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Comments: This is the BBC version of the PBS Chasing Big Cats. It's one of the best and most entertaining Big Cat documentaries I've seen.

Summary: The face of a cheetah fills the screen, then its sleek and streamlined body hurtles by in slow motion. Suddenly you are able to see the grace and poetry of this magnificent cat as never before, to watch the remarkable effort of each stride and turn as it chases its prey to the death.

These innovative images were the work of Owen Newman and Amanda Barrett, who made their reputations filming the big cats of Africa as no one had done before. This 14-year retrospective of their work features the two filmmakers talking about how they managed to capture never-before-seen footage of big cats, including some that had been written off as impossible to film. To these two filmmakers, "impossible" was just a challenge to overcome. Driving into the night, armed with night goggles, infrared lights and cameras, they were the first to film leopards at night, uncovering a whole array of behavior that was new to science and filmmakers alike.

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Comments: The man with no name is back... The man in black is waiting... a walking arsenal - he uncoils, strikes and kills!

Summary: A ringing instance of a sequel far outstripping its predecessor, Sergio Leone's For a Few Dollars More takes the lethal antihero from A Fistful of Dollars, gives him both a rival and an adversary worthy of sharing a gun-blazing corrida, and ratchets up the stylization to something approaching grandeur. This time the Man with No Name (Clint Eastwood) is a bounty hunter whose desert Southwest killing ground is suddenly crowded by the presence of an older, black-clad shootist (Lee Van Cleef). Individually and together, they terminate sundry grotesques while closing in on their biggest quarry, a memorably insane bandit called El Indio (Gian Maria Volonté is brilliant). There's just enough plot to imbue Van Cleef with genuine mystery, a dark avenging angel from a lost past whose pull would supply the emotional core of Leone's later masterworks Once upon a Time in the West and Once upon a Time in America. Leone's bravura widescreen compositions are breathtaking, and Ennio Morricone's music score--tinged with lunatic religiosity--is his first great one. --Richard T. Jameson

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Comments: A murdered wife. A one-armed man. An obsessed detective. The chase begins.

Summary: A well respected Chicago surgeon Dr. Richard Kimble has found out that his wife, Helen, has been murdered ferociously in her own home. The police found Kimble and accused him of the murder. Then, Kimble (without Justifiable Reason) was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. However, on the way to prison, Kimble's transport crashed. Kimble escapes and is now on the run. Deputy Samuel Gerard from Chicago takes charge of the chase of Kimble. Meanwhile, Kimble makes up his own investigation to find who really killed his life, and to lure Gerard and his team into it as well.

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Comments: An Epic Story of the Vietnam War

Summary: A two-segment look at the effect of the military mindset and war itself on Vietnam era Marines. The first half follows a group of recruits in basic training under the command of the punishing Sgt. Hartman. The second half shows one of those recruits, Joker, covering the war as a correspondent for Stars and Stripes, focusing on the Tet offensive.

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Comments: White short shorts (we're talking John Stockten short), no socks and deck shoes, white gloves and an ivy-league education. That's creepy for a serial killer. Said outfit and his friend Butthead make a bet with the vacationing family that they will be dead in 12 hours. This is one of the creepiest films I've seen.

All the pretentious talk about "making a film that sends a clear message about violence, and the audience's view and involvement with violence on film" is NONSENSE. Where does that kind of silliness come from? There is nothing didactic or pedantic about this film. It is terror for terror's sake.

One of the 'synopses' states "the viewers are forced ... to share a certain complicity with the criminals." How's that? Wouldn't that be true of watching any film? Is it because the director breaks the 'fourth wall'?

When this film was over I didn't contemplate my complicity in media violence, I applauded the writer, director and actors for giving me a great ninety minutes of terror.

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Summary: Two seemingly well-educated young men, who call each other Paul and Peter among other names, approach a family on vacation. They are, apparently, friends of the neighbors, and, at the beginning, their true intentions are not known. But soon, the family is imprisoned and tortured in its own house violently, which the viewers are forced mostly to imagine and to share a certain complicity with the criminals. It might be some kind of game with the lives of husband, wife, son, and dog, but why are they doing it?

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