Writer-director Leonard Schrader opens his film with a clip from the 1921 silent classic Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, showing Rudolph Valentino doing a sizzling tango. Dumb move. Schrader's take on the "dance of sex without love" can't compete. Though the film strikingly re-creates the Argentinian underworld in 1924, the lurid script has the depth of a travel brochure. Stephanie (Mathilda May) is bored with her life as the wife of an old-coot judge (Fernando Rey). On a cruise ship with her husband, she pretends to fall overboard but instead takes on the identity of a mail-order bride from Poland. What she sees as a momentary lark becomes a living hell when her groom, Zico (Esai Morales), sells her into white slavery. Forced to do the unspeakable, Stephanie is suicidal until she meets Cholo (Vincent D'Onofrio), a charismatic killer who's not into sex. Cholo tangos.

Credit the cast for saying their lines without laughing. May looks great in her Louise Brooks hairdo, but D'Onofrio (Mystic Pizza) seems to have arrived in Buenos Aires via Brooklyn; his authenticity stops with his hair wax. There's no confusing the erotic posturing of Naked Tango with the passion Schrader brought to his script for. Kiss of the Spider Woman. His debut as a director is merely a Dirty Dancing with pretensions.

“Is It True”

As the British Invasion reached its peak in 1964, Brenda Lee went from Nashville to London to record one of her hardest-rocking hits, her perky vocal backed by a stuttering, squalling guitar. That guitar was played by session musician Jimmy Page, yet to skyrocket to fame with first the Yardbirds and then Led Zeppelin. "She said to me, 'I've come here to make a record with the British sound,'" remembered producer Mickie Most. "She felt she wouldn't get the same sound in Nashville because they're only just catching up on the British beat group sound of about six months ago."