At the center of Iranian filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf's exquisitely told tale of unrequited love is a nomadic world in which an ancient form of rug-weaving results in the precious gabbeh—a carpet in which is woven the images of timeless tales and legends. Makhmalbaf has extended the folk art tradition that produced the gabbeh itself to the filmmaking process, fashioning a kaleidoscopi…
Frank (Mel Gibson) and Archy (Bill Kerr) are friends who enlist in the Australian military in World War I. After a period of training together in Egypt, the two men become fodder in the battle between Australia and the German-allied Turks. This large scale recreation of the catastrophic battle of Gallipoli was staged by Australia's Peter Weir (Picnic at Ha…
When a millionaire industrialist (J.L López Vásquez) is wheelchair-bound and afflicted with amnesia after an auto accident, his greedy family turns all of their attention to him, hoping to find a way to get him to reveal the number of his Swiss bank account. They're not exactly gentle in their methods; at one point they put him in a room with a large pig, and tel…
Il Giardino del Finzi-Contini Vittorio de Sica's extraordinary, unexpected (at least by me) late-career masterwork is the story of a wealthy Jewish-Italian family living in luxurious, sheltered elegance—and in denial. It is World War II, and the Finzi-Continis are living in Ferrara. They will not believe that their way of life is endangered, let alone about to end catas…
Jigokumen One of the seminal moments of my moviegoing life occurred in 1965, when a local art house ran a new-to-me triple bill of Japanese films: Hiroshi Teshigahara's Woman in the Dunes, Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu, and Teinosuke Kinugasa's 1954 Gate of Hell. Calling the evening sensory overload would be an understatement. Set in the 12th century, Gate of Hell is the story of a…
“Do you see?,” points out General Idi Amin to director Barbet Schroeder as they take a boat ride together through a Ugandan jungle, “the elephants on the shore are saluting me.” If Werner Herzog can be called a risk-taker to film a documentary on the edge of the La Soufrière volcano at the moment it was predicted it would erupt, what would you call Schroeder for …
II Generate Della-Rovere Many of us will always think of Generale Della Rovere, though it was directed by Roberto Rossellini, as a Vittorio De Sica picture. Not because he had a hand in the direction—he didn't—but because as the star of the film he turns in one of the most memorably magnificent portrayals in film history. Generale Della Rovere takes place during World War II, …
Pokolenie Polish director Andrzej Wajda made his directorial debut with this stark and absorbing tale about a young man named Stach (Tadeusz Lomnicki) whom we first meet searching for work in Nazi occupied Poland. Stach gets a job in a woodworking shop, where he meets Dorota (Urszula Modrzynska), a woman who introduces him to the resistance movement, and with whom he fa…
A Gentle Creature Une Femme Douce In 1969, France's celebrated director Robert Bresson made Une Femme Douce (A Gentle Woman), his first color film, which begins with the suicide of the title character (Dominique Sanda). Attempting to make sense of what—at least at first—does not make sense, the woman's husband looks back on their brief time t…
Emile Zola's 1884 novel about the appalling working conditions of French coal miners was the basis for what was widely touted as the most expensive film in the history of the French film industry. Claude Berri (who's made such genuinely engaging movies as Jean de Florette) produced and directed this sprawling, nearly three-hour-long production that tells the story of th…
In the early 1970s I managed to get on the wrong side of my college film studies instructor by suggesting that the newly released Claire's Knee was a wonderful piece of cinematic storytelling. “Rohmer's movies aren't even cinematic,” the young scholar informed me sternly. “His camera hardly ever moves.” It's a lucky thing, I suppose, that my …
Preparez Vous Mouchoirs While he isn't a surrealist in the same league as Luis Buñuel, Bertrand Blier took upon himself in the 1970s the task of shaking much of the movie world—particularly the French movie world—out of its perceived stagnation. His 1974 debut. Going Places, was a violent, funny, and highly controversial vision that caused a sensation in France but left…
Ginger & Fred has been dismissed in some circles as being “an old man's movie.” Fine. If all old men can make movies like this, you can check me into a nursing home so that I can be around more of them. Federico Fellini's 1986 valentine of a movie is the story of a pair of aging, retired dancers named Amelia and Pippo (Giulietta Masina and Marcello Mastroi…
In the early 1900s, Leo (Dominic Guard), a young boy spending the summer with an aristocratic family on their British estate, becomes involved in an affair between a beautiful young member of the household (Julie Christie) and her lower-class, secret lover (Alan Bates). Leo is persuaded to carry notes between the two lovers—there is a price to pay, …
Die Angst Tormannes beim Elfmeter In his program notes for the Telluride Film Festival screening of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, admirer Errol Morris wrote: “Henry provides the perfect answer to the Hollywood executive's favorite question: ‘what makes these characters sympathetic?’ The answer in Henry: absolutely nothing!” Wim Wenders's 1971 The Goa…
Gojira About 20 years ago, New York's Japan House cleared the calendar of its normally high-toned film series—works of directors like Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Naruse were the typical fare—for a special event: a retrospective of Toho Studios' most popular monster films, titled “Thank You, Godzilla.” There was a lot to be thankful for, as by some measures the inf…
Les Valseuses Making It Bertrand Blier's portrait of a pair of petty, sadistic thugs remains a source of controversy a quarter-century after its release. Blier adapted his own novel for the screen, and gave the leads to virtual unknowns Gérard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere—one wonders what might have happened to Blier's career without that inspired bit of casting. Going…
Le Carrosse d'Or Jean Renoir was fascinated by the way that our lives mirror, and are mirrored by, the theatrical experience. The stories of love and passion that recur again and again through the ages, in many guises, articulated in different ways, are what Renoir sees as a kind of continuing, generation-to-generation grand performance. It's there in the many little recreations of t…
Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam The legend of the Golem—a humanoid clay figure brought to life by Rabbi Loew in 16th-century Prague in order to defend the Jews against pogroms—has been the basis of a number of films from 1914 through the 1950s.The best of them, this 1920 silent German film directed by Paul Wegener, is a starkly stylized film filled with ominous shadows and disturbi…
With the final chapter in Sergio Leone's epic trilogy, which began with A Fistful of Dollars and continued with For a Few Dollars More, highbrow critics began to notice that there was something going on here, and they'd better reckon with it. Some took the easy way out, switching their writing on these films from “reviewing” to “criticism” by fishing out t…
Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo L'Evangile Selon Saint-Matthieu This extraordinary picture is one of the most eloquent ever made about a religious figure. The antithesis of every bloated Hollywood religious epic, The Gospel According to St. Matthew was filmed in a modest black-and-white format without the usual vulgar trickery or, in fact, special effects of any kind. Most of the dialogue is lift…
La Grande Illusion A portrait of war, friendship, gallantry, and respect in a world that has now—in every sense—vanished. Jean Renoir's great Grand Illusion is the story of all of this, as well as a suspenseful and gripping tale of French soldiers determined to escape their German captors during World War I. Pierre Fresnay and Erich von Stroheim are, respectively, the French a…
La Chambre Verte For hard-core fans of the films of the late François Truffaut, The Green Room can be an extraordinarily moving and powerful experience. But even some Truffaut fanatics may have their patience tested by this adaptation of Henry James's The Altar of the Dead, the story of a man whose obsession with death became his life. Beginning with Two English Girls in 1972, many o…
Gamma Sango Uchu Daisakusen Battle Beyond the Stars Death and the Green Slime Whatever happened to those innocent days when you could release a picture like The Green Slime that was made for ten bucks and looked it, featured a bunch of one-eyed octopi with rubber tentacles that were being waved by stagehands, and boasted an “international cast” of low-rent performers like Robert �…
The most recent masterwork from Senegal's great Ousmane Sembène is a stinging, potent comedy focusing on the unexplained circumstances surrounding the death of a local political dealmaker, a man who was also an unapologetic philanderer, the self-proclaimed moral anchor of the community, and was so widely admired that he was referred to respectfully as “Guelwaar,” or &#x…
A nice surprise. Albert Finney is Eddie Ginley, a working-class dreamer whose drab, Liverpool existence is relieved only by the daydreams in which he cracks murder cases with the style and aplomb of Bogart's Philip Marlowe. Soon, Eddie gets the chance to live out his fantasies when he's plunged headlong into a real—and dangerous—murder case. Avoiding all of the “…