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.