Vanya on 42nd Street

The last film of the great French director Louis Malle uses a rather complex play-within-a-play method to explore the subtle intertwined relationship between life as a play and play as life. Many of the actors in the film are sometimes themselves and sometimes become characters in the play, interpreting the entangled emotional relationships between them in the real and fake life interactions. The image quality of the film is relatively monotonous, but the acting is quite exciting. It was selected by the Associated Press as one of the ten best films of the 1990s.