Gustave Flaubert’s 1856 novel, for all of its modern sense of honesty and power, could have been written just yesterday. Here we have one of literature’s tragic heroines—the beautiful Emma Bovary—and the dark temptations that draw her down a fatal path. Emma is besieged by boredom as she yawns away her days as a country doctor’s wife in a town where nothing seems to happen. Seeking change and excitement, Emma comes up with a desperate and dangerous solution: the pursuit of excess. She embarks on tumultuous affairs with two different lovers, making extravagant purchases and living a lie more reckless than any of her neighbors would ever dare. Emma’s husband is clueless to her sins, but when an unpaid bill for one of Emma’s shopping trips arrives at home, he begins to understand what has happened. Emma’s crimes of passion are swift to catch up with her, bringing her glamorous lifestyle to a screeching halt and tearing her life to pieces in a terrifying finale.

Perhaps the most famous opening lines from any novel are the opening lines to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” These words are spoken by Mrs. Bennet to Mr. Bennet on the news that a gentleman of fortune has just moved to Netherfield Park, a nearby estate.The Bennets begin this story with a peculiar problem: they have five unmarried daughters and no sons. Their estate is entailed, or restricted in inheritance, to Mr. Collins, a family cousin. Upon Mr. Bennet’s death, Mr. Collins will inherit the family lands, which will leave the Bennet daughters without a home or money. It becomes vital, therefore, that at least one of the daughters marries well in order to support and house their sisters (and mother if she is still alive) should they not be able to marry …

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a novel written by Mark Twain and published in 1884. It is commonly regarded as one of the Great American Novels, and is one of the first major American novels written in the vernacular, characterized by local color regionalism. It is told in the first person by Huckleberry “Huck” Finn, best friend of Tom Sawyer and narrator of two other Twain novels. The book is noted for its colorful description of people and places along the Mississippi River. By satirizing a Southern antebellum society that was already anachronistic at the time, the book is an often scathing look at entrenched attitudes, particularly racism. The drifting journey of Huck and his friend Jim, a runaway slave, down the Mississippi River on their raft may be one of the most enduring images of escape and freedom in all of American literature. The book has been popular with young readers since its publication and is taken as a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. It has also been the continued object of study by serious literary critics. The book was criticized upon release because of its coarse language, and became even more controversial in the 20th century because of its perceived use of racial stereotypes and because of its frequent use of the racial slur, “nigger.”

Structured in a frame tale, the Decameron played a part in the history of the novel. It was finished by Giovanni Boccaccio in 1353. This work opens with a description of the Black Death and leads into an introduction of a group of seven young women and three young men who fled from Plague ridden Florence for a villa outside of town. To pass the time, each member of the party tells one story for every one of the ten nights spent at the villa. The Decameron is a distinctive work, in that it describes in detail the physical, psychological and social effects that the Bubonic Plague had on that part of Europe. It is also interesting to note that a number of the stories contained within the Decameron would later appear in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. However, it is unclear as to whether or not Chaucer had known of the Decameron. One woman, Pampinea, is elected Queen for the first day. Each day the company’s previous king/queen elects who shall succeed them and nominates the theme for the current days storytelling. Each day has a new theme assigned to it except for days 1 and 9: misfortunes that bring a person to a state of unexpected happiness; people who have achieved an object they greatly desired, or recovered a thing previously lost; love stories that ended unhappily; love that survived disaster; those who have avoided danger; tricks women have played on their husbands; tricks both men and women play on each other; those who have given very generously whether for love or another endeavor.

The thrills of Welles’ breathtakingly exciting debut picture are multifarious. For one thing, there’s the exhilaration of watching a 25-year-old genius named Orson Welles explore the possibilities of the medium for the first time, playing provocatively with the properties of film as if he’d been doing it all his life. Visually and aurally – from Gregg Toland’s celebrated deep-focus cinematography to Robert Wise’s crisp, complex editing to the multi-layered expressionistic soundtrack – Kane is as stunning and sophisticated as any movie ever made, and it crackles and whizzes along at a pace that can even keep the MTV generation riveted to the screen. Then there’s the thrill of watching the exuberant young Mercury Players, among the finest actors ever to work in front of a movie camera, having the time of their lives as they projecting themselves into the future and into the past. Their fresh performances still bristle with spontaneity and an edge that few contemporary actors can match.

Ok. The plot is a bit weird, but amusing! Amelie was a girl who kind of grew up isolated from other children. Her antisocial ex-Army doctor father, mistakenly believes that she suffers from a heart condition (a mistake resulting from the increase in her heartbeat caused by the rare thrill of physical contact with her father, who only ever touches her during medical check-ups). Her mother Amandine, a neurotic schoolteacher with shaky nerves, sees to Amelie’s education. Amandine dies when Amelie is young, the victim of a freak accident involving a suicidal Québécoise woman who throws herself off the top of Notre Dame Cathedral and lands on Amelie’s mother. Raphaël withdraws even further as a result, and devotes his life to building a rather eccentric shrine in the garden to Amandine’s memory, which houses her ashes. Left to amuse herself, Amelie develops an unusually active imagination.

This is the most erotic movie ever made! Director Zalman King’s original version of Wild Orchid seemed to be too sexually graphic for an R-rating and the MPAA threatened to release it with an X-rating (the NC-17 rating having not yet been introduced), which would have severely limited its commercial potential. King reluctantly edited out part of a love scene between Otis and Rourke in order to bring the film into line with the R-rating. The scene in question was widely rumored in the media to have shown the two actors — who had become romantically involved during production of the film — actually having intercourse; both actors denied this, but the director was ambiguous. The scene became a cause celebre in the media, with the Siskel & Ebert review program devoting part of one installment to film critic Roger Ebert discussing the censored scene with King (Ebert is shown watching the footage, but it was not broadcast). The footage itself had been filmed in such a way that penetration (if any) was not visible; even in one overhead shot showing realistic sexual movement, Rourke’s genitals are completely in shadow, making it impossible to confirm or deny based upon available photographic evidence. In his examination of the situation, Ebert used Wild Orchid as evidence that the MPAA needed to create a new rating for films made for adults that were not aimed at the pornography market to which the X-rating had been associated; not long after the film’s release, the MPAA abandoned X and introduced the NC-17 rating, which was intended for this purpose.

When Wild Orchid was released to the home video and cable markets the next year, King assembled an unrated “director’s cut” which contained the footage he had been forced to trim. The theatrical release ran at 105 minutes; the video version runs 111 minutes and most notably includes the more explicit version of the debated love scene which is almost completely made up of different footage than what was used in the R-rated theatrical version. This was one of the first occasions in which a film that had been edited for sexual explicitness was later issued in unexpurgated form on home video, a practice that is now standard.

Directed in a highly stylized manner, Pulp Fiction joins the intersecting storylines of Los Angeles mobsters, fringe players, small-time criminals, and a mysterious briefcase. Considerable screen time is devoted to conversations and monologues that reveal the characters’ senses of humor and perspectives on life. The film’s title refers to the pulp magazines and hardboiled crime novels popular during the mid-20th century, known for their graphic violence and punchy dialogue. Pulp Fiction is self-referential from its opening moments, beginning with a title card that gives two dictionary definitions of “pulp”. The plot, in keeping with most of Tarantino’s other works, is presented out of chronological sequence. The picture’s self-reflexivity, unconventional structure, and extensive use of homage and pastiche have led critics to describe it as a prime example of postmodern film.

You turn 30 and still like playing war games on your computer, you like Terminator, Rambo & Co.? Try this one: The Pianist. Don’t eat right before the you watch the movie and do not arrange any dinner afterwards. Don’t watch this film alone. But if “Schindlers List” was more than you can bear, you better go back to your computer … A brilliant pianist, a Polish Jew, witnesses the restrictions Nazis place on Jews in the Polish capital, from restricted access to the building of the Warsaw ghetto. As his family is rounded up to be shipped off to the Nazi labor camps, he escapes deportation and eludes capture by living in the ruins of Warsaw. This movies is based on a book, a true story of Wladyslaw Szpilman who, in the 1930s, was known as the most accomplished piano player in Europe. At the outbreak of the Second World War, however, Szpilman becomes subject to the anti-Jewish laws imposed by the conquering Germans. By the start of the 1940s, Szpilman has seen his world go from piano concert halls to the Jewish Ghetto of Warsaw and then must suffer the tragedy of his family deported to a German concentration camps, while Szpilman is conscripted into a forced German Labor Compound. At last deciding to escape, Szpilman goes into hiding as a Jewish refugee where he is witness to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (April 19, 1943 – May 16, 1943) and the Warsaw Uprising (1 August to 2 October 1944). This film will be tough. But no doubt about it. Everybody should watch this film once in his lifetime.