Lots to enjoy this week but first thing's first: get out and VOTE! 

Reviewer: Philip Tatler IV
Ratings (out of five): ****

Foreign Parts (directed by the team of Verena Paravel and J.P. Sniadecki) has all the makings of a groan-inducing activist documentary along the lines of Scott Hamilton Kennedy’s The Garden or (worse) a ghoulish voyeur’s-eye-view of extreme poverty in America. Instead, Paravel/Sniadecki have pulled off the rare verite documentary that manages a formal grace and doesn’t patronize or fetishize its subjects.

Reviewer: James van Maanen
Ratings (out of five): ***

What's in a name -- or more to the point, in a title? The original French title of Mia Hansen-Løve's third feature (after the OK All Is Forgiven and the much better Father of My Children), Goodbye First Love, is the much simpler Un amour de jeunesse, which translates to "Young Love," or maybe "A Love in Youth." The point of this talented writer/filmmaker's latest movie -- if I am anywhere close to understanding it -- concerns how difficult it is for her heroine, Camille, to actually bid good-bye to this first love. Instead she allows herself to become utterly obsessed with it and its vessel, the hunky young man named Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky), who keeps telling her, by word and deed, to cool it. 

Reviewer: Jeffrey M Anderson
Ratings (out of five): **

Fernando Di Leo was a kind of mad genius in the Italian sub-movie industry, starting as a writer for Spaghetti Westerns and moving up to directing a series of astounding crime movies. Raro Video has been slowly unleashing a good many of these in the past couple of years, and many of them are very much worth looking into, especially for exploitation fans. Sadly, Madness (1980) is not one of them.

Forgoing any of the twisty plots and unbelievable action of his earlier films, Madness focuses on a handful of characters and stays mostly in one place. Joe Dallesandro stars as "Joe," an escaped killer who runs around the countryside in a tank top. Apparently, he buried some stolen loot under a fireplace in a country house.