1. Taj Mahal Dvd

With: Stacy Martin, Louis-Do de Lencquesaing, Gina McKee, Alba Rohrwacher, Fred Epaud, Praveena Vivekananthan. (French, English, Hindi dialogue) Official Site: Imagine “Die Hard” as told from the point of view of one of the terrified office workers huddled under her desk while angry Germans hold Nakatomi Plaza hostage. That fundamental shift of perspective, which redirects the audience’s focus from a gung-ho action hero trying to save the day to a relatively unexceptional victim on the sidelines, drives “(Spy)ies” helmer ’s sophomore feature, “,” a genre-upending non-thriller inspired by the 2008 Mumbai attacks in which we spend the entire movie trapped in a hotel room with a panic-stricken teenager.

Taj Mahal Dvd

Neither as psychological nor as cinematic as its ambitious concept suggests, the film could nevertheless stir up some reasonable arthouse interest following its Venice and Telluride festival launches. Whether or not the exercise succeeds essentially boils down to how interesting audiences find 18-year-old Louise, a privileged Franco-English photography student played by “Nymphomaniac” star. The actress, who is both strikingly beautiful and convincingly brittle in the role, shrewdly follows her scandalous bigscreen debut with an entirely different sort of challenge — one that depends not upon exposing her body, but revealing what’s going on behind her big doe eyes. Except that Martin looks so blank at times that we don’t know whether she’s afraid for her life or simply craving a Big Mac.