Diamond Earrings Madame de… Narcissistic and spoiled, Madame de … (Danielle Darrieux) lives in ostentatious comfort with her military husband (Charles Boyer); she's so accepting of their unemotional marital arrangement—and their separate bedrooms—that she's unashamed to pawn for a little extra cash the earrings her husband gave …
Zemlya Soul “I wanted to show the state of a Ukrainian village in 1929,” wrote director Alexander Dovzhenko in 1930 of his masterpiece, Earth, “that is to say, at the time it was going through an economic transformation and a mental change in the masses.” The change that the great director portrays is the struggle to establish a collective farm program in the face of th…
L'Edisse Deciding that they have nothing more to say to each other, lovers Vittoria (Monica Vitti) and Riccardo (Francisco Rabal) break off their affair; before long, Vittoria becomes involved with a swaggering young stockbroker named Piero (Alain Delon) who is working for her mother. The final chapter of the Michelangelo Antonioni trilogy that bega…
Too reverential, too dull, and too long. Claude Lelouch must have embarked on this project as if it were some kind of historical biopic about founding fathers who were never actually alive—just mythological. Chanteuse Edith Piaf and boxer Marcel Cerdan were both French national treasures, of course, but just because they got together, do they have to be turned into waxworks—Raging St…
I've never been completely sure why this extraordinary film casts the spell that it does, yet its eerie, documentary-like quality does seem to constantly be on the brink of capturing some cataclysmic, violent eruption, which, of course, perfectly mirrors the temperament of the tortured artist who is its subject. British director Peter Watkins made a number of acclaimed films prior to Edvard…
Fontane Effi Briest In 19th-century Germany, a teenage girl (Hanna Schygulla in an exceptionally fine performance) is pressed into marriage with a much older Prussian diplomat (Wolfgang Schenck). Years later, in the far away Baltic port in which they live, Effi enters into a brief affair with a soldier (Ulli Lommel), the long term unexpected effects of whi…
Ei The problem with movies that run less than an hour is that it's very difficult for them to get adequate distribution. The public tends to feel they're being ripped off if they see something as short as Egg (58 minutes) and so the movie has to be paired with a short. The short may be good, but it's perceived as filler—the audience resents this and is in …
Otto e Mezzo Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 In that fickle and specialized world of the “art film,” Federico Fellini had indeed been crowned “King of the World” (sorry, Mr. Cameron) following the worldwide reception that greeted his 1960 La Dolce Vita. Though he subsequently worked on a minor, short film for the omnibus feature Boccaccio '70…
This Strange Passion One of a series of films Luis Buñuel made in Mexico while in exile from Spain, Él (a Spanish pronoun for he) was released in the United States as This Strange Passion, which is not an entirely terrible title. Él is the story of Francisco (Arturo de Cordova), a wealthy, 40-year old Catholic virgin who persuades the beautiful Glor…
The Gopher The Mole It's sometimes tempting—especially when sitting through one of the glut of mediocre, machine-tooled Gen-X entertainments that often pass for “cutting edge” visions in today's art houses—to think back to the “good old days” of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when it seemed that a committed, new generation of filmmakers trul…
Paris Does Strange Things Eléna et les Hommes This lushly designed comedy of manners, set in Paris in the 1880s, tells of the Polish Princess Eléna (Ingrid Bergman) who decides to abandon her true love, Henri de Chevincourt (Mel Ferrer), so that she can instead attain political power by way of a liaison with the Minister of War, General Rollan (Jean…
Not as bad as you may remember, but you may still want to turn off the sound. The late Bo Widerberg's film about a young, married soldier (Thommy Berggren) and a circus tightrope artist (Pia Degermark) who run off together in Sweden in the late 1800s was based on the true story of a couple who chose death over living apart. The picture might have gained a little …
Utvandrarna In the middle of the 19th century, horrendously impoverished living conditions couple with severe religious and moral intolerance led more than a quarter of Sweden's population to leave their country, and a vast proportion of those came to America. Swedish director Jan Troell set out in the early 1970s to create a gigantic epic in two parts that would tell of this extraordinary …
Dieu de Tonnerre God of the Sun On a weekday afternoon in New York in the early 1970s, I wandered into the now-defunct Fifth Avenue Cinema where I watched—along with three other patrons who were scattered through the tiny theatre—this Senegalese film about an African tribe's encounter with French colonialists near the end of World War II. As the French exploit and systematical…
Conflagration The Flame of Torment A young priest (Raizo Ichikawa) develops an obsession with what he perceives as the perfection of a beloved temple; rather than see it corrupted or commercialized in any way, he vows to destroy it. Adapted from the story The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by novelist and militarist/cult figure Yukio Mishima, Kon Ichikawa's Enjo (…
Between Us Coup de Foudre At First Sight In the 1950s, Madeleine and Lena (Miou-Miou and Isabelle Huppert), two married women, meet and learn about each other; only then do they come to realize how disillusioned and dissatisfied each of them is with her marriage and her life. Diane Kurys's glossy 1983 film (released in France as Coup de Foudre) was widely champio…
When her house burns down as the result of a mysterious fire, an old woman (Irene Papas) decides that the otherworldly vision reported by her exquisite granddaughter, Erendira (Claudia Ohana), is the cause. Immediately and unforgivingly holding the teenager responsible, the old woman decides that the only way for the girl to pay for the damage she has caused is through …
An enchanting surprise. Ermo (Ailiya) is a noodle maker who lives in a rural Chinese area. She works like a dog to support her son and her lazy, goldbricking husband, but despite her scrimping and saving, she can't get over the fact that her neighbor—known as “fat woman” (Zhang Haiyan)—has the biggest color TV set that Ermo has ever se…
L'Eternel Retour Love Eternal Director Jean Delannoy's updating of the Tristan and Isolde legend was a big hit in France, where it was filmed during the German Occupation. Jean Marais and Madeleine Sologne are Patrice and Nathalie, modern lovers who are repeating the age old tragic love story. Jean Cocteau's screenplay would most likely have been better served by Jean Cocteau …
Hitlerjunge Salomon I attended an early screening of Agnieszka Holland's Europa, Europa with the same skepticism and, yes, dread that I generally carry with me to new films about the Holocaust. It's not that I don't want to see new takes on the subject, but rather that movies have so rarely dealt with it effectively or honestly—for a host of reasons—that I often …
Slow Motion Sauve Qui Peut Sauve Qui Peut la Vie In 1967, Jean-Luc Godard told a film critic: “To me, style is just the outside of content, and content the inside of style, like the outside and the inside of the human body—both go together, they can't be separated.” Then why must so many of Godard's critics try to do precisely that? By the time Every Man for Hims…
The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser Jeder fur Sich und Gott Gegen Alle The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser In Nuremberg in the 1820s, a mysterious man was discovered standing in the town square bearing a letter. Having been locked in a cellar and abused by his… master?…father?…until he was grown, and never having met another human being until the day that he appeared in town, Kaspar is in es…
At a strange, somewhat dreamlike strip club in Toronto, a regular named Francis (Bruce Greenwood) spends hours, and many dollars, in the company of the beautiful Christina. Francis's obsession—and Christina's response—form the core of director Atom Egoyan's remarkably engaging wisp of a film, but there are enough subplots and peripheral characters w…
El Angel Exterminador “Basically,” wrote Luis Buñuel in his autobiography, “I simply see a group of people who couldn't do what they wanted to—leave a room.” He was describing the basis of this hilarious and terrifying 1962 masterwork, filmed in Mexico on a modest budget. Nobile (Enrique Rambal) has invited guests to his splendid home …
The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus Les Yeux sans Visage Occhi Senza Volto It sounds like a horror movie plot you've watched a thousand times: a deranged plastic surgeon is obsessed with restoring his disfigured daughter's face to its original beauty. But this time, the atmosphere of dread and spiritual devastation that France's Georges Franju has brought to this nightmarish fab…