong, Cunhua Ji, Liu Jia, Wen Jiang, Ming Qian