.45 is an independent 2006 dark comedy/thriller starring Milla Jovovich, Angus Macfadyen, Aisha Tyler and Stephen Dorff.

Plot:

The story follows Kate and her boyfriend Big Al who sell guns on the streets of New York. He the demanding, overpowering one of the two and believes he is big time, but Kate is the smarter one. When Al believes Kate deceives him, he beats her to a pulp and this leads to a tale of sex and manipulation while trying to execute a plan of revenge

Not an excellent movie, I just loved the dialogs...

Lions for Lambs was released in North America on Friday, November 9, 2007. Filming began on January 29, 2007.The film tells the story of a platoon of soldiers stationed in Afghanistan, a senator, a reporter, and a college professor. It is rated R due to some war violence and language. The film was written by Matthew Michael Carnahan, and directed by Robert Redford. It stars Robert Redford, Meryl Streep, and Tom Cruise. As of February 2007,

Plot:

The story begins after two determined students at a West Coast university, Arian (Derek Luke) and Ernest (Michael Peña), follow the inspiration of their idealistic professor, Dr. Malley (Redford), and attempt to do something important with their lives. But when the two make the bold decision to enlist in the US Army, to join the war in Afghanistan, Malley is both moved and distraught. In flashback we see Arian and Ernest in class, giving a presentation.

In California, an anguished Dr. Malley attempts to reach privileged but disaffected student Todd Hayes (Andrew Garfield) who is the very opposite of Arian and Ernest. He is bright but not working very hard; he says this is because of the time he spends with his girlfriend, and as president of his fraternity. Malley puts him to the test by offering him a B without doing anything. This puzzles Hayes.

Meanwhile, in Washington D.C. the charismatic Republican Presidential hopeful, Senator Jasper Irving (Cruise), has invited TV journalist Janine Roth (Streep) to announce a new war strategy in Afghanistan, started at the same time, to occupy certain strategic points in the mountains by small units, "forward operating points", before the Taliban occupy them. He hopes that what Roth will write will convince the public that this tactic is a good thing, but Roth has her doubts and does not want to become an instrument of propaganda. However, her commercial minded boss is happy to publish the story.

The helicopter with Arian and Ernest is hit, Ernest falls out of the helicopter, and Arian jumps after him. Ernest's leg is badly wounded and he cannot move; Arian stays with him. After some time the Taliban arrive. After a gun fight they run out of ammunition and, rather than die lying down, Arian helps Ernest stand up and face the Taliban, knowing the rescue chopper wont arrive on time, Arian raises his rifle and both are killed in a hail of gunfire whilst scenes from their past lives are flashed on screen. The film ends with Hayes watching the News with a friend, the reporter is talking about a singer's private life, whilst below runs a strip announcing Irving's new Military plan for Afghanistan, the film ends and credits roll.

De passievrucht (A Father's Affair, though literally it means the passion fruit) is about the most beautiful fruit of shared passion that a couple can bear: a child. The child in question is Bo (the talented Dai Carter), who lives together with his father Armin (Peter Paul Muller) and his second wife Ellen (Halina Reijn) in Amsterdam. Bo and Ellen get along fine, though Ellen is not Bo’s natural mother; this honour belongs to Monika (Carice van Houten), who has died ten years before we meet our characters.
Bo is your typical adolescent, experimenting with love and lust and trying to find out who he really is. He might not really be who he thought he was, however. His father tells him he has just discovered that he suffers from a rare condition that has left him infertile since birth. This means Monika is still Bo’s mother, but that Armin’s paternity is out of the question. Armin is desperate to know who has fathered "his" child if it was not him, though Bo seems less concerned. He seems to think: "I am being raised by Armin and Ellen and that’s that."

Armin starts a real crusade in order to find the answer to that one question that seems to have taken over his life. First he interrogates the doctor (whom he suspects might have had an eye on Monika around the time Bo was born) and Ellen, who was Monika’s best friend until her untimely death. Soon he is racking his brain as to whom to interrogate next, whilst Bo seeks refuge from Armin’s relentless quest at the house of his grandfather (and Armin’s father) Huib (the grand Jan Decleir, from Oscar-winning features Antonia’s Line and Character).

This film about a child as a fruit of passion is poured into the facile mould of a quest for a single answer (who is the father?) and as such is technically a mystery rather than a drama about fatherhood. I suspect that the homonymous Karel Glastra van Loon novel, on which the film is based, was more meditative about what fatherhood really entails (and probably got into the nature vs nurture debate) but unfortunately the film sidesteps any of these philosophical questions to chase after Armin from one interrogation to the next.

The film’s visual style is also reminiscent of a fast-paced thriller rather than a contemplative drama, with director Maarten Treurniet overdoing it with its continual (artificial) downpour and camera-trickery and effects that suggest speed and movement. This "modern" gimmickery is muted however by the utterly conventional use of flash-backs to the time Monika was alive. Leaving aside the genre-issues, the question of who inseminated a woman long dead is not something that makes for an intriguing narrative that lasts the 100-odd minutes of this feature. The script is simply too weak to retain the audience’s attention throughout. We are not able to identify fully with any of the characters and least of all Armin, whose actions drive the plot but whose motivations are never fully explained or even explored.

Hannibal Rising (2007) is the fifth film about Dr. Hannibal Lecter. A prequel to Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, and Hannibal, it is an adaptation of Thomas Harris's 2006 novel of the same name and tells the story of how Lecter becomes the infamous serial killer of the previous films and books.

Plot:

This prequel shows a young Hannibal Lecter from childhood in Lithuania, to his teen years in France, and up to his arrival in North America.

Lecter is boy of 8 years old at the beginning of the film (1944), living in Lecter Castle in Lithuania. Lecter, his younger sister Mischa, and his parents escape to the family's hunting lodge in the woods to elude the advancing German troops. Back at Lecter Castle, six Lithuanian militiamen (Grutas, Dortlich, Grentz, Kolnas, Milko, and Pot Watcher) request to join the Waffen-SS. The SS commander orders them to kill the Lecters' Jewish cook who was left behind, to which they gleefully comply.

A Soviet tank stops at the Lecters' lodge looking for water, and forces everyone out of the house. However, the tank is then spotted by a German bomber, which sparks a firefight. The bomber is shot down by the tank, but subsequently crashes into it, and the ensuing explosion kills everyone but Lecter and Mischa.

The SS militiamen then loot Lecter Castle. Seeing their wounded SS commander, Grutas shoots him and takes his badge. However, the impending Russian advance force them to hide out in the woods, where they locate the Lecter lodge. They storm and take over the lodge. Finding no other food in the bitterly cold Baltic winter, the men look menacingly at Hannibal and Mischa.

The movie then cuts to a scene eight years later inside Lecter Castle, which has been turned into a Soviet orphanage. A bully harasses Lecter, who has been rendered mute by his experiences, about not singing the orphanage anthem. The bully attacks his head, but Lecter blocks his swing with a fork, impaling the bully's hand. That evening, Lecter experiences his first flashback about Mischa, which angers the youth commander, who locks him in a dungeon. However, Lecter escapes from the castle orphanage to Paris to live with his widowed aunt, the Lady Murasaki. She manages to get him to speak for the first time, and instructs him about flower arrangement, martial arts, and ancestor worship.

At a local market, a butcher makes a crude remark about Lady Murasaki. Lecter then attacks him. Later, while the butcher was fishing, Lecter requests an apology from him, and is denied. He disembowels the butcher with a katana, then decapitates him. He is suspected of the butcher's murder by Inspector Popil, a French detective who had also lost his family to the war. Thanks in part to his aunt's intervention, however, Lecter escapes responsibility for the crime.

Eventually, Lecter becomes the youngest person ever admitted to medical school in France. He receives a working scholarship at a hospital in Paris, where he is given a job preparing cadavers. One day, Lecter witnesses a condemned war criminal receiving a sodium thiopental injection to force him to recall details about his war crimes. In an attempt to recall the names of those responsible for his sister's death, Lecter injects himself with the solution. His subsequent flashback reveals that the pot watcher was killed when the Russians bombed the lodge, and the dogtags were still left in the ruins of the lodge.

Lecter then returns to Lithuania in search of his sister's remains. While crossing the Soviet border, he draws the attention of Dortlich, who is now a Soviet border patrol officer. Lecter excavates the ruins of the lodge where his family died, and also unearths the dog-tags of the group of deserters who had killed his sister. Dortlich attempts to kill him but is incapacitated by Lecter. After he buries Mischa's remains, Lecter forces Dortlich to reveal the whereabouts of the rest of his gang, and then decapitates Dortlich with a horse-drawn pulley. Dortlich's blood splashes on Lecter's face, and he licks it off. Later, the Soviet police arrive on the scene, only to discover Dortlich's head, its cheeks carved off, and a brochette.

Lecter then visits Kolnas' restaurant in Fontainebleau. He finds Kolnas' young daughter and notices Mischa's bracelet on her. He then gives Kolnas' dogtag to her. Kolnas' enters the restaurant, but Hannibal is persuaded not to murder him, by his Aunt, for the sake of Kolnas' children. Dortlich's murder, along with Kolnas' dogtag, puts the rest of the group in alert. Grutas, now a sex trafficker, dispatches a second member of the group, Zigmas Milko, to kill Lecter. Milko sneaks into Lecter's laboratory at night with a gun, but Lecter senses his presence, and knocks him out with an injection. Just as Popil is entering the lab, Lecter drowns Milko in formaldehyde. Popil questions Lecter about Dortlich's murder, but is again unable to establish Lecter's guilt. Popil then tries to dissuade him from hunting the gang, and offers to let him go free if he helped locate Grutas. After Lecter leaves, Popil remarks to his assistant that Lecter lost all of his humanity when Mischa died, and has become a monster.

During a confrontation with Lady Murasaki, Lecter almost has sex with her, but relents after Lady Murasaki begs him not to get revenge, claiming he had made a promise to Mischa. Lecter then sets up a time bomb in Grutas' home, and attacks him in the shower. However, a maid alerts Grutas' bodyguards, who then rush in. Just as Grutas' bodyguards are about to slit his throat, Lecter's time bomb goes off and he escapes.

Grutas kidnaps Lady Murasaki and calls Lecter, using her as bait. Lecter recognizes the sounds of Kolnas' ortolans from his restaurant in the background. Lecter goes there and plays on Kolnas' emotions by threatening his children, forcing him to give up the location of Grutas' boat. Lecter then says he will leave Kolnas alone for the sake of his family, and places his gun on the hot stove. As Kolnas goes for the gun, Lecter impales him through the head with his Tantō. He then hides the tantō behind his back.

Lecter goes to the houseboat. Just as he is about to untie Lady Murasaki, Grutas shoots him in the back. Grutas then proceeds to rape Murasaki. Lecter takes out the tanto, which was broken by the force of the bullet, and slashes Grutas's Achilles' tendons with it, crippling him. In a final confrontation, Grutas claims that Lecter too had consumed his sister in broth fed to him by the soldiers, and he was killing them to keep this fact secret. Enraged, Lecter carves his sister's initial, M, into Grutas's chest. Lady Murasaki, finally disturbed by his behavior, flees from him even after he tells her that he loves her. As she leaves, Hannibal bites off Grutas's cheeks in what will become his signature attack. The houseboat is then incinerated, but Lecter, assumed to be dead, emerges from the woods. The film then concludes with Lecter hunting down the last member of the group, Grentz, in Canada.

Red Dragon is a 2002 thriller film, based on the novel written by Thomas Harris featuring the brilliant psychiatrist and serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter.

Directed by Brett Ratner and written by Ted Tally (who also wrote the screenplay for The Silence of the Lambs), it starred Edward Norton as Graham and Anthony Hopkins as Lecter—a role he had, by then, played twice before in The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal.

Red Dragon is, in publishing chronology, the first story in the Lecter saga (Hannibal Rising, a later-published origin story, was released on February 9, 2007). Red Dragon's story takes place before the events in The Silence of the Lambs, and after Lecter's original capture and incarceration. While Lecter plays a central role, Red Dragon focuses more on the characters of Will Graham and the tortured serial killer, Francis Dolarhyde.

Plot:

The film begins with a Baltimore Symphony concert marred only by poor flute playing, which visibly distresses one audience member: psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter. In the next scene, Dr. Lecter is hosting a dinner party for the Symphony Board in his elegant townhouse. As he serves a savory dish, he refuses to identify it. A board member expresses her concern that they are feasting on rare delicacies when it is discovered that a Symphony member, Flutist Pierre Raspail, is missing.

After the guests leave, FBI profiler Will Graham rings the doorbell. Lecter invites him in and hands him a Cognac. Graham examines the objects around him. Lecter comes closer and starts talking in a low soothing voice, as if he's talking a patient through a painful diagnostic procedure; in fact, he's eviscerating Graham with a linoleum knife. Eventually, sirens are heard as Graham is rushed to an emergency room and Lecter is rushed to jail.

A few days later, the missing flutist's body is found, missing the thymus and the pancreas. In calves, these two organs are known as ris de veau (literally, calf's laughs); in other food animals, they are called sweetbreads. These organs are a major delicacy of classical French cuisine, implying that Lecter included the organs in the food served at the party.

After his release from the hospital, Graham retires from the Bureau and moves to Florida, where he spends his time repairing boats.

Several years later, Graham is called out of retirement by the FBI to help track down a serial killer known to law enforcement agencies and the press only as "The Tooth Fairy," who has murdered two families, in two cities, in two months. Haunted by the brilliant sociopath that was once his co-agent and friend, Graham must find the courage to ask him for help in finding "the Tooth Fairy." The Tooth Fairy is a disturbed man named Francis Dolarhyde, who worships Hannibal Lecter after learning of his crimes. Dolarhyde also calls himself the "The Great Red Dragon", because of his obsession with the William Blake painting, "The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in the Sun". Graham later discovers that Lecter is manipulating him by corresponding with Dolarhyde.

The relationship between Lecter and Graham parallels the relationship between Lecter and Clarice Starling in the later books, but here there are different overtones. Lecter treats Starling as an unworthy student but Graham as a fellow professional (though not an equal). Lecter's acceptance of Graham does not stop at the being "professional" level, but extends further into the overlapping realm between Graham's and Lecter's surprisingly similar psyches.

Two complications hinder the investigation. On the one hand there is Freddy Lounds, a tabloid reporter who once ran afoul of Graham during the Lecter case and is now dogging him to get the story on The Tooth Fairy. On the other hand there is the correspondence between Lecter and Dolarhyde which eventually sees Lecter providing Dolarhyde with Graham's home address, endangering Graham's wife and son. Fortunately, both complications are solved: the first because Dolarhyde kills Lounds after the latter writes unfavourably about him in the newspapers, the second because Graham manages to evacuate his family from their house before any harm can come to them.

In the meantime, Dolarhyde meets Reba McClane, a blind co-worker at Chromalux Film & Videotape Services. Dolarhyde and McClane begin a romantic relationship. Dolarhyde's newfound love conflicts with his homicidal urges, which manifest themselves in his mind as his separate personality "The Great Red Dragon". After his association with Reba, Dolarhyde attempts to stop the Dragon's "possession" of him. In order to stop killing, he believes that he must dominate the dragon by consuming the original copy of the painting. Dolarhyde goes to the Brooklyn Museum, beats a museum secretary unconscious, and eats the original Blake watercolour of The Red Dragon.

Graham eventually realizes that the killer knew the layout of his victims' houses from their home videos, which he only could have seen if he worked for Chromalux, the company that transers the home videos to video cassette. Dolarhyde's job at Chromalux gives him access to all home movies that pass through the company. Sensing that he is about to be caught, Dolarhyde goes to see McClane one last time, but he finds her talking to a co-worker, Ralph Mandy (in this film, a composite of Dandridge and Ralph Mandy in the novel, corresponding to Ralph Dandridge in Manhunter). Enraged, Dolorhyde kills Ralph Mandy, kidnaps McClane and, having taken her to his house, sets the place on fire. He intends to kill her and then himself, but finds himself unable to shoot her. After he apparently shoots himself, McClane escapes.

Graham is given Dolarhyde's scrapbook, saved from the wreckage of the house, which details the killer's obsession with the Blake painting and his admiration of Hannibal Lecter's murder style. The book also exposes the abuse Dolarhyde suffered as a child at the hands of his grandmother, which evidently turned him into a monster.

However, it turns out Dolarhyde did not shoot himself, but used the body of a previous victim (the body is that of Ralph Mandy; in the novel, it is that of a gas station attendant with whom Dolarhyde had had a previous confrontation) in order to stage his own death. Dolarhyde pursues Graham to his home and attacks Graham's son. In order to save his son, Graham subsequently uses the same terms that Dolarhyde's grandmother had used against him (eg. "dirty little beast", threatening to cut off his penis, a threat Dolarhyde's grandmother had used to prevent him from bedwetting as a child), on his own son. This enrages Dolarhyde, who attacks Graham, allowing his son to escape to safety (this episode was added for the movie to prevent a rather graphically violent attack scene from ensuing). Graham's wife, Molly, ends the horrific deal by managing to shoot and kill Dolarhyde. After recovering, Graham receives a slightly triumphant letter from Lecter, which bids him well and hopes that he isn't too disfigured (a statement which has almost no strength in the film version, as opposed to the book in which it is cruelly mocking Graham, as his face is, in fact, irreparably disfigured by Dolarhyde's attack.) The film ends with Dr. Chilton informing Lecter that there is a young woman from the FBI waiting to speak with him; presumably Clarice Starling.

Hannibal is a 2001 film directed by Ridley Scott, adapted from the Thomas Harris novel of the same name. Set ten years after The Silence of the Lambs, the premise is that one of Hannibal Lecter's surviving victims, the extremely wealthy Mason Verger, is out to capture, torture, and kill him. The film's locations alternate between Italy and the United States. One of the final scenes shocked audiences and critics alike.

Plot:

The film takes place ten years after the events depicted in The Silence of the Lambs. Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) has taken up residence in Florence, Italy under the pseudonym 'Dr. Fell'. Meanwhile, FBI Agent Clarice Starling (Julianne Moore) is disgraced after a botched stakeout/drug raid that resulted in the death of five people including drug dealer Evelda Drumgo (Hazelle Goodman) who was shot by Starling while holding a baby.

In the meantime Starling is sent to the mansion of billionaire Mason Verger (Gary Oldman), who was mutilated and paralyzed after an encounter with Lecter years earlier. Verger, who specifically asked for Starling, claims he has new information (which turns out to be an X-ray) which he is only willing to disclose to Starling. Upon her arrival Verger tells Starling about his history with Lecter. He first met Dr. Lecter because he was under a court order to have therapy after being convicted of child sex abuse charges. During a social call Lecter suggested that Verger hang himself (for erotic asphyxiation) and inhale poppers fumes (while hanging). Then he asked him to peel his own face off with a shard of a mirror. After peeling off his own face he screams "fight the power" which is a sadly objectable term.


In Florence, Inspector Rinaldo Pazzi (Giancarlo Giannini) is investigating the disappearance of a library curator and meets up with his replacement: Dr Fell. At the same time, Pazzi's department is contacted by Starling who, after having received a scented letter from Lecter, wants to have the surveillence videos of all perfume stores that sell the particular perfume; including one in Florence. After spotting Fell in the requested surveillence tape, Pazzi finds out Fell's true identity and, hoping to get the three million dollar reward, contacts Mason Verger. Pazzi decides to apprehend Lecter, with the help of Verger's men, ignoring Starling's urgent advice to be careful and leave Lecter alone. Lecter, however, has found out about Pazzi's intentions and kills him by disemboweling and hanging him from the Palazzo Vecchio, a fate that Pazzi's (real-life) ancestor, Francesco Pazzi, shared with him. Lecter then heads for the United States, to find Starling.

In order to exact his revenge on Lecter and draw him out of hiding, Verger, in the meantime, recruits corrupt Department of Justice employee Paul Krendler (Ray Liotta). Krendler, tempted by Verger's money, delivers falsified love letters from Lecter to the head of the FBI, claiming he found them in Starling's office. As a result, Starling is temporarily put on non-active. She is therefore unable to stop Verger's men from capturing Lecter and bringing him to Verger's estate to be eaten by a herd of specially trained giant forest hogs. Nonetheless, Starling heads to Verger's mansion where she manages to kill Verger's men and free Lecter just before the herd of hogs is unleashed. Lecter subsequently saves the wounded Starling from the animals and, while doing so, also convinces Verger's assistant Doemling (Zeljko Ivanek) to let Verger roll into the pit with the hogs, thereby killing him. He would therefore get the satisfaction of watching Verger die.

In the climax of the film, Lecter takes Starling to Krendler's lake-front house and performs surgery on her to remove the bullet. After awakening she discovers her whereabouts and calls the police before heading downstairs where Lecter has performed a Craniotomy on Krendler. As Starling watches in horror, Lecter feeds the severely drugged Krendler a small part of his own brain after it has been sautéed in butter and herbs. After a failed attempt to apprehend Lecter by herself, the police finally arrive, but not before Lecter has escaped.

The Silence of the Lambs is a 1991 Academy Award-winning film directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins. It is based on the novel by Thomas Harris, his second to feature Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a brilliant psychiatrist and cannibalistic serial killer. In the film, Clarice Starling, a young FBI trainee, is sent to see the imprisoned Lecter in order to ask his expert advice on catching a serial killer given the name Buffalo Bill, who is abducting women and skinning them. The film won five Academy Awards including Best Picture and is the only horror movie to win the top prize.

Plot:

The movie opens with the FBI in a desperate search to find a vicious serial killer dubbed Buffalo Bill, who is abducting women and skinning them. Jack Crawford, the head of the FBI's behavioral science unit, asks his brightest pupil, Clarice Starling, to present a VICAP questionnaire to a brilliant forensic psychiatrist turned cannibalistic serial murderer named Hannibal Lecter, who was serving nine consecutive life terms at a Baltimore mental facility. Lecter had solved several serial killer cases for Crawford prior to his conviction as one himself, and Crawford is convinced that Lecter's insight could help capture Buffalo Bill.

Upon meeting Lecter in his cell, Starling is astonished to find him well mannered and seductively charming. After toying with and insulting Starling's attempts to get information from him, he refuses to take the questionnaire, knowing that Crawford had tried to entice him by sending a female agent in to ask for his help on the Buffalo Bill case. As Starling turns to leave, a patient down the block from Lecter assaults Starling with semen as she passes by his cell. Lecter becomes enraged seeing this "discourtesy", and calls Starling back to his cell, where he gives her information about one of his former patients in the form of a riddle. Solving the riddle, this information leads Starling to a rent-a-storage lot where the possessions of Benjamin Raspail (a deceased former patient of Lecter's), are contained. Hidden in Raspail's car is a severed head in a jar. It is implied that the head is that of Raspail.

Starling returns to Lecter, and confronts him about the severed head and Benjamin Raspail, whom Lecter denies involvement in murdering. Lecter then makes an offer to Starling, if she puts in a transfer for him to another facility, he will use the case file to profile Buffalo Bill. Starling agrees and the deal is made.

Buffalo Bill then abducts Catherine Martin, the daughter of United States Senator Ruth Martin (Tennessee). Bill's sixth victim is found, and her back has been skinned. Starling helps Crawford perform the autopsy, and the chrysalis of a moth is found in the throat of the victim.

With the stakes heightened, and Crawford having had Clarice propose a faux transfer to a hospital in upstate New York where he will have a cell with a window and more freedom, Clarice must play her way through Lecter's mind-games and lies. Lecter, figuring that the deal is too good to be true, demands personal information from Starling in exchange for information on Buffalo Bill (quid pro quo). Crawford had told Clarice not to tell Lecter anything personal, but desperate for Lecter's help, she ignores Crawford's warning and tells him about her worst childhood memory.

Starling tells Lecter about the death of her father, a town marshal who was killed by two burglars while on night patrol. She was sent to live on a sheep and horse ranch in Montana with cousins. In exchange, Lecter tells her about the significance of the moth found in the sixth victims throat: it symbolises change (from caterpillar to chrysalis and then into butterfly) and that Buffalo Bill wants to change too. He also tells her about Buffalo Bill's lifestyle, and how he believes that he is a transsexual. He then tells her to search the records at sex-reassignment hospitals for rejected patients based on failed psychological evaluations.

Meanwhile, it is revealed that Frederick Chilton, the asylum's chief of staff, has been secretly recording the consultations between Lecter and Starling in an attempt to finally profile the infamous Hannibal Lecter. Chilton also learns about Crawford's faux deal, and tells Lecter. In exchange, he purposes a personal deal to Lecter: if Lecter reveals Buffalo Bill's identity, he will indeed get a transfer to another facility, but only if Chilton is credited for persuading Lecter to reveal what he knows. Lecter insists that he will only give the information to Senator Ruth Martin personally in Tennessee. Pleased that he has finally gotten through to Lecter after eight years of being his warden, Chilton agrees and hastily leaves Lecter's cell.

In Tennessee, Lecter toys with Senator Martin briefly, enjoying the woman's anguish, but eventually gives her some information about Buffalo Bill: his real name is Louis Friend, referred to him by Raspail, as Raspail and Friend were lovers. With this new information, the FBI races off to save Catherine.

Starling confronts Lecter in his makeshift cell, suspecting that Lecter had given the senator a false name. She suspects that the name is an anagram for "iron sulfide" (Fool's Gold), and requests that he tell her the real name. Lecter refuses and demands that Starling finish telling him about her worst chidhood memory. Starling knows that it is the only way to get information from him, so she tells him about how she was awoken early one morning to the sound of lambs screaming as they were being slaughtered. Witnessing the horror, she attempted to save one by carrying it away, but was soon caught and the lamb was returned to slaughter. Lecter asks Clarice if she is still haunted by the sound of screaming lambs, and he wonders whether she imagines that by saving Catherine, will she finally have peace. The anxious Starling demands that Lecter give her Buffalo Bill's true name, but before he is able to, Starling is escorted from the building by Chilton and Lecter's guards. She however slips out of the guards' grasps to retrieve the case file from Lecter, and he uses the opportunity to lightly stroke her hand.

That evening, Lecter demands a second meal. During the time when Chilton was questioning Lecter at his cell in Baltimore, he had forgotten his pen in Lecter's cell. Lecter then swallowed the pen and, after regurgitating it, used a piece of it to pick the lock on his cuffs while the two police officers brought in his second meal. Now free, Lecter fatally beats and disembowels one officer, whom he then ties to the cell bars. He then kills the second officer by biting him and skinning his face. When the police and SWAT teams arrive, they believed they had found Lecter in the elevator shaft, severely wounded. Before their arrival, though, Lecter switched clothes with the second officer and used his skinned face as a mask. But, believing the second officer to be alive, they put Lecter in an ambulance and rush him to the hospital. Meanwhile, they discover that the man in the elevator shaft is actually the dead body of the second officer; during this time, Lecter kills the ambulance crew and escapes.

Starling's shock at all these events is put on hold when she realizes that Lecter has left more clues for her inside the case file of Buffalo Bill given to Lecter when he said he would do a psychological profile. With the help of her roommate, Starling realizes that there is something significant in the way Buffalo Bill's first victim was killed. Fredrica Bimmel was killed first but found third, suggesting that Bill wanted to hide her body. Starling surmises that Frederica knew Bill in personal life. Lecter had told her that Bill covets these women and that people covet that which they see every day.

Crawford sends Starling to investigate the victim's home town, Belvedere, Ohio, where she discovers that she was a tailor. Dresses in her closet have diamond-shaped templates on them, identical to the patches of skin removed from Buffalo Bill's latest victim. Starling realizes that Buffalo Bill is a capable tailor who wants to transform into a woman by fashioning himself a "woman suit" of real skin. She telephones Crawford, who is already on the way to make an arrest. Lecter's transsexual-surgery theory has yielded a positive ID from Johns Hopkins Hospital: a Jame Gumb just outside Chicago. Crawford is leading a strike on Gumb's business address in Calumet City, Illinois, while Chicago SWAT takes a home address. Starling is to continue interviewing Bimmel's friends.

Starling learns that Bimmel once worked for a woman named Mrs. Lippman. When Starling goes to Lippman's house, however, the door is answered by a man claiming that his name is "Jack Gordon". Starling has an idea that Gordon is actually Buffalo Bill, and his real name is Jame Gumb. Starling then sees subtle clues in the house that lead her to believe that Gordon is Gumb. Starling draws her weapon and attempts to arrest Gumb, but he abruptly scrambles into the basement, and she follows. She finds an alive Catherine Martin in the dry well when the lights go out, leaving them in complete darkness. Gumb, wearing night vision goggles, creeps up behind Starling and cocks his gun. Starling hears the click and turns around, quickly firing back, killing him. Starling calls for backup, and Catherine Martin is rescued.

During a party celebrating her graduation from the FBI Academy, Starling is startled when she receives a phone call from Lecter. He asks her if the lambs have stopped screaming, and promises her that he will not come after her, and that he expects the same courtesy. He also tells her that he is "having an old friend for dinner". Before the credits roll, Lecter is observed stalking Fredrick Chilton, who is at the same location vacationing.

At the beginning of ''Far From Heaven,'' the camera drifts downward toward the tidy streets of Hartford, through a screen of blood-red maple leaves. It is autumn 1957, and like the New England foliage, the people of Hartford are chilled into vivid, lurid color by the frost of middle-class, midcentury propriety. The bright clothes they wear, the baroque interiors of their houses, the jarring pastel tones of their enormous cars all stand in contrast to the constriction of their emotional lives and the narrow range of expression their bizarre, disconcertingly familiar world allows.

The visual and aural texture of Todd Haynes's ardent and intelligent new film provides a kind of subliminal commentary on its story of thwarted desire and soul-killing pretense. All of the wild, unruly feeling that the characters must repress pops to life around them, in every detail of Mark Friedberg's production design, Edward Lachman's painterly cinematography, Sandy Powell's delectable costumes and, above all, the great Elmer Bernstein's sobbing, swooping score.

Mr. Bernstein's music, which plays beneath nearly every scene, puts the melody in this melodrama, and Mr. Haynes, fading breathlessly from one scene to the next, reaches moments of operatic intensity that seem disproportionate to his tale of genteel bigotry and marital dysfunction. But that's the point of the movie, and the source of its troubling beauty. It suggests that the 50's facade of normalcy -- represented by the routinized, orderly lives of Frank and Cathy Whitaker (Dennis Quaid and Julianne Moore) -- concealed both incendiary passions and a ruthless social machinery devoted to their suppression.

Of course, this is hardly a new idea; it was, indeed, part of the era's understanding of itself. ''Far From Heaven,'' which opens today in New York and Los Angeles, is both a movie about the 50's and a tribute to some of the great movies of the 50's, in particular the Technicolor melodramas that Douglas Sirk made in collaboration with the producer Ross Hunter for Universal Pictures. (It happens that Focus Features, the distributor of Mr. Haynes's movie, is Universal's newly reorganized art-film subsidiary.)

Those pictures -- including ''Magnificent Obsession,'' ''Written on the Wind,'' ''Imitation of Life'' and ''All That Heaven Allows'' -- were popular with audiences in their day, but they were regarded with condescension by critics and other sophisticates suspicious of their soapy, maudlin extravagance. As was the case with so much postwar American popular culture, the subtlety and complexity of Sirk's art -- in particular his subversive knack for tucking social criticism and psychological insight into stories governed by the constraints of the Production Code and the conventions of the tear-jerker -- were appreciated only in retrospect, in part through Sirk's influence on later filmmakers, notably Ranier Werner Fassbinder.

Like Fassbinder, Mr. Haynes, whose previous features are ''Poison,'' ''Safe'' and ''The Velvet Goldmine,'' is interested both in updating Sirk and in reproducing his fluid, incandescent style. He wants, in effect, to appeal to that part of the audience that is flattered by knowing, analytical entertainments and, at the same time, to seduce us out of our intellectual cocoon into a state of pure, unbridled feeling -- to bridge the gap between the Eisenhower-era housewives who were Sirk's original audience and the aesthetes who secured his belated entry into the auteurist pantheon.

This is a remarkable ambition, but also an eminently sensible one: the union of art and sensation, intellect and feeling, mass appeal and aesthetic refinement is something the movies are uniquely able to promise, and occasionally, when a filmmaker possesses the right mixture of calculation and compassion, able to deliver.

For a director who got his start working with Barbie dolls (in ''Superstar,'' his harrowing short film about the life of Karen Carpenter), Mr. Haynes is fiercely devoted to his actors. Ms. Moore, who played the unhappy suburban housewife in ''Safe,'' here plays a heartbreaking variation on the theme. At first, Cathy is almost a caricature of domestic fulfillment, driving her daughter home from ballet class in a sky-blue station wagon, planning her annual cocktail party with her best friend, Eleanor (the splendidly wicked Patricia Clarkson), and welcoming a reporter and a photographer from the local society pages into her meticulously decorated home.

But Mr. Haynes never mocks Cathy's happiness, even as he chronicles its unraveling. Though her face is framed by stiff curls and masked with rouge and lipstick, Ms. Moore (who was pregnant during the filming) glows with warmth, curiosity and goodness -- the very qualities, Mr. Haynes suggest, that cause Cathy so much trouble.

Her life is complicated by the discovery of her husband's homosexuality and then (perhaps consequently) by her friendship with Raymond Deagan (Dennis Haysbert), a black gardener. Their relationship -- chaste, but charged with mutual longing -- and Frank's sexuality are, of course, matters that Sirk could have addressed only obliquely. But though he is more candid than he could have been in the 50's, Mr. Haynes refrains from tearing aside the veil of euphemism and hypocrisy that shrouds his characters' lives. For one thing, he is as fond of the language of the period as he is of its interior decoration; the dialogue he has written is highly stylized, at times almost to the point of Coen brothers campiness. Cathy scolds her son when he says things like ''shucks'' and ''jeez,'' and Eleanor reels off a litany of insinuating synonyms for homosexual (the funniest of which turns out to be ''wickedly successful Gotham art dealer'').

But by observing -- and even, to some extent, exaggerating -- the decorum of the era, Mr. Haynes gives ''Far From Heaven'' an emotional impact that could not have been achieved by conventionally realistic means. The most casual moments are suffused with a feeling of emotional extremity; the air is as charged and threatening as it might be in a horror film. Everyone in this world seems terribly alone -- Cathy increasingly so -- and at the same time under constant surveillance, spied upon and gossiped about, an instant away from betrayal or ostracism.

The film's rawer moments -- when Frank explodes into obscenity, when Cathy catches him kissing a man, when Raymond's young daughter is attacked by a group of white schoolboys -- feel almost unbearably brutal. And the actors invest their smallest gestures with the weight of inexpressible feeling.

Mr. Quaid's handsome face is twisted with suffering and self-loathing, and his performance is all the more shattering because he thwarts our compassion. Frank's misery transmutes, all too easily, into cruelty directed at his wife. Mr. Haysbert is equally powerful in a performance that goes in the opposite direction. On the surface, Raymond is all reticence, decency and good manners -- liberal Hollywood's dream of the noble, upwardly mobile Negro. But Mr. Haysbert and Mr. Haynes conspire to subvert this stereotype, too. Along with Viola Davis, who plays Cathy's housekeeper, they pay homage to Sirk's grandest, most radical picture, ''Imitation of Life,'' in which Juanita Moore took the cinema archetype of the selfless black servant and turned her into a human being.

And this, in effect, is what ''Far From Heaven'' accomplishes for all of its characters. It rediscovers the aching, desiring humanity in a genre -- and a period -- too often subjected to easy parody or ironic appropriation. In a word, it's divine.

''Far From Heaven'' is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Its mild sexual content and language would never have been allowed in 1957, but times, thank Heaven, have changed.


FAR FROM HEAVEN

Written and directed by Todd Haynes; director of photography, Edward Lachman; edited by James Lyons; music by Elmer Bernstein; production designer, Mark Friedberg; costumes by Sandy Powell; produced by Christine Vachon and Jody Patton; released by Focus Features. Running time: 107 minutes. This film is rated PG-13.

WITH: Julianne Moore (Cathy Whitaker), Dennis Quaid (Frank Whitaker), Dennis Haysbert (Raymond Deagan), Patricia Clarkson (Eleanor Fine), Viola Davis (Sybil) and James Rebhorn (Dr. Bowman).

The Lives of Others (original title in German: Das Leben der Anderen) is an Academy Award-winning German movie, marking the feature film debut of writer and director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. For it, Donnersmarck won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The film had earlier won seven Deutscher Filmpreis awards including best film, best director, best screenplay, best actor and best supporting actor, after having set a new record with 11 nominations. It was also nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the 64th Golden Globe Awards. This award went to Clint Eastwood instead of Donnersmarck.

Plot:

The thriller/drama is about the cultural scene of East Berlin, monitored by secret agents of the Stasi, the GDR's secret police. It stars Ulrich Mühe as Stasi agent Gerd Wiesler, Ulrich Tukur as his chief officer Anton Grubitz, Sebastian Koch as the playwright Georg Dreyman, and Martina Gedeck as a prominent actress and his lover, Christa-Maria Sieland.

In 1984 East Germany(also known as the GDR or DDR) , Stasi agent Gerd Wiesler, a keenly idealistic supporter of the communist regime, is assigned to spy on playwright Georg Dreyman, who, Wiesler is told, is suspected of Western leanings. Stasi agents secretly enter Dreyman's apartment in order to install small microphones in the light switchs and electric sockets, and cables in the walls, which connect the microphones to an attic space above the apartment, where Wiesler and an assistant take turns monitoring the activity below 24 hours a day, typing a report with anything they hear that might be relevant. A neighbour who happens to observe the agents is told that if she reveals their presence her daughter will be forced out of her spot in the university.

Wiesler soon finds out that the real reason why Dreyman is being spied on is that a minister and member of the Party's Central Committee is attracted to Dreyman's girlfriend, actress Christa-Maria; if Dreyman is arrested the minister will have free rein. This destroys Wiesler's motivation, as the job is not seriously investigating crimes against the Socialist state.

Dreyman is a supporter of the regime, but dislikes the way dissidents are treated. He publicly stands up for his friends if he feels that they have been unfairly treated. One friend is a director, Jerska who has been sapped of joie de vivre because he has been blacklisted for several years. At Dreyman's 40th birthday party, Jerska gives Dreyman a gift of sheet music entitled "Sonata for a Good Man". Shortly afterward, Jerska commits suicide which finally spurs Dreyman into speaking out against the regime. Dreyman arranges with West Germany's "Der Spiegel" periodical magazine to anonymously publish in an article on suicide rates in the GDR. While the GDR publishes detailed statistics on many things, it has not published any statistics on suicide rates since the 1970s , presumably because they are embarrassingly high. Because all typewriters are required to be registered, Dreyman uses a separate typewriter with a red ribbon to write the article, which he hides under the floor in his apartment. Before Dreyman and his friends discuss sensitive issues in Dreyman's apartment they test whether it is bugged: they pretend that someone will be smuggled in a relative's car over to the West. Later they conclude that the apartment is not bugged, because the car is not searched. Unknown to them, that is only because Wiesler has temporarily taken pity on them and had not understood that the discussion was in fact a test.

As Wiesler's empathy for the writer and his girlfriend has grown over time, he lies in his reports to protect Dreyman. Also, at his proposal, the hours of surveillance are reduced, so that it is no longer continuous and he no longer has to share the work with his more objective assistant.

Meanwhile, the minister, angered that Christa-Maria had chosen to no longer see him, orders Wiesler's superior, Anton Grubitz, to find some way to destroy her and tells him that she has gained narcotics, illegally, from abroad. Grubitz and his men manage to catch her in the act of purchasing these drugs and she is arrested. Terrified, she turns Dreyman in. The house is searched for contraband by security officials, but the typewriter is not found. Wiesler is called in to interrogate Christa-Maria. At this point,Grubitz, begins to suspect of Wiesler's newly found pity and implies that even though there are longtime friends, a failure to perform his work will be very costly. Wiesler interrogates Christa-Maria (with his boss watching through the two way mirror) with the same flawlessness and objectivity that characterized him for years. She breaks down and tells him where the typewriter is hidden. Wiesler however, still determined to protect a couple he has come to care for, travels to their apartment before the police can search it again and surreptitiously hides the typewriter.

During a second search, in the presence of Christa-Maria, when the hiding place of the typewriter is about to be opened, Christa-Maria walks away in shame, and throws herself in front of a truck. The secret hiding place is opened, but is found empty. A helpless Wiesler who is watching the events just outside the apartment, tries to tell Christa that he has the typewriter, but can't complete his words. Dreyman arrives at the scene and Christa-Maria dies in his hands. As a result the surveillance operation becomes pointless: Wiesler's superior, calls it off and distrusting Wiesler, ensures the end of his career. The newspaper lying in the front seat of Wiesler's car announces that Gorbachev is the new Party Secretary of the Soviet Union. Wiesler is demoted to Department M, where he tediously steams open letters all day. Four years and seven months later, Wiesler is opening letters when a coworker with a radio notifies him of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

At the end of the film, after German reunification, Dreyman encounters a former minister and asks why his apartment was never bugged. The minister ironically details the scope of Dreyman's extensive surveillance, telling him where to look for the equipment. Dreyman finds the wires and becomes perplexed as to how he was never caught. He finds the truth further while searching his file in Stasi's archives: while Wiesler heard Dreyman and his friends conducting anti-regime activities (such as the writing of the suicide article), Wiesler did not report those things in his voluminous typed notes; instead, he (Wiesler) falsely wrote that Dreyman was writing a play on Lenin, a topic the regime would have approved. Next to the final page of notes is a red smudge, which provides evidence that it was he who had removed the type writer, which used red ink. Dreyman notes the code name "HGW XX/7" in all reports and discovers the identity that it corresponds to. He finds out the location of Wiesler and pursues him in a taxi, watching Wiesler delivering leaflets. He gets out of the car with the intention of meeting him, but changes his mind and gets back into the car.

Two years later, Dreyman publishes a novel named "Sonata for a Good Man". By chance, Wiesler sees the book in a bookstore, and finds that it is dedicated "To HGW XX/7 with gratitude" . When Wiesler buys the book and the vendor asks him if he should package it as a present, Wiesler responds: "No. It's for me."