Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari In the early 19th century. Dr. Caligari (Werner Krauss) exhibits a sleepwalker, Cesare (Conrad Veidt), at a carnival. Soon after, a murder takes place and it is Caligari, the “master” of Cesare, who is the chief suspect. Before long, however, it's discovered that Caligari is actually the director of a nearby insane asylu…
Australia's Paul Cox created one of his most elliptical and mysterious films in Cactus, the story of a woman who has to decide whether or not to have one of her eyes removed so as to possibly preserve the remaining vision in the other. Isabelle Huppert plays the woman, whose dilemma is caused by an accident while she's on vacation in Australia. Things become even more complicated whe…
Metisse Lola (Julie Mauduech) is an 18-year-old West Indian woman living in Paris, who happily discovers that she's pregnant. Not quite as happy, however, are Julie's two boyfriends, Jamal (Hubert Kounde) and Felix (Mathieu Kassovitz, the versatile star of A Self-Made Hero), who are as miserable in each other's company as they are wond…
In the late 19th century, the gifted sculptress Camille Claudel (Isabelle Adjani), desperate for artistic success and obsessively involved with the womanizing sculptor Auguste Rodin (Gérard Depardieu), descends further and further into emotional instability, ultimately ending her life in an asylum. Though it's ostensibly the brutally insensitive treatment …
The Camp at Thiaroye As World War II was coming to an end, black Senegalese troops who had been fighting in the French Army were brought back to Senegal by the French and confined in “transit camps” for what stretched into an interminable and inexcusable period of time. Many of these men—those fortunate enough to have survived the war—had not only been fighting heroical…
The second of Pier Paolo Pasolini's Medieval Trilogy is the one best forgotten.
Capitaine Conan In 1918, as World War I nears its end, a band of French soldiers—fierce, despondent, dazed, disease-ridden, and lusting for revenge—refuses to stop fighting. Slogging through the mud in Bulgaria, this small regiment doesn't find out about the end of the war until months after the armistice, which only increases their frustration and rage. Based on a true and lo…
Alec Guinness redefines compartmentalizing in this charming, lightweight British farce from 1953. He's the sailor with a girl in every port, but there are only two ports, and the two girls are both his wives. Brief Encounter's Celia Johnson is the respectable, traditional British wife who keeps their neat, genteel home in Gibraltar, and Yvonne De Carlo provides a considerably more sp…
By combining the familiar shape and structure of Hollywood biography with a vividly bold, colorful, avant-garde visual design, Derek Jarman won over many of his detractors with this elegant, entertaining, and engagingly witty dissection of the life, art, and passion of Caravaggio. The film opens in 1610 when, near death, Caravaggio reflects back on scenes from a life in which many of the same issu…
In a mythical Alpine valley, ominously surrounded by steep, ice-covered mountains, lives a population of bizarrely dysfunctional, pathologically repressed villagers who speak only in hushed of tones due to their constant fear of causing a catastrophic avalanche. With this mass anxiety at the core of their daily existence, the villagers logically but disastrously evolve into a society that exists f…
Careful, He Might Hear You is based on an autobiographical novel by Sumner Locke Elliot, who during the 1930s as a six-year old boy was the object of a custody fight between two of his aunts, both of whom had very different reasons for wanting the youngster. When director Carl Schultz was preparing the project, he knew that he wanted the disorientation and emotional vulnerability of the boy to be …
The centerpiece of Spanish director Carlos Saura's trilogy of dance films—which included Blood Wedding and El Amor Brujo—was the most popular of the three, and with good reason. Cross-cutting between rehearsal and performance of the flamenco version of Bizet's opera, revealing the parallel stories of passion that exist on and off the stage, Saura reinforces the story of…
La Kermesse Heroique When the Spanish army invades Flanders in the early 17th century, the men of one small town act on their cowardly impulses by hiding; the women, however, prepare a feast—and themselves—to appease the invaders in high style. An amazingly frank sexual comedy that still startles today, Carnival in Flanders was directed in 1935 by Jacques Feyder, who later wasted no …
Dear Diary Some movies—like certain wines—need to be consumed in their country of origin for their full flavor to be revealed. Put another way, some pictures just don't travel well, and that would seem to be the case with the gentle comic essays of Italy's acclaimed and popular (at home) Nanni Moretti, who is still largely unknown in the U.S. Despite its l…
Marcello Mastroianni is an Italian NATO official who finds no challenge in seducing modern, emancipated women. Without external threats he is unable to achieve arousal, which leads him into a series of “dangerous” encounters, such as a female lion tamer (in the cage, with her lions), a married woman (at her home, at the moment her husband is expected), and…
Thief uses brick to smash glass case containing priceless Mukkinese Battle Horn. Thief reaches into smashed case, picks up brick, and runs away. Thief's footsteps fade into the distance, stop, then return. Thief puts back brick, takes Mukkinese Battle Horn, runs away again. If you don't find this bit amusing, take a pass. If, on the other hand, this is just the sort of groan-inspirin…
Golden Marie Golden Helmet Based on an actual murder case that took place in Paris in 1898, Jacques Becker's Casque d'Or (Golden Helmet) is both gangster film and period melodrama, as well as one of the great romantic epics of all time. The 31-year-old Simone Signoret is Marie, the woman known by her “golden helmet” of hair in the dance hall where she spen…
Le Chat et la Souris When a woman's rich, unfaithful husband turns up dead, the hard-boiled and exceedingly unorthodox Inspector Lechat (get it?) is determined to track down his prey. Claude Lelouch's lighthearted, picturesque policier is more enjoyable than it has a right to be, but just give in and enjoy the vivid Parisian scenery, not to mention the all-in-fun scener…
Ceddo (translated loosely as “the feudal class”) is unquestionably one of the most important films yet produced in Africa—an engrossing and magnificent national epic that defines its culture at a particular moment in history. On the surface, Ceddo is a riveting and thoroughly entertaining political thriller; set in the 19th century, it concerns the kidnapping of …
Percy Adlon's Céleste is based on the published memoirs of one Céleste Alberet, the woman who served as housekeeper to the reclusive, chronically ill Marcel Proust for the eight years leading up to his death in 1922. Wisely avoiding the temptation to resemble a miniature Remembrance of Things Past, or even to suggest a full portrait of the great writer's last years, C&#…
Mecaniques Celestes A highly favorable but curiously defensive review of Celestial Clockwork—written by an otherwise invaluable and brilliantly perceptive critic—maintains that the film was approached with “suspicion” in cinema circles here because it was made by an unknown director. Had it been made by Almodóvar, the critic believes, the picture would have been …
See Fanny (1932).
Claude Sautet is an anomaly as well as a magician. Here, as in so many of the delicately drawn love stories he's directed since 1970, there's no real “hook” to suggest that the familiar plotline—in this case a couple wrestling with the emotional turmoil of an old lover suddenly reappearing—is going to result in anything special. And yet Sautet knows that b…
Set against the magnificent landscapes of New South Wales at the exact turn of the century, The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith tells the story of a half-caste aborigine who's determined—through hard work and enormous resilience, even in the face of obscenely entrenched racism—to work within the limitations of his society in order to better his life. Jimmie is not by any means acce…
A down-to-earth, iconoclastic, peasant-born Red Army commander takes on the White Russians in the bloody Civil War of 1919. Based on a biography of Chapayev written by one of his military associates, this enormously popular epic film was directed in a grandly pictorial, sweepingly energetic style, rousing yet not bombastic. Its creators, Sergei and Georgy Vassiliev, worked under the collective nam…
The Lonely Wife In 19th-century Bengal, Charulata (Madhabi Mukherjee) is bored and frustrated by her wealthy, pretentious, and self-aggrandizing husband, Bhupati, who has no time for her. When the naive but insensitive Bhupati suggests that his cousin Amal might make an innocently diverting companion for his wife, he has no way of knowing that Charulata's friendship with Amal …
Les Mille et une Recettes du Cuisinier Amoureux The Cook in Love Told primarily in flashback, Georgian director Nana Djordjadze's romantic epic is the story of a French chef named Pascal (Pierre Richard of The Tall Blond Man with One Black Shoe) whose love affair with the beautiful Cecilia (Nino Kirtadze) is rivaled in intensity only by the flavors and textures o…
Les Enfants du Paradis If you're ever asked to provide proof that movies can indeed weave a spell unlike any other medium—unlike literature, unlike painting, unlike music, and yet containing elements of all of them—then consider a single screening of Marcel Carné's incomparable cinematic dream, Children of Paradise (Les Enfants du Paradis). A comple…
Falstaff Campanadas a Medianoche When considering the work of the late Orson Welles, pundits still tend to drone on about the lost opportunities, the unfinished projects, the technical sloppiness. It's the schoolboy's nightmare of being reminded that he's “not living up to his potential”; and if Welles is looking down on us now, he knows he's destined to h…
L'Amour l'Après-Midi The final installment in Eric Rohmer's series of “Six Moral Tales” finds the director contemplating a familiar but ever-tantalizing situation; a married man's contemplation of a no-strings-attached dalliance with a beautiful and intriguing “other” woman. Frederic (Bernard Verley) is afflicted with the…
Eboli Cristo si e fermato a Eboli In 1935, at the start of the Abyssinian War, Italian artist, writer, and physician Carlo Levi was banished to a small village in southern Italy due to his unwavering opposition to fascism. It was an extraordinary and life-changing year that Levi spent in exile, though he would only write about the experience years later—while living in Florence during World…
Hong Kong Express Chongqing Senlin Hong Kong's Breathless. The two most memorable stars of Wong Kar-Wai's snappy and intoxicating Chungking Express are not the two actors who play the two cops at the center of the movie's two plots; the real stars are Hong Kong itself and the man whose electric images seem to reinvent the city from minute to minute, cinematographer Christopher…
Nuovo Cinema Paradiso When Salvatore, a movie director, learns of the death of the projectionist at the cinema in the small Sicilian town of his youth, he returns home—both physically and by way of flashback sequences—to relive and rediscover the primal childhood joy that he discovered at the movies so many years before. Giuseppe Tornatore's 1988 Cinema Paradiso has an enchant…
La Cite des Enfants Perdus In one of the coolest high-concept plots in the history of fantasy films, a fiendish scientist named Krank—who lacks the ability to dream—kidnaps innocent children to steal their nocturnal imaginings. France's Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Delicatessen, The Fifth Element) have dreamed up a darkly dazzling visual wonderland that sugg…
La Citte delle Donne This big, colorful Fellini circus is a gloriously un-PC extension and expansion (not necessarily deepening) of the sexual fantasies in which he gloried in 8 1/2 and Juliet of the Spirits, and then embalmed in the self-flagellating, interminable Casanova. Maybe it's a guy thing, but I found City of Women a sweet, poignant, and—dare I say it?&#…
Le Genou de Claire Jerome (Jean-Claude Brialy), a young man who's engaged to be married, decides he needs a bit of a breather beforehand in order to rest and contemplate the step he's about to take; you could say Jerome needs to get himself together. The spot he chooses for his R and R is a kind of beautiful no man's land, a lake that exists just between France a…
Federico Fellini's seductive personal memoir about the joys and terrors of childhood, and how they can often be the same thing, is not a documentary in the traditional sense—thank goodness. With his simple admission that circus clowns both fascinated and frightened him as a boy, Fellini sells us a ticket to a young person's view of theatricality; a spectacle that we can'…
It could be that there's a logical explanation for what makes Scottish director Bill Forsyth's comedies so exceptionally engaging and strangely moving, but I prefer to think that his talent is as magical as the stories he tells. In his 1984 Comfort and Joy, Forsyth tells the tale of a Glasgow disk jockey whose personal life is falling apart—and whose job hardly provides the ne…
Komissar Filmed in 1967 but suppressed until 1988, Soviet director Alexander Askoldov's film is an unexpected thunderbolt. Set during the 1922 civil war. Commissar is the story of a Red Army officer whose pregnancy forces her to go into hiding with a Jewish family until the birth of her child. Coming to acknowledge the family as human despite the virulent anti-Semitism that is the norm is b…
L'Aveu It's amazing how rarely this film—one of the finest works by Costa-Gavras (Z, State of Siege, The Music Box)—shows up in repertory film programs or even on lists of important films of the 1970s. It may be that audiences that embraced Costa-Gavras's thunderously powerful Z were so caught up in the unraveling of the fascist conspiracy depicted …
Vivement Dimanche! Finally, Sunday François Truffaut's final film—a larky pastiche of gumshoe noir and Hitchcock homage about a trench-coated secretary determined to clear her boss of suspicion by tracking down a murderer—hardly feels like a summing up of the great director's career. Confidentially Yours (Vivement Dimanche) feels tired and rote, and…
Il Conformista Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant) wants so much to blend in with those around him that he's willing to suppress, sacrifice, and sublimate his own instincts and desires in order to be “normal.” Seeking this “normality” in Mussolini's Italy of the 1930s, Clerici marries a pretty, empty-headed girl (Stefania Sandrel…
Le Mepris Il Disprezzo Jean-Luc Godard's adaptation of Alberto Moravia's A Ghost at Noon stars Brigitte Bardot as the disgusted wife of a talented and formerly principled writer (Michel Piccoli) who signs to do a rewrite of The Odyssey for a vulgar American producer (Jack Palance). The fact that The Odyssey's director is to be Fritz Lang, and is act…
When a bride abandons her groom at the altar, the assembled wedding guests decide that they can't let a little problem like that interrupt the festivities. The resulting two-day wedding party encompasses every imaginable kind of comedy, scandal, insult, and humiliation as the throng turns into a mob and from there takes on an uncontrollable, intimidating life of its own. In this and other f…
Violence et Passion Gruppo di Famiglia in un Interno Mark Twain once wryly commented that “Wagner's music is actually better than it sounds.” The same comment—in spirit—might be adapted to many of the more “operatic” films of Luchino Visconti, and the unfairly maligned Conversation Piece is most certainly one of them. It's a gentle, introspec…
Every night, an expansive—and expanding—gangster (Michael Gambon) holds court in the posh London restaurant he owns. As he wolfs down plate after plate of food prepared by the expensive French chef (Richard Bohringer) whom he constantly belittles, he holds court to a slew of sycophants and low-lifes who guffaw at his crude humor and never dis his gluttony.…
After a sex scene in one of his movies. Woody Allen remarked “that was the most fun I ever had without laughing.” The characters of Crash might say that their sex is the most fun they've ever had without dying. It's dying—not what the French call “the little death” but what Canadian director David Cronenberg would call “the big one”&#x…
Cria Cuervos Raise Ravens Rear Ravens When a young girl's father dies, the child mistakenly believes that the “poison” she has been playing with is responsible for his death. Carlos Saura's exquisite memory film is set primarily in the waning days of Spanish Fascism, touching delicately but not insistently on the themes of misplaced guilt and collective responsibility. …
Viskingar Och Rop At the turn of the century, a dying woman and her servant are visited by the woman's two sisters. Though we do learn a bit about all the sisters' lives—and their relationships with each other—through flashbacks, it is their increasingly revelatory conversations that gradually probe the depths of their fears, exploring ever more honestly the love, sexua…
Le Crime de Monsieur Lange One of the earliest screenplays on which surrealist Jacques Prévert collaborated was this charmingly witty and easily digested bit of anti-capitalist entertainment from Jean Renoir. A deeply pleasurable fantasy of what socialism might be if it could ever actually be made to work. The Crime of Monsieur Lange is set at a publishing house run by the slimy and oppress…
Ensayo de un Crimen Rehearsal for a Crime While it's generally acknowledged that this 1955 Mexican film by Luis Buñuel never fully measures up to its underlying premise, that premise itself may be as hilariously, perversely “Buñuelian” as anything the great surrealist ever conjured (and may be so ingenious as to have been impossible to live up to). …
Evil Angels During a recent, high-profile murder investigation near my hometown of Detroit, the guilt of the victim's spouse was virtually assumed by many in the community, not because of any facts, but because of the extremely polished, calm, and emotionless manner in which the spouse answered reporters' questions on television. As it turned out, the eventual solution to the case pr…
Night of the Demon The Haunted Montague James's story “Casting the Runes” was the basis for this satisfyingly creepy horror film, made in 1958 by the legendary director Jacques Tourneur (Out of the Past, Cat People). While visiting London, psychologist and believer in all things rational John Holden (Dana Andrews) has an unpleasant encounter with on…