To Our Loves Despite nearly continuous international critical accolades and a parade of film festival awards, Maurice Pialat's low-concept, intimate slice-of life dramas have never really caught on with the American art-house crowd. A good example of his work is this startlingly intimate domestic nightmare about a teenage girl (the amazing, 17-year-old Sandrine Bonnaire's scre…
Freedom for Us Having established a reputation as a brilliant satirist during the silent era with films like 1924's Paris Qui Dort, in which an experimental ray gun causes Parisians to reveal their own hypocrisy, René Clair worried—as did so many other directors of comic films at the time—about the prospect of sound intruding on their fantastic and surrealistic silent w…
L'Accompagnatrice Richard Bohringer, one of the fixtures of contemporary French cinema in films such as The Last Metro, Diva, and Le Grand Chemin, may be best remembered by future generations not as a fine actor but as a great actress's father; Romane Bohringer has been appearing in small roles for years, but in Claude Miller's 1992 The Accompanist she pulled off something sur…
Canadian wunderkind Atom Egoyan's films can be as tantalizing as they are frustratingly distant (including his breakthrough hit, The Sweet Hereafter), and his 1991 The Adjuster is one of the films that demonstrates his strengths and weaknesses most clearly. It's the story of an insurance adjuster named Noah (Elias Koteas) whose clients have had catastrophi…
Efter Repetitionen If you've seen Deconstructing Harry and you're more than a bit curious as to why Woody Allen has always been so fascinated with Ingmar Bergman, the modestly mounted but deeply moving After the Rehearsal is as good a place as any to start. As an aging and legendary director named Henrik Vogler (Erland Josephson) prepares work on a new production of Aug…
Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes In one of the 16th century's more spectacular follies, would-be conqueror Gonzalez Pizarro mounted an expedition through the jungles of Peru to seek El Dorado—the shining, legendary city of gold. One of the many unlucky and unprepared men to accompany him was one Gaspar de Carvajal, who kept a journal of the nightmarish adventure which would eventually find i…
A recent news story out of Japan reported that hundreds, if not thousands, of Japanese children suffered seizures after watching an episode of an animated TV series that used a particularly mesmerizing stroboscopic visual effect. Akira, Katsuhiro Otomo's 1988 pioneering example of the particular Japanese animation form known as anime, is not known to have produced such an effect on anyone, …
Dreams Yume I Saw a Dream Like This Konna Yume Wo Mita I compare the critics who've labeled Akira Kurosawa's Dreams “uneven” to therapists who've listened attentively to a brilliant patient as he confides his innermost secrets, only to tell him when his hour is up that two or three of his private fantasies went on a little too long. If ever a director has earned …
Few movies have been subjected to as much revisionist criticism as has Sergei Eisenstein's staggering action epic about the legendary Russian prince who defeated the savage Teutonic hordes on a vast frozen lake in 1242. Commissioned by Stalin to whip the Russian masses into an anti-Nazi frenzy, Eisenstein understood that there should be no reason why propaganda couldn't be rip-snorti…
Dustin Hoffman plays a shy, nervous, continuously sweating bank clerk who manages to marry the ravishingly pretty Stefania Sandrelli, discovering too late that what should have been his dream come true—his beautiful bride's unquenchable sexual appetite—has become his worst nightmare. Pietro Germi specialized in a highly popular subcategory of domestic Italian comedy, the zenit…
Fear Eats the Soul Angst Essen Selle auf Rainer Werner Fassbinder was a man in a hurry to make the films he wanted to make, having created some 40-odd pictures by the time he died at age 36, reportedly found face down at his editing table and filled with your run-of-the-mill combo of cocaine, vodka, and Valium. An admirer of the tragic American melodramas of Douglas Sirk (Written on the Win…
In the 1960s baby-boomers discovered Walt Disney's part-grand and part-bizarre Fantasia (1940) and promptly proclaimed it an early head film. For some of their parents, Fantasia had served as an early and important introduction to classical music. This newly rediscovered classic proved to be a revelation worldwide. In Italy it captured the heart of one of the most celebrated c…
An aging anarchist (Marcello Mastroianni) wants to give up the fight for a comfy rocking chair, but is goaded into action once more by colleagues who fear that fatigue-both individual and collective—is the greatest enemy of revolution. Allonsanfan (sing the title and you've got the opening words of France's national anthem “allons enfants,” o…
Alphaville, a Strange Case of Lemmy Caution Alphaville, une Etrange Aventure de Lemmy Caution In the history of motion pictures there have been innumerable ways of imagining the future. Yet even when examining the medium's entire first 100 years, it is entirely possible that there has never been a vision as bleak or as radically beautiful as that which was conjured by Jean-Luc Godard in his…
I Remember For those who would separate the films of Federico Fellini into the films made before La Dolce Vita (1960) and those that came after, Amarcord is often cited as the summation of the director's later work. This haunting and self-consciously dreamlike movie, featuring a lilting yet vaguely frightening score by Nino Rota, is a loosely autobiographical kaleidoscope of m…
Der Amerikanische Freund Bruno Ganz is Jonathan, a mild-mannered picture framer, originally Swiss but living in Germany, who discovers that his rare blood disease will result in a death sentence. At the same time, a mysterious American art dealer and all-around shady profiteer named Ripley (Dennis Hopper) has a friend who wants a hit performed on a gangster, pointing out to Jonathan …
Der Amerikanische Soldat If pictures like The American Soldier hadn't been followed by the flood of far more sophisticated films that he churned out throughout the remainder of the 1970s, Rainer Werner Fassbinder might have been relegated to a minor footnote in the history of modern European cinema. This shaky tribute to American noir reveals a director whose love of directors like Samuel F…
And Woman…Was Created Et Dieu Crea la Femme If it's possible for a movie to change the history of the medium as well as to more generally alter popular culture—all without being a particularly good picture—then And God Created Woman will serve nicely as an example of how it can be done. This overheated, widescreen, brightly colored roundelay of sexual longing, lusting, …
El la Nave Va One of the most unjustly neglected of Fellini's later films (along with Ginger & Fred), And the Ship Sails On is a nearly plotless epic about the various passengers who've gathered on a fabulous ocean liner in the early 1900s to be on the final journey with a legendary opera star. If the jaw-droppingly realistic, digitally enhanced recreations of Ja…
Among the many glories that I had the privilege of discovering at the 1973 New York Film Festival was a two-and-a-half-hour version—a big fragment, really, some 30 minutes shorter than the original—of Andrei Tarkovsky's already-legendary Andrei Rublev. Tarkovsky's second feature, a sprawling, three-hour mosaic of imagined moments in the life of the 15th-century icon pai…
Among the many glories that I had the privilege of discovering at the 1973 New York Film Festival was a two-and-a-half-hour version—a big fragment, really, some 30 minutes shorter than the original—of Andrei Tarkovsky's already-legendary Andrei Rublev. Tarkovsky's second feature, a sprawling, three-hour mosaic of imagined moments in the life of the 15th-century icon pai…
In 1948 Hungary, during the early and increasingly dehumanizing days of socialism, a young woman who is deeply committed to the cause finds herself falling in love with the charming—and married—group leader of her Party “re-education” school. Veronika Papp's Angi is one of the most memorable and convincing characters to come out of the great wave of Eastern Europ…
Anna: From Six Till Eighteen Anna: Ot Shesti do Vosemnadtsati Filmed over a period of thirteen years beginning in 1980, this extraordinary work by Russia's justly celebrated Nikita Mikhalkov (A Slave of Love, Burnt by the Sun) is both a documentary portrait of the collapse of the Soviet Union and, simultaneously, a tender, fascinating, epic home movie chronicling the maturing …
Marleen Gorris's exquisite recounting of the loves and trials of several generations of women in a rural village in the Netherlands has been nearly as popular with audiences as it has been with critics. Antonia's Line unfolds in a series of flashbacks that gently cascade through the memory of the now-90-year-old Antonia (the wonderful Willeke van Ammelrooy) who tells us…
O Dragao da Maldade contra ο Santo Guerreiro The most outspoken and brilliantly talented member of the Cinema Novo movement in Brazil, Glauber Rocha came to the film world's attention with his 1964 Black God, White Devil. In this sequel, made five years later, the bounty hunter from the earlier film comes to realize that his true enemies are not the revolutionaries he's being …
The Unvanquished The centerpiece of Satyajit Ray's renowned Apu Trilogy, which traces the life of a poor Bengali boy from childhood through fatherhood, is an act of both grace and quiet revolution. It begins where its predecessor, Pother Panchali, left off, as the Bengali family arrives in the holy city of Benares in 1920. Apu's father becomes ill in his new home, and though the fath…
Il Fiore delle Mille e Una Notte Flower of the Arabian Nights A Thousand and One Nights In the last years of his career and his life, Pier Paolo Pasolini turned to an unexpected source for inspiration: cinematic interpretations of literary classics, including Medea (1970), The Decameron (1971), The Canterbury Tales (1972), and this colorful but oddly disjo…
When his mining job falls prey to Finnish downsizing, Taisto (Turo Pajala) hops into the new Cadillac his father has given him and sets off for the wide open spaces of Finland to find a brand-new future, and, perhaps, romance. This dark 1988 comedy from Finland's Aki Kaurismäki is an early and superb example of the way Kaurismäki spins his shaggy-dog tales with a…
At the end of the silent era, Russian filmmakers created masterworks of power and lyricism that frequently transcended their propagandistic purposes. Alexander Dovzhenko, a cinematic poet and brilliant theorist, created in his Arsenal a sweeping chronicle of the war of 1914 and the conflict between nationalists and revolutionaries. Startling images—a group of well-heeled bourgeois listening…
Voskhozhdeniye At the 1976 Telluride Film Festival, audiences were justifiably blown away by this daring and dynamic tale of World War II, in which the Nazis were not the only enemy of the beleaguered Russian people. Even hinting at the possibility of Russian collaboration with Germany during the war was almost unheard of in Soviet cinema, yet The Ascent focuses on it so unblinkingly that it seeme…
Popiol i Diament Long before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the ensuing chaos, confusion, and factionalizing, Polish director Andrej Wajda created this complex and insightful work about the new and unexpected perils that arise when a hated regime is toppled. Taking place in a small Polish town in 1945, on the day that Germany surrendered. Ashes and Diamonds is the story of Maciek (Zbi…
The Lovelorn Minstrel The Hoary Legends of the Caucasus In a weirdly mythical age that seems to exist only in the stunningly fertile imagination of the director, a musician who has fallen in love with a rich man's daughter is punished by being made to spend his years wandering the countryside. The visions and adventures that he encounters are what interests the director, Sergei Parajanov, w…
Goodbye, Children Louis Malle was a filmmaker so interested in telling different kinds of stories that the questions of what he would do next and how he would do it were always gloriously unpredictable—all that remained constant was the generosity and humanity he brought to each of his films, regardless of subject. Here, that subject is autobiographical. In 1944, during the German occupatio…
Anne Fontaine's hour-long film is precisely the kind of picture that could have been made in the U.S. only as a film school project, unlikely to ever be seen by paying audiences. In France, however, this remarkable little comedy was actually a success, thanks mainly to the unprepossessing charm of the film's lead, the gangly and rubber-faced Jean-Chretien Sibertin-Blanc (a nam…
Sanma No Aji The final film by the great Yasujiro Ozu is a story about a widowed father who must come to terms with having to give up his only daughter to marriage. As in Ozu's Late Spring (1949), the father needs to convince the daughter that it's a part of life for her to get married and to leave her father to fend for himself. She's reluctant to do so, he�…
Hostsonaten Autumn Sonata marked the only time that the cinema's two most treasured Bergmans—Ingrid and Ingmar—worked together. When two legends get together the results are often less than the sum of the two brilliant parts, possibly because the very pairing can be intimidating to all. Happily, Autumn Sonata is an exception. The story is of a mother (Bergman) wh…