La Nuit Americaine At the American premiere of François Truffaut's Day for Night at the 1973 New York Film Festival, I overheard a critic in the lobby loudly pronouncing that Truffaut had finally revealed himself as a phony; he had made a movie about moviemaking that was devoid of passion and suffering. The critic (a reactionary jerk then and now) was wrong on both coun…
Vredens Dag Of the 14 films that Denmark's Carl Dreyer completed during his 60-year career, few received significant distribution here, and even fewer are seen much today. His 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc and his 1932 Vampyr are probably his best known in the U.S.; less seen is Dreyer's great 1943 Day of Wrath, the story of a young 17th-century woman who falls in love with her ste…
Tianguo Niezi Director Yim Ho's quietly jolting, Hong Kong noir is the story of a young man who goes to the police with his suspicion that his father's death a decade earlier wasn't an accident. The killer, he's convinced, is his own mother. Selective memory (seen in flashback) gradually becomes “repressed memory” in The Day the Sun Turned Co…
Aranyer Din Ratri Four thirty-something middle-class Bengali men take a road trip into the countryside where they promptly get lost, rhapsodize about the forgotten ideals of their youth, and decide that they will stop shaving and become “all hippies.” It may have sounded like a romantic notion in 1970, but the supremely wise Satyajit Ray was hip to the true bourgeois aspirations of t…
When a nervous architect arrives at a British country estate, he and the others present begin describing their recent nightmares, with shocking results. Four directors collaborated to create this five-part 1945 British horror classic, which unfolds seamlessly enough to be the work of a single, impressively twisted mind. Dead of Night is the grand-daddy of all multi-part horror films, though many w…
When you read the advance description of a forthcoming David Cronenberg movie—whether it's Crash, his remake of The Fly, or Dead Ringers—it's only natural to assume that either he's lost his mind or that he's simply trying to be outrageous for the hell of it. Then you see the film, and it's immediately apparent that Cronenberg is far more than a gre…
La Muerte de un Burocrata This early work from Cuba's foremost filmmaker, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, is the witty and sharply funny story of a man whose efforts to dig up and rebury the corpse of his uncle lead to a bureaucratic nightmare of epic—and comic—proportions. Alea was to use a similar comic metaphor (trying to move a corpse) as the basis of his…
Il Decameron Probably the most spirited, faithful, and purely entertaining of the many screen adaptations of Boccaccio's writings, Pier Paolo Pasolini's 1970 rendering of eight bawdy and charming stories from The Decameron was hot stuff when originally released; few theatres would play it thanks to a then-deadly “X” rating, and many of the customers who showed up at tho…
Na Samyn Dnie There was a comic strip from the early years of Peanuts in which a kid (I don't remember whether it was Charlie Brown or Linus) was asked how his first conversation with the little girl he had a crush on went. “I didn't know what to do,” he replied, “so I hit her.” lt's immediately apparent that that strip was not publish…
In a post-nuclear future, the tenants of a dilapidated rooming house—including a group of militant vegetarians—do their best to keep from becoming dinner for the building's aggressively carnivorous landlord. A large-scale visionary fable distinguished by a polished and genuinely original visual style, this energetic tale of love and cannibalism from French directors Marc Caro …
As a result of the critical and popular failure (unjustified, I think) of his 1970 fairy-tale-like portrait of slum residents, Dodes 'ka-den, the despondent Akira Kurosawa attempted suicide. The work he plunged himself into—partly as comeback, partly as therapy—was this simple tale set early in this century of a Russian explorer who encounters a wise, aging hunte…
In an unnamed country in the not-too-distant future, a bourgeois couple (Mike Nichols and Miranda Richardson) find the tensions of their marriage strained to the breaking point when a brutal, fascist regime tightens its grip on their privileged, intellectual world. A straightforward record of the 1995 London stage production of a play by Wallace Shawn (better known as an actor…
The Goddess In 19th-century Bengal, a well-to-do man (Chhabi Biswas) dreams that his 17-year-old daughter-in-law (Sharmila Tagore) is the reincarnation of the goddess Kali. Believing his dream to be a holy message, the father publicly proclaims this “miracle” and promptly ensconces the startled girl on an altar at his home; soon, the area's peasants…
Le Diable au Corps An autobiographical novel by Raymond Radiguet, who died at age 20, is the basis for this poetic, powerfully bitter love story between adolescent French schoolboy François (Gérard Philipe) and unhappy soldier's wife Marthe (Micheline Presle) during World War I. Though the movie is by every standard an elegantly modulated and except…
Il Diavolo in Corpo This unnecessary remake of the 1946 Claude Autant-Lara classic Devil in the Flesh (Le Diable au Corps) is a modern-day updating of the original story, about a schoolboy who becomes sexually involved with a soldier's wife in World War I. Director Marco Bellocchio has changed the war to the one which modern terrorists are waging in Italy; Giulia (Marus…
The Devils of Loudun Oy. For those too young to remember, there was, once upon a time, an outlandish movie director named Ken Russell. It's been a decade or so since he's caused anything resembling a stir, but for the nearly 20 years beginning with 1969, the unveiling of a new Ken Russell movie was awaited with anticipation, fear, and a fistful of Dramamine. His historical epics in p…
Djavulens Oga “A woman's chastity is a sty in the devil's eye,” or so goes a legend as related in an old Danish radio play called Don Juan Returns. In 1960, fresh from the worldwide acclaim he received for The Virgin Spring, Sweden's Ingmar Bergman decided on an adaptation of the play for his next project. The Devil's Eye was conceived as a grand comedy ab…
At a Catholic boarding school, adolescent boys are discovering their own sexuality; their confusion and anxiety is matched only by that of their instructors. Fred Schepisi's superb 1976 debut film is—to whip out the old cliche—“controversial,” as films on this subject always are by their very nature. What sets The Devil's Playground apart is the compassion…
Les Diabolique It's as great as it's cracked up to be, but perhaps for different reasons than you've heard. Henri-Georges Clouzot's 1955 thriller is the story of a monstrous, philandering schoolteacher (Paul Meurisse) whose wife (Vera Clouzot) and lover (Simone Signoret) get together to do him in. Diabolique was originally promo…
Le Journal d'une Femme de Chambre Il Diario di una Cameriera Octave Mirbeau's novel about bourgeois decadence in the face of budding fascism was originally filmed in Hollywood in 1946 by Jean Renoir, but it was an unhappy clash of cultures that resulted in an amiable but negligible mess of a film. This savagely witty remake, made in France in 1964 by Luis Buñuel, sets the stor…
Le Journal d'un Cure de Campagne Just see it. Describing director Robert Bresson's masterpiece is inevitably to trivialize it; it's an experience that was conceived for and can only be experienced as cinema. The story is simple. A priest, dying of cancer, is in a state of despair because he believes that he has failed in his life's task of raising the moral level of his…
Das Tagebuch Einer Verlorenen The plot is part Dickens, part Jerry Springer; a wealthy pharmacist's daughter has a child by her father's assistant, then lands in a reform school commanded by a sadistic matron, moves on to a brothel, and ultimately becomes the wife of a wealthy count whose sexual secrets lead to his suicide. The last silent film by director Georg Wilhelm Pabst was bas…
Le Journal du Seducteur The Seducer's Diary When a mysterious Parisian student loans Claire (Chiara Mastroianni, daughter of Marcello and Catherine Deneuve) a rare copy of a novel called Diary of a Seducer, she falls hopelessly in love with him. Her realization that the book possesses the uncanny power of an aphrodisiac leads to a bizarre and rather unexpected web of desire, a…
The Loves of Jeanne Ney Lusts of the Flesh G.W. Pabst's adaptation of Ilya Ehrenburg's novel is the story of the love between a young French girl (Edith Jehanne) and a young Russian communist (Uno Henning), and the manipulating adventurer (Fritz Rasp) who comes between them. This beautifully photographed and richly detailed drama is famous fo…
Siegfried and Kriemhild's Revenge Die Nibelungen: Siegfried und Kriemhilds Rache As hard as it may be to imagine Die Nibelungen as anything other than Wagnerian, Fritz Lang's great silent epic about the death of Siegfried and the revenge of his wife Kriemhild was based not on Wagner's operatic interpretation of the story but on the original legend, which Lang envisioned as a h…
Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie I've never really been sure whether the “Buñuelian” moments that have happened to me since 1972—the year in which The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie was released—were a result of seeing the film, or if I simply noticed them because of the film. It doesn't matter, I suppose, yet even as recently as last week, wh…
Ashani Sanket In a remote Bengali village, Gangacharan (Soumitra Chatterjee) is a well-respected Brahmin who serves many functions: priest, physician, schoolteacher, and general spiritual leader. But it is 1942, and World War II will soon affect even the most remote reaches of the globe, causing panic, profiteering, and inflation, and this will cause even the carefully structured, pr…
This autobiographical work from England's Terence Davies is constructed as a series of living tableaux ripped freshly bleeding yet ominously tranquil from the memory of a child growing up in a working class family in the 1940s and 1950s. The brutality of Davies's father (Pete Postlethwaite) is presented without anesthesia, though the antidotes seen in the film range fro…
This plush and sparkling romantic thriller—the debut feature of director Jean-Jacques Bieneix—is the story of Jules (Frédéric Andrei), a young messenger who becomes obsessed with the operatic voice and person of American opera star Cynthia Hawkins (Wilhelminia Wiggins Fernandez). Jules has made a secret, bootleg recording of Cynthia's …
Divorzio All'Italiana Marcello Mastroianni dazzled audiences worldwide with his impeccable, deadpan comic timing in Pietro Germi's brutally funny 1962 black comedy. The title refers to the quickest and cleanest method of separating from one's spouse in Italy, which isn't divorce, exactly; it's murder. (Crimes of passion are permitted; divorce is not.…
Doktor Mabuse der Spieler Fritz Lang's two-part film is a massive fresco of depravity and violence—a portrait of a society so close to the brink of self-destruction that a single madman can come close to pushing it over. Dr. Mabuse (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) is a brilliant criminal mastermind whose designs are nothing less than to profit from—as well as accelerate …
Le Docteur Petiot Docteur Petiot is the true story of a physician in occupied Paris who assured Jews that he could transport them safely out of the country for a price; after taking their possessions, however, he turned them over to the Nazis to be murdered. Considering the intrinsic fascination of this real-life horror story, and in spite of the casting of the reliable Michel Serrault as Petiot, …
Clickety Clack After a five year hiatus following the release of his magnificent Red Beard (a period that also included his brief, disastrous participation in the production of Tora! Tora! Tora!), Akira Kurosawa returned to the screen with this gentle, humane fantasy about the daily lives of the residents of a slum. Based on a previously published collection of short stories, the fil…
Don Kikhot This is an intelligent and generally enchanting Soviet adaptation of Cervantes, directed with flair and color (and a big budget) by Grigori Kozintsev. The picture's comedy rarely gets in the way of its gracious poignancy, and Kozintsev deserves credit for maintaining a high-wire act that never collapses into the maudlin. But what's really priceless about this…
Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos Dona Flor (Brazilian natural resource Sonia Braga) becomes a widow when her husband's womanizing and drinking and other bad habits finally causes the simultaneous expiration of most all of his organs. She's glad to get rid of the bum, and remarries—this time to a respectable, tasteful man who's moderate in all things. It doesn…
Peau d'Ane As if to imagine a Hollywood musical as filmed by Jean Cocteau (years before Disney's Beauty and the Beast, mind you), Jacques Demy and musical collaborator Michel Legrand continued the partnership that began with their The Umbrellas of Cherbourg with this bizarrely straightforward yet surprisingly engaging fairy tale. Jean Marais (Cocteau's Bea…
La Double Vie de Veronique The late Krzysztof Kieslowski's 1991 film picks up in a sense where Ingmar Bergman's Persona left off. In Bergman's 1966 film, the personalities of what may be two separate women (Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson) seem to combine and blend into each other. In Kieslowski's film, two identical women—one living in Poland and on…
Brutti, Sporchi, e Cattivi Ugly, Dirty and Bad The title was whittled down by the American distributor from Ugly, Dirty and Bad, but Down & Dirty is still a perfectly apt title for Ettore Scola's hilarious, raw portrait of a riotously degenerate extended family living outside of Rome. Nino Manfredi plays the head of this clan, who's so mean that when his family spikes his most…
At a lavish English country estate in 1694, a young painter (Anthony Higgins) makes a deal with the estate's owner (Janet Suzman) to complete a dozen renderings of the place, but the terms of his employment are unusual indeed. Strange goings-on are replaced by even stranger goings-on, and just what exactly the draughtsman is up to is revealed slowly, in the form …
An unexpected delight. Dreamchild, written by Dennis Potter (The Singing Detective) and directed by Gavin Millar, is a fantasy about a real person whose fame stemmed from being someone else's fantasy. The central portion of the story is set in New York in the 1930s, when 80-year-old Mrs. Alice Hargreaves (Coral Browne) arrives from England to celebrate the centen…
Kvinn Odrom Journey into Autumn Two women—one who owns a fashion photography studio (Eva Dahlbeck) and one who's a friend and model (Harriet Andersson)—make a trip to Göteborg to visit the studio-owner's former, now-married lover (Ulf Palme). The model, who herself is recovering from a broken engagement, unexpectedly find…
A coroner named Henry Madgett (Bernard Hill) is startled to discover that three male drowning victims were all married to three generations of women who are all named Cissie Colpitts (Joan Plowright, Juliet Stevenson, and Joely Richardson). The coroner—who has a dead-bug and dead-animal collecting son named Smut—agrees to keep quiet in exchange for an …
Yoidore Tenshi This superb 1948 Kurosawa picture was seen by much of the world only after Rashomon took the cinema world by storm two years later. It's the story of a swaggering gangster (played wonderfully by the 28-year-old Toshiro Mifune) who visits a doctor (Ikiru's Takashi Shimura) to have a bullet removed, only to be informed that he has tuberculosis…
Drunken Monkey in a Tiger's Eye Depending on exactly how you count, Drunken Master was Jackie Chan's third movie, and it's one of his best. Jackie Chan (called Jacky in the credits of this movie) is listed everywhere you look as a martial arts star, but—while not wishing to denigrate martial arts stardom—he is considerably more than that. He'…
Der Dibuk Recently revived in a restored version that features exquisitely expressionistic images and a clear, rich, Yiddish-language soundtrack, this 1937 Polish film by director Michael Waszynski is a stately and elegantly mounted adaptation of Sh. Ansky's legendary stage play. The Dybbuk is the story of Khonen (Leon Liebgold) and Leah (Lili Liliana), a couple …