From legendary Oscar-winning director King Vidor (The crowd, Duel in the sun) comes an exotic tale of romance set in gorgeous Polynesia: Bird of paradise. Johnny (Joel McCrea) is an intrepid young sailor traveling the South Seas who falls in love with Luana (Dolores del Rio), the beautiful daughter of an island chief. But Luana is betrothed to a neighboring native prince, and is soon to be married. With little thought to the future, Johnny and Luana elope together, searching for paradise in each other's arms. With McCrea at his most dashing and del Rio at her alluring height, Bird of paradise is a movie of wild eroticism and thrilling adventure, and not to be missed.

Bette Davis rose from the ranks of Warner Bros. contract players to become a screen superstar when she was loaned out to RKO to appear in John Cromwell's adaptation of W. Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage. Leslie Howard (Gone with the wind) stars as Philip, a British medical student who becomes infatuated with a most unlikely woman: a vulgar waitress named Mildred (Davis). Undeterred by Mildred's obvious contempt of him (and her disgust for his disabled foot), Philip lavishes his affection upon the tawdry woman, and allows his personal and professional life to disintegrate as a consequence of her sadistic whims. Though considered an unlikely choice to play a cockney working girl, Davis fearlessly embraced Mildred's dark side, and delivered an erotic yet malevolent performance that launched her to the forefront of Hollywood's leading ladies.

This documentary sheds valuable light on all aspects of Lorraine Hansberry's play, A Raisin in the Sun, including the daunting challenge of securing investment and a venue for this production about a working class Black family, the casting process, artistic debates and finally its public reception. The film features interviews with the play's original cast members, Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, Louis Gossett, Jr. and Glynn Turman, director Lloyd Richards, producer Phil Rose, supporter Harry Belafonte as well as writer Amiri Baraka along with excerpts from the 1961 Hollywood movie. Additionally the film reveals how central feminism was to her ideas and boldly acknowledges (using her diary entries) her same gender relationships and private lesbian identity before the appearance of the gay rights movement.

D. W. Griffith reached a pinnacle of expressiveness in this tender yet tragic tale of love and suffering in the seedy Limehouse district of London. Richard Barthelmess gives a sensitive portrayal of a Chinese man who travels to England to spread the pacifist teachings of the Orient, but it is Lillian Gish who illuminates the screen. In this, the most heart-rending performance of her career, she plays a fifteen-year-old street urchin who longs to escape her miserable existence. Emotionally scarred by the torment and neglect of her abusive father (Donald Crisp), she collapses in the shop of the lonely and disillusioned "yellow man." As he tenderly nurses her back to health, an unspoken romance flowers between them, awakening in each of them feelings of love they thought themselves forever denied. In some ways, Broken blossoms was Griffith's response to critics of The birth of a nation, an effort to clear himself of lingering charges of racism. However, cinematic convention forbade physical intimacy between the two races. With this in mind, Griffith took what might have been a bold interracial romance and turned it into something more ethereal: a form of cinematic poetry that engages the viewer through subtle gestures and changes of expression, meticulously choreographed and gracefully assembled. Featuring Lillian Gish, Richard Barthelmess, Donald Crisp.

Café de Flore" is a love story about people separated by time and place but connected in profound and mysterious ways. Atmospheric, fantastical, tragic and hopeful, the film chronicles the parallel fates of Jacqueline, a young mother with a disabled son in 1960s Paris, and Antoine, a recently divorced, successful DJ in present day Montreal. What binds the two stories together is love - euphoric, obsessive, tragic, youthful, timeless love. In 1960s Paris, a working class woman gives birth to her first child, Laurent, a Down Syndrome son. Undaunted she embraces the challenge of raising her beloved offspring as normally as one would any other child. Her husband abandons them both. She bravely brushes this additional hiccup aside as Laurent replaces her spouse as the perfect man of her dreams. As Laurent approaches school age Jacqueline's aplomb becomes obsessive and cloying. Her increasingly self-destructive attachment to her son is raised to a fever pitch when, at the age of seven, he meets a Down Syndrome girl (Véronique) and experiences his first crush. His sudden desire for independence, and his attraction to Véra, are the catalysts that transform Jacqueline from a loving mother into something resembling a lover scorned. What emerges is a love triangle of potentially tragic proportions. In 21st century Montreal, a forty year old divorcee, Carole, is trying to restart her life after her divorce, two years earlier, from Antoine, a devastatingly handsome, successful touring DJ. Soul mates who've been a couple since the age of fifteen, their divorce is a schism that might prove impossible for either of them to put in the past. Making the transition even more difficult for Carole is the fact that her two daughters, one teen, one tween, are about to gain a stepmother, a stunningly beautiful, heartbreaking blonde, a woman about to "steal" away the perfect man of her dreams. The young girls are being cruelly pulled in two different directions, Antoine's father, a recovering alcoholic, seems to side with his ex-daughter-in-law, and Carole is succumbing to fits of depression and potentially dangerous bouts of sleepwalking. What emerges is a love triangle of potentially tragic proportions.

A multi-layered courtroom drama about the global politics of food, the dynamics of 1st and 3rd world nations, and human rights at its simplest through a landmark legal case pitting a dozen Nicaraguan plantation workers against Dole.

Stationed at Taiwan's most dangerous military base, a young officer's greatest struggle isn't his intense physical training-it's holding onto his innocence while stationed next to a military brothel. This historical drama touches on the aches and absurdities of coming-of-age in a nation on the brink of war.

Aditya Assarat's "delicate, delightful, and nearly note-perfect debut feature" (Salon. com). An architect from Bangkok pulls up to a motel in a nearby ghost town of deserted streets. His obscured past finds symmetry in the repressed history of the girl he meets and pursues.

Kino is now proud to present Lady Chatterley in a new, two-part, extended european edition featuring nearly an hour of additional material excluded from the film's theatrical cut that explores the emotional and sensual borderlands uniting sex, love, and loyalty with even more intelligence, passion, and power than before. Through extra footage never seen in the US, director Pascale Ferran's "rapturous visual tone poem" (New York Times) becomes both a highly erotic immersion into Lady Chatterley and Parkin's passion and an equally frank and unsentimentally provocative portrayal of a marriage hobbled by war and ultimately torn apart by hypocrisy.

Produced in Berlin in 1919, Ernst Lubitsch's the Doll (Die Puppe) is a charming romantic fantasy that shows the director already in full command of the now-legendary "Lubitsch touch."

An elegant, moving tale of an unexpected romance between a married man (Vincent Lindon) and his son's homeroom teacher (Sandrine Kiberlain, Lindon's former wife), and their attempt to keep their desires from turning into a full-blown affair. A modern-day Brief Encounter, crafted with enormous grace and subtlety by acclaimed French director Stéphane Brizé (I am not here to be loved, Among adults).