At the whirling-dervish center of the French action film "District B13" is a fighting discipline known as parkour. I'm pretty sure that's French for "somersaulting over balconies while drop-kicking the gangsters who kidnapped your sister and turned her into a junkie." However it translates, parkour isn't par-for-the-course movie mayhem, but a gorgeously choreographed gymnastics of pain that elevates "District B13" over the impossible missions and last stands of the season.

If you happened to visit IMDB, you might notice that the aforementioned sister-turned-junkie (Dany Verissimo) has also appeared in such notable French cinema as:

* Une nuit au bordel, alongside such accomplished stars as Monika Sweetheart;
* Ally et xperiment, with Tiffany Hopkins;
* French Beauty, with Sebastian Barrio;
* So Long Mister Monore, with Titof; and
* an episode of Les Tropiques de l'amour, with Rita Faltoyano and Monica Sweet.

Wikipedia offers some background.

District B13 - Review - Movies - New York Times

The great French director Jean-Pierre Melville (Le Samourai, Le Cercle Rouge) is said to have bristled at the suggestion that his 1969 adaptation of Joseph Kessel’s novel about a band of French Resistance fighters during World War II presented its characters in much the same light as the wily con men and hoods who populated Melville’s better-known gangster films. Helping to cement the connection, no doubt, was the presence of stars Lino Ventura (as the brave civil engineer Philippe Gerbier) and Paul Meurisse (as organization head Luc Jardie), who just three years earlier had played the escaped con and the commissaire hot on his trail in the diabolical cat-and-mouse game of Melville’s Le Deuxième Soufflé. Yet I can think of no higher praise for Army of Shadows than to say that it approaches its pulse-quickening tale of life in the underground in the same exacting way Melville rendered so many stories of life in the underworld. As with the ascetic criminals he couldn’t resist mythologizing, Melville — who, like Kessel, had been a member of the Resistance himself — sees the brave rebels as steely men of action (and women, hence the unforgettable Simone Signoret as the resourceful Mathilde), operating outside the law and according to their own strict codes, never allowing emotion to cloud their judgment. The result is a brilliant and relentless thriller, painted in Melville’s trademark shades of charcoal and midnight blue, marked by daring escapes, unimaginable moments of self-sacrifice and unconscionable acts of betrayal. At its center rests the granite-featured Ventura, his final meeting with a once-trusted compatriot on a Paris street a chilling reminder that, in wartime, even mercy is brutal. Presented in a new 35 mm print, the film is being released in the U.S. for the first time thanks to the invaluable Rialto Pictures.

Army of Shadows | LA Weekly

Haneke pushes past simply representing violence to explore our mediated relationship to it through the televised images of real-life horror that permeate our everyday lives

Michael Haneke | LA Weekly

In Terrorist, a novel whose title will either roll eyes or raise eyebrows, John Updike seeks to crack open one of the hardest shells available to the New England writer: the mind of the young, angry, resentful Muslim.

This quote cropped up in Gabriel García Márquez ["Disbelief is more resistant than faith because it is sustained by the senses." ]

The Spider and the Wasp: John Updike and his Terrorist | LA Weekly

The guy is like an amphetamine-dosed amalgamation of Malcolm Gladwell, Thomas Friedman and real-life futurist Faith Popcorn. He’s five seconds ahead of everyone else, and he rides the twisted weirdness of the world as if it’s the perfect wave.

It's a Bad, Bad, Bad, Bad World: Selling tomorrow in The Futurist | LA Weekly

At its best, the show's witty repartee brings to mind classic film noir. "Do you smoke after sex?" someone asks Brenda, to which she retorts with the old blue joke, "I don't know, I never looked." And when a combative colleague accuses her of being a bitch, she snaps, "If I liked being called a bitch to my face, I'd still be married."

License to Shrill: The Closer | TV by Joy Press

A novel about a mad bomber by John Updike —why not?

John Updike's Terrorist by Benjamin Strong | village voice

The parkour scenes are, in fact, awesome.

Spread the word: This delirious import is the most (maybe the only) fun action movie of the summer—swift, funny, filled with actual stunts instead of digitized mayhem, and primed at a moment's notice for megaton ass-kicking. Set in 2010 Paris, it fuses Escape From New York's futuristic city-as-prison concept with Assault on Precinct 13's bristling political subtext, as an undercover cop (Cyril Raffaelli) and a convict (David Belle) battle their way through a walled-in underclass banlieue searching for a massive "clean bomb." The plot is mostly straight-to-video silliness, except for a final kicker that feeds off the real-life unrest seething in Paris's strife-torn suburbs. But Belle—a master of parkour, the French extreme sport/martial art devoted to the casual hurdling of physical obstacles—brings an exhilarating athleticism to the many chases and fights. I'd trade all of M:i:III's 126 minutes for one 1.7-second shot of Belle hurtling himself in a single motion through a locked door's transom.

District B13 | Review

In The King, Gael García Bernal plays a sailor named Elvis who shakes the moral foundations of an upstanding Texas town. And Presley themes aside, it's one of the most original movies ever made about religion in America.

The King | THE CRITIC: GQ

Movies in Piedmont Park.

See Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

Screen on the Green, in Atlanta