With an Academy Award and a slew of movies with critical success and great box office under his belt, Taiwanese director Ang Lee decided to go for broke with his latest project, a gorgeously filmed period spy saga showcasing some of the most sexually explicit scenes ever seen in a mainstream movie. The film is mostly set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai in 1942, where an acting student with a false identity (debuting actress Wei Tang) is enlisted to seduce collaborationist regime security chief Yee (Tony Leung) in order to set him up for assassination by her resistance mentors. However, the deeper and more erotically the student gets into her impersonation—she evolves into Yee’s steady mistress—the more attached to him she becomes.

Shelf Talk: Lust, Caution received mixed notices and less than enthusiastic box-office results, but on DVD, it’s destined for a healthy reception. The appeal is two-fold: arthouse patrons who go for high-profile foreign- and English-language films from a name filmmaker (Lee’s credits also include The Ice Storm and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and curiosity seekers who want to catch the much talked about NC-17 bedroom sequences. Neither should be disappointed, despite the film’s lengthy running time. There are similarities to such foreign hits as the recent Black Book from Paul Verhoeven and Jean-Jacques Annaud’s The Lover, so keep that in mind and market accordingly to adult audiences. And don’t forget to distinguish between the R-rated version and the kinkier NC-17 edition with four minutes of extra footage.