Babettes Gaestebud On the Danish seacoast in the late 19th century, two elderly sisters living in a village of modest, abstinent puritans take in a housekeeper and preparer of modest meals named Babette (Stéphane Audran), a mysterious Frenchwoman who does what the women ask, yet asks little in return for herself. Fourteen years later, she makes them dinner her way. Actually, t…
The Worse You Are, the Better You Sleep Waru Yatsu Hodo Yoku Nemuru Filmed during the break between two of Kurosawa's greatest action epics. The Hidden Fortress and Yojimbo, The Bad Sleep Well is a well-crafted but ultimately unfocused thriller about high-level government corruption. Toshiro Mifune—secretary to a corrupt corporate bigshot—marries his boss's daughter dur…
La Femme du Boulanger In a small French village, the new baker's arrival is greeted with great anticipation by the locals, since the previous baker's suicide has left the population breadless. The baker (Raimu) turns out to be quite talented, but his lovely wife (Ginette Leclerc) decides that not everything about him is completely satisfying, and she promp…
Ballada ο Soldate Winner of the Palme d'Or at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival and an Academy Award nominee for best original screenplay. Ballad of a Soldier was the breakthrough film for the Soviet film industry following World War II. It tells the story of a young Russian soldier named Alësha who's given a few days’ leave as a reward for taking out a couple of Ger…
Narayama-Bushi-Ko Even in an era in which debates about assisted suicide have become standard TV news sound bites, Imamura's magnificent The Ballad of Narayama—the tale of a 70-year-old woman who, by village custom, has reached the age when she must be taken to a mountaintop to die—retains all of its shocking, spellbinding power. Imamura intercuts the woman's struggle t…
Bande à Part The Outsiders Though they have a reputation for despising things American, the French have always been the first to recognize the beauty and daring in so many of the American movies that we considered to be disposable. Jean-Luc Godard dedicated his pioneering Breathless to “poverty row” studio Monogram Pictures, and in his Band of Outsiders he dared to throw away …
The true story of Phoolan Devi, a relentlessly abused woman from a low caste who almost single-handedly staged a bloody revolt against the male-dominated, oppressive system that tried to beat her into submission. That revolt—which turned the real Phoolan into the legendary folk hero of the title—is not simply implied or referred to offscreen; it's shown in the same graphic det…
Banditi a Orgosolo A Sardinian shepherd named Michele, falsely accused of both murder and sheep rustling (perhaps the greater crime in his community), is forced to “take it on the lam” (sorry) with his brother when the villagers come after him. Most of his flock does not survive the journey, and Michele is forced into crime in order to survive. Performed p…
Il Quartetto Basileus A well-regarded string quartet that has played, recorded, and toured together for decades is stunned by the sudden death of one of the four. His replacement turns out to be a fine musician but a much younger and livelier man, whose womanizing and drinking and occasional marijuana use appear outrageous and disruptive to the other three; but what really dogs this older trio…
La Bataille d'Alger La Battaglia di Algeri Gillo Pontecorvo's powerful and remarkably balanced depiction of the Algerian rebellion against the French in the 1950s has one especially surprising effect when seen again today, nearly 30 years after its initial release. The massive demonstration scenes and breathtakingly realistic glimpses of urban guerrilla warfare remind us not so much …
Potemkin Bronenosets Potemkin Sergei Eisenstein's depiction of the 1905 navy mutiny that ultimately led to the Russian Revolution is considered a classic and deserves to be. With Potemkin, Eisenstein took the lessons of D.W. Griffith ever further in the use of quick editing and the subtle, psychological expansion of screen time to create overwhelming emotional responses in the viewer. Early…
Baxter is a movie about a dog, but it will never play on a double bill with Beethoven. (Still, it would be fun to hear Charles Grodin ranting, outraged, about the decadent “values” of Baxter on his cable show.) Not for the kiddies, this dog is pure bad news. His thoughts—heard in deep, carefully pronounced French—are generally evil, least dangerous when th…
La Passion Béatrice In the Middle Ages, young Béatrice (Julie Delpy) has been pining for the return of her father (Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu) who was taken prisoner by the English while fighting the Crusades. When dad returns, however, he instigates a reign of domestic terror with a puzzled and shattered Béatrice as his primary target. This elaborate…
The Stepfather When the wife of 30-year-old pianist Remy (Patrick Dewaere) dies in a traffic accident, he and his 14-year-old stepdaughter, Marion (Ariel Besse), are left alone to make the best of it. Soon, however, her biological father comes to take her away, but her concern for and adoration of Remy leads her back to his door, and ultimately to his bed. As always, wr…
We're used to seeing fairy-tale romances set in unlikely surroundings, but Hettie MacDonald's Beautiful Thing—the story of two teenagers in a London housing project who gradually discover their love for each other—is nevertheless a disarming and welcome surprise. For one thing, the kids who discover their mutual affection are both boys; for another, the picture ends wit…
La Belle et la Bete In an era in which special-effects companies like Industrial Light & Magic and Digital Domain can convince us of the absolute reality of anything we see on the screen, from a T-Rex to the Titanic, a danger exists that lazy filmmakers who rely solely on this realism of the impossible to astonish us may inadvertently neglect the one element of the fantastic that realism ha…
Domicile Conjugal The fourth film (the third feature) in François Truffaut's semi-autobiographical Antoine Doinel cycle finds Antoine (Jean-Pierre Léaud) right on schedule; he's a bourgeois husband and new father who's feeling trapped and having an affair that he doesn't even seem to really want. Though Antoine seems on first gl…
Po Dezju Pred dozhdot The failure of this extraordinary picture to reach a wide American art house audience—despite nearly unanimous rave reviews—is part of a sad, consistent chain of evidence that most Americans will do anything to avoid the subject of the Bosnian/Serbian/Croatian conflicts, perhaps out of fear that they won't understand the complexities and anc…
Prima della Rivoluzione Those of us who either toyed with or obsessed on the idea of revolution in the 1960s, only to retreat home each evening to the safety of spouse, bed, and television, will respond as powerfully as ever to the second film by Bernardo Bertolucci, made when he was only 24. Based loosely on Stendahl's The Charterhouse of Parma, Before the Revolution is the story of a youn…
In a British edition of the published screenplay of Belle de Jour, Luis Buñuel reveals not only that his most popular masterpiece—a film in which each image seems painstakingly planned and executed—was completely edited in twelve hours, but also decides one very big, previously controversial issue for us all: “You know of course,” Buñuel remarks, “t…
The Age of Beauty In the relatively untroubled Spain of 1931, prior to the rise of fascism, a young army deserter is given food and shelter by a charming old anarchist. The young man is grateful and prepares to leave, but discovers that the old man also happens to be father to four enchanting, beautiful, and sensuous daughters. Not so much a male fantasy as a kind of national longing for a more in…
An American architect named Stourley Kracklite (Brian Dennehy) arrives in Rome to act as curator of an exhibition in tribute to a legendary 18th-century architect. Strange events and goings-on abound, including Kracklite's suspicions that his expectant wife Louisa (Chloe Webb) is having an affair—possibly with an unctuous professional rival (Lambert…
The generally derogatory expression “made for television” is pretty much without meaning in the case of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's adaptation of psychiatrist Alfred Döblin's epic 1929 novel of Germany in the late 1920s. Without the backing of television, how else could Fassbinder have created a 15-and-a-half hour movie, including a two-hour epilogue in which the …
In 1991, Ingmar Bergman completed a screenplay based on the courtship and marriage of his parents, but rather than direct this extremely personal material himself, he entrusted it to friend and colleague Bille August. August's Pelle the Conqueror had just found worldwide success, and Bergman's intimate drama of marital tension and class/culture-clash appealed enormously to Aug…
The Best Way to Walk La Meilleure Façon de Marcher A longtime assistant to such directors as Robert Bresson, Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, Claude Miller made his feature-directing debut with this wise and witty dramatic comedy set in the early 1960s. Patrick Dewaere plays Marc, a rugged and proudly masculine counselor at a boys’ summer camp, who is startled (to…
Ying Huang Boon Sik Gangland Boss Two brothers—one a mobster who longs to again be a decent citizen, the other a cop who's convinced that their father's death is his brother's fault—live to see their combined rivalry and affection explode against a backdrop of Hong Kong mob violence. If it sounds like you've been there and done that, you're not taki…
37.2 le Matin 37.2 Degrees in the Morning There's a lot to hoot at in the third feature film by Diva creator Jean-Jacques Beineix, but watching an obviously gifted director's talent dribble away bit by bit is hardly a pleasurable experience. The expectations raised by Diva, Beineix's surprise 1982 hit (which took off in France only after American critics and audiences c…
Warnung Vor Einer Helligen Nutte The holy whore of the title refers to the combined villain, hero, and seductress of the story: the cinema itself. Made as a response to a particularly difficult film shoot that Fassbinder experienced (the picture was called Whity), Beware of a Holy Whore finds cast and crew at a seaside resort, simmering with anger, sexual anxiety, and seething with r…
This gentle and pleasingly shaped picture is part of a new subcategory in British cinema that deals with the specific problems encountered by many of the nation's Indian immigrants—in this case, women. Bhaji is the story of a group of women linked by family and friendship who decide to travel by bus from their Birmingham homes to spend a day together in pure sisterhood at the seaside…
Ladri di Biciclette Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Marilyn Monroe, and Elvis can be found on America's postage stamps, but in Italy, for 650 lira, you can mail a letter featuring the trusting, confused, heartbreakingly eloquent face of little Bruno (Enzo Staiola), son of the desperate and shattered character whose story is at the heart of Vittorio de Sica's masterpiece, Th…
Mahanagar In the mid 1950s, a young Calcutta housewife—whose marriage is suffering from the same financial anxieties as much of the rest of the lower-middle-class—decides out of necessity to break with tradition and enter the work force. Her experience turns out to be liberating, but not in the manner she expected. Her crash course in office politics, racism, classism, sexism, and, u…
The Usual Unidentified Thieves I Soliti Ignoti Persons Unknown The poverty depicted in neo-realist classics like Shoeshine and The Bicycle Thief may not seem like the stuff of comedy, but Mario Monicelli's Big Deal on Madonna Street proves that humor is in the eye of the beholder; this simple, brilliant farce is indeed something to behold. Five down-on-their-luck characters decide to pull o…
Jack Hazan's dramatized portrait of the life of, friends of, and work of painter David Hockney is one of the more bizarre and curious cultural artifacts of the 1970s. A semi-improvised and hugely self-aggrandizing examination of how the split between Hockney (playing himself) and his lover influenced, inspired, and generally affected his work. This kind of biopic about artists…
L'Ucello dalle Plume di Cristallo The Phantom of Terror The Bird with the Glass Feathers The Gallery Murders After collaborating on the original story of Sergio Leone's great Once Upon a Time in the West with Leone and Bernardo Bertolucci, Dario Argento plunged head first into the horror genre with his first directorial effort, the now tamely gory The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. I…
Henryk Greenberg, a Polish-born American who lost much of his family in the Holocaust, is the subject of Pavel Lozinski's mind-blowing, 47-minute, 1992 documentary chronicling Greenberg's return to the village of his childhood. Certain of the location where his father and younger brother were murdered, Greenberg returns to find most of his former neighbors predictably claiming foggy …
Riso Amaro After collaborating with Luchino Visconti on the 1942 Ossessione, Visconti's bleakly overwhelming—not to mention scandalous, suppressed, and unauthorized—version of James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, Giuseppe De Santis set out to create a major neo-realist work of his own with his 1948 Bitter Rice. Conceived and promoted as a heavy-hitting expose…
Die Bitteren Traenen der Petra von Kant Writing about Rainer Werner Fassbinder in The Village Voice when The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant debuted at the 1973 New York Film Festival, Molly Haskell should have received the Accuracy in Media terseness prize for describing the film as “a tragicomic love story disguised as a lesbian slumber party in high-camp drag.” And they said Fassbi…
Une Noire de… La Noire de… The first feature-length film by Senegal's Ousmane Sembène tells the tragic, inevitable story of a young Senegalese maid's forced exile when her white employers want to use her as a servant at their home in the south of France. The film that is most often cited as marking the birth of the African cinema, Black Girl (the original …
Deus e ο Diabo na Terra do Sol Manuel and Rosa, an impoverished couple trying to survive in the drought-ridden Brazilian countryside of 1940, desperately grasp at various systems of belief, hoping to make sense of their chaotic world. Religious cults and gangs of self-proclaimed revolutionaries both turn out to be dead ends for the couple, but ultimately they come to the realization that se…
Okay, go on, call me a shameless apologist, rationalizer, toady or sycophant. The fact remains that the late and dearly missed Louis Malle made so many magnificent films during his all-too-brief but indispensable career that he was thoroughly entitled to an occasional, ill-conceived howler on the order of Black Moon. That being said, I'm reminded of Joseph Cotten as Jed Leland ambling into …
Having established a school, hospital, and religious outpost high in the Himalayas, a group of nuns finds that the tensions of daily life—physical, emotional, sexual—become magnified in their claustrophobic world in ways both deadly and revelatory. Deborah Kerr is the nun who remembers, in flashback, the pleasures of her former, worldly life—feelings that resurface in the pres…
Orfeu Negro A retelling of the Greek legend of Orpheus and Eurydice set in modern day Rio, Black Orpheus took home the Palme d'Or at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival and remained one of the darlings of art houses and repertory film theatres throughout the 1960s. While the immensely influential musical score of Antonio Carlos Jobim and Luis Bonfa still has the power to intoxicate (despit…
Kuroi Ame Japan's Shohei Imamura, whose career included serving as assistant director on Ozu's 1953 Tokyo Story and who wrote and directed the extraordinary The Ballad of Narayama in 1983, turned his attention in 1989 to the inevitable subject that Japan can never fully turn away from. Many films have dealt with the bombing of Hiroshima, yet the direct, indelible, and uncompromisingl…
La Maschera del Demonio The Demon's Mask House of Fright Revenge of the Vampire This Brigadoon of terror, in which the devil walks the earth for one horrifying day each century, marks the fully credited debut feature of Italy's Mario Bava. His full-bodied, all-stops-out, Gothic Grand Guignol style produces some memorable images (Bava was also co-cinematographer), most o…
Loving Moments The word “bleak” in a movie's description can be counted on to sell almost as many tickets as such ever-popular adjectives as “boring,” “political,” or” demanding” When the offending word is actually in the title, however, there's a good chance the film will go totally unnoticed. Happily, this was not the case wit…
Le Sang d'un Poete There was a time when the greatest and most innovative of our artists and writers wanted to work in the cinema. It couldn't have been for the money; films like the 1928 Buñuel/Dali Un Chien Andalou and Jean Cocteau's 1930 The Blood of a Poet were not, I feel certain, designed to keep Chaplin or Griffith awake at night worrying about competition…
Bodas de Sangre The first in an acclaimed trilogy of dance films by Spain's Carlos Saura, Blood Wedding achieves its power through the purity and simplicity of its concept and execution. Star and choreographer Antonio Gades drives his dancers through a rehearsal of his ballet adaptation of Garcia Lorca's story of thwarted passion and bloody revenge, and for once a filmed ballet gener…
The story appears to be simple; a photographer thinks he may have accidentally taken pictures of a murder. He “blows up” the photos, and reaches a surprising conclusion. Although his 1960 L'Avventura changed the language of movies, it was Michelangelo Antonioni's widely seen, 1966 Blow-Up that ultimately changed the expectations of moviegoers, exposing a new generation …
“I'm not afraid of death but I am afraid of dying,” wrote filmmaker Derek Jarman in 1992. “Pain can be alleviated by morphine but the pain of social ostracism cannot be taken away.” In 1993, only months before his death from AIDS, Jarman completed his final film, a contemplation of his life and impending death featuring a dense, carefully orchestrated soundtrack …
Der Blaue Engel Near the end of The Blue Angel, disgraced professor Immanuel Rath (Emil Jannings) is reduced to the lowest point of his life: dressed as a clown and forced to crow like a rooster on the stage of a seedy Berlin nightclub—the Blue Angel—as an audience of former students hoots and taunts him. Rath, the strict disciplinarian who was feared by his students, h…
Lan Feng Zheng Many of history's most significant epochs—those that cause upheaval in the lives of millions—tend to be treated on screen in ways that try to demonstrate the “big picture” results of this change, but at a cost of de-emphasizing the day-to-day human experience of living through such an era. Chinese director Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Blue Kite a…
Das Blaue Licht Mount Cristallo emanates a mysterious light that mesmerizes climbers from the nearby village, who ultimately fall to their deaths trying to reach it. But Junta, a beautiful girl who is pure at heart, innocent, and virtuous (Leni Riefenstahl), conquers the precipice—only to be persecuted by other villagers who assume that her survival must mean that she's…
Das Boot 1st Voll One of the least known (in the U.S.) films on the subject of the Holocaust is also one of the finest. The Boat Is Full is Swiss director Markus Imhoof's moving and detailed depiction of a group of German Jewish refugees who pose as a family in order to reach asylum in Switzerland, only to find that strictly maintained quotas are causing many to be turned back…
Bob the Gambler There's a brief, throwaway moment in Stanley Donen's comedy Bedazzled in which the devil (Peter Cook) is seen casually ripping the last page out of Agatha Christie thrillers before shipping them off to book stores. If he'd really wanted to be devilish, he would have snipped the priceless, soul-satisfying final line of dialogue out of all prints of…
An army of screenwriters—and three of Italy's most celebrated directors—collaborated with decidedly mixed results on this three-part updating of The Decameron. Federico Fellini opens the show with The Temptation of Dr. Antonio, in which a Milquetoast is outraged by a milk poster—a billboard actually—on which Anita Ekberg's mammaries push the dairy's…
A celebrated writer and social critic in the 1950s, Senegal's Ousmane Sembène traveled to Moscow in 1961 to study filmmaking, believing that the cinema was the most effective way for his voice to reach the largest possible audience. Upon his return, Sembène directed this riveting 20-minute film that packs the power of a full-length feature. Borom Sarret chronicles—in th…
You could say that Borsalino is an example of style over substance—if there were any substance. Come to think of it, the picture doesn't have much style, either. Fortunately, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon are asked to provide just about everything that this buddy-buddy comic gangster picture has to offer, and that turns out to be enough to have even spawned a sequel (Bors…
Boudu Sauve des Eaux If it's true that no good deed goes unpunished, perhaps there's a good reason. When the tramp called Boudu (Michel Simon) jumps into the Seine at the beginning of Jean Renoir's great Boudu Saved from Drowning, the bookseller who rescues him is sure that he's doing the right and decent thing. He takes Boudu home with him, proud to offer…
Shonen One of the most overtly confrontational of the new generation of Japanese filmmakers, Nagisa Oshima is best known in the U.S. for In the Realm of the Senses, his scandalous, widely banned marathon of copulation, strangulation, and castration that was based on an actual 1936 incident. Also drawn from a real event was this 1969 Oshima film about a nearly impoverished family whose only income …
Two lonely young people wander the dark streets, cafés, and clubs of a strange, other-worldly Paris. In the strangest of ways, they meet. That would be all, folks, except for the fact that this 1984 feature by France's Léos Carax is so visually suggestive and transporting that the black-and-white images take on a chilling, edgy life of their own. Paris has been imagined in cou…
My Girlfriend's Boyfriend L'Ami de Mon Ami Eric Rohmer's films seem to acquire almost as many titles as his characters do paramours. This sixth in his series of “Comedies and Proverbs,” for example, was known in England as My Girlfriend's Boyfriend, which is considerably closer to the original title of L'Ami de Mon Ami than is the vastly less specif…
A two-part, three-and-a-half hour film originally made for Canadian television, The Boys of St. Vincent is based on an actual case in which scores of children were abused for years in a Catholic orphanage. Legal proceedings started by those accused in the actual case were successful in delaying its broadcast, but the complete film surfaced at the 1993Telluride Film Festival, where critics and fest…
El Baron del Terror Baron of Terror Abel Salazar produced a series of horror films in Mexico in the late 1950s and 1960s, and while it would be fair to categorize most of them as truly terrible, some of them—such as Curse of the Doll People and The Brainiac—have a nightmarish quality that's not easy to dismiss. This one has a plot about a centuries-old sorcerer who continues t…
Fritz Lang is reputed to have said that the widescreen CinemaScope process was only fit for photographing snakes and funerals. If he had lived long enough, he would have included a happier image in that brief list: the face of Emily Watson. As Bess, the holy innocent and devoted wife in Lars von Trier's exhilarating and gloriously wacky Breaking the Waves, Watson is a woman whose love for h…
A Bout de Souffle French hoodlum and petty thug Michel (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is on the run from the law after shooting a cop and stealing a car. He hooks up with Patricia, a beautiful American girl (Jean Seberg) who hawks papers (“New York Herald Tribune!”) on the Champs Élysées. They make love, they make faces, they kill some ti…
La Mariee Etait en Noir François Truffaut's obsession with the films of Alfred Hitchcock influenced his films in two separate and distinct ways. Many of Truffaut's most personal and inspired works—The Soft Skin, The Wild Child, The Story of Adele H., The Woman Next Door—possess the frighteningly intense, clear-eyed obsessiveness of Hitchcock at his peak. Others, …
Noel Coward's one-act play Still Life was the basis for David Lean's classy tearjerker about two strangers—both married—who meet by chance and gradually come to the realization that they've fallen in love. Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard broke moviegoers'hearts and made grown men—and women—sniffle in theatres the world over when they decided …
Harp of Burma Birumano Tategoto Director Kon Ichikawa's exquisite, heartfelt 1956 film—set in Burma at the close of World War II—is the story of a Japanese private who finds himself emotionally unprepared for Japan's defeat, as well as for the unimaginable death and destruction around him. Almost instinctively, he undergoes a religious experience that causes him to refu…
Quemimada! “Very often, between one historical period and another, ten years suddenly might be enough to reveal the contradictions of a whole century. And so often we have to realize that our judgments, and our interpretations—and even our hopes—may have been wrong. “So says Sir William Walker (Marlon Brando), the British agent who's sent to a Portu…
Outomlionnye Solntsem Nikita Mikhalkov's seductive film takes place at a lively, warm, well-lived-in Russian country estate in 1936. It's a year in which many of the old veterans of the Revolution (one of whom is the head of this household, played by Mikhalkov himself) are taking the nation's direction for granted and are letting their guard down, not yet fully a…
I've been waiting in vain for Michael Winter-bottom to make another film as original and subversive as Butterfly Kiss, but then again, with material this strong, maybe once is enough. Amanda Plummer is Eunice, a woman who roams the English countryside murdering women after asking them if their name is Judith. Eunice is a mess; she wears chains under her clothing and is pierced in places tha…
A traveling company of entertainers—whose ragged costumes and refusal to throw in the towel can be seen as the very definition of trouper—make their way over the paved and dirt roads of tiny Brazilian towns and villages, putting on shows, collecting what money they can, picking up an occasional hitchhiker, and moving on. The shows themselves aren't much, even for these small-t…