Le Scaphandre et le papillon (The Diving Bell and the Butterfly) is the phenomenal adaptation of French journalist and media mogul Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoirs after a stroke at the age of 42 leaves him completely paralyzed except for his left eye, ending his career as editor of world-renowned magazine Elle and how he dictates his book to an editor using a system of blinking.

eXistenZ is director David Cronenberg‘s 1999 film that is his strangest and most disturbing yet. It was overshadowed during its release, but has picked up a bit of a cult fan-base since it was released on DVD.

A world-famous, celebrity virtual reality game designer named Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is unveiling a demonstration of her newest game at a private, focus group meeting. The game works off of a biological, non-sentient machine called a pod, which plugs into a bio-port, looking very much like an organic opening at the base of a person’s spine. Ted Pikul (Jude Law) is a marketing guy from the game’s company and when the game session is about to begin, a late-comer unveils a weapon made entirely from bone and which shoots teeth (thus rendering it invisible to metal detectors) and attempts to assassinate Geller, Pikul is the one who rushes her from the scene, injured, but alive and the two of them try to unravel what is going on and whether or not the game has survived the attack also.

Writer/director Laurent Firode‘s 2000 film Happenstance (Le Battement d’ailes du papillon) is a fabulous French-language romantic comedy starring Audrey Tautou, one of my favorite actresses, as Irene, the leading character. It is a romantic comedy that uses its simplicity to showcase the elements of Chaos Theory or the Butterfly Effect, where one action leads to a series of progressively larger actions so that, for example a butterfly in Indonesia can cause a hurricane in Florida.

Spike Lee takes the novel writing talent of David Benioff and changes it into a screenplay to bring us this gut-wrenching story of regret, confusion, love, and loss and under Lee’s direction and his actors’ talents brings out a simultaneously heart-breaking and heart-warming story that is infused with a feeling of terrible, terrible regret in 25th Hour.

Hamburger Hill is the 1987 movie directed by John Irvin and written by James Carabatsos about the famous and brutal 10-day battle during the Vietnam War for a hill between the 101st Airborne Company of the US Army and the army of North Vietnam in which hundreds were killed and wounded on both sides in what came to resemble trench warfare and spat out injured and dead American soldiers in such a way as to suggest they had been shredded like hamburger meat. The real battle garnered major attention in Washington, especially among Congress, and was the last major battle of the Vietnam War with Richard Nixon soon after beginning to return US troops to the United States.