Le Mari de la Coiffeuse The director of the transfixing Monsieur Hire is back with another tale of obsession and fetishism, but this time far less successfully. The Hairdresser's Husband is about a man (the sweetly droopy-faced Jean Rochefort) who—as a boy—developed an erotic association with the act of having his hair cut. We see these childhood scenes in flashb…
Rosa (Angela Molina) is a young peasant woman who has inherited strange but not-always-wonderful telepathic powers from her grandmother (Margarita Lozano).
You wonder sometimes why anyone ever bothers to do movie versions of Shakespeare when there are so many purists, scholars, and fans waiting in the wings to tell the filmmaker just exactly why he's gotten it all wrong. (Kenneth Branagh tried to head critics off by making a four-hour Hamlet that included every last line, but some of us found things to complain about anyway, like the fa…
After his dazzling breakthrough performance in István Szabó's Faustian parable Mephisto, Klaus Maria Brandauer looked like the next big thing. He was to work in two other films of Szabó's over the subsequent six years—Colonel Redl and Hanussen—which completed Szabó's historical trilogy on the themes of collaboration and denial. Based o…
Cheun Gwong Tsa Sit From Hong Kong cult fave Wong Kar-Wai comes a neon-lit love story about a pair of gay lovers (Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung) who travel from Hong Kong to Buenos Aires in hopes of resurrecting their stormy relationship. Happy Together is a sometimes lyrical/sometimes disjointed series of moments from a love affair, filtered through the stylized, constantly mo…
Seppuku In 17th-century Japan, following the downfall of a number of powerful clans, the samurai who once held allegiance to these families were now unemployed and without masters. These masterless samurai, or ronin, had no means by which to support themselves but were nevertheless expected to live by the same code of honor they were bound by previously. Masaki Kobayashi's wrenching, thorou…
Lashou Shentan You can say that again. Hong Kong action ace John Woo has designed a complex conspiracy of illegal arms traffic and international corruption just so that a pair of renegade cops (Tony Leung and sullen, legendary action star Chow Yun-Fat) can team to wipe them off the map—in style. The action sequences in Woo's films are not gratuitous—they'r…
Regain La Femme du Boulanger Itinerant scissors-grinder Gedemus (Fernandel), and his lover Arsule (Orane Demazis) come upon a rural French town that seems almost deserted—except for a single, lonely hunter named Panturle (Gabriel Gabrio).It is Panturle's belief that as long as a single person remains in this place, it is a town. Otherwise, th…
La Haine Hatred Matthieu Kassovitz (Café au Lait) snared the Best Director prize at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival for his grim, bleak portrait of disaffected, gun-toting Parisian youth. You can't deny his talent, but you can remain unaffected by it. Hate (La Haine) caused a sensation in France, where the urgency of the film's message was not lost on…
Herz aus Glas One of the pictures that best typifies the characteristically outrageous showmanship of Werner Herzog's early career is his bizarrely compelling, quite demented portrait of a small German town that—at some undetermined point in the “pre-industrialized past”—loses the secret for making a unique form of glass. That's pretty much the plot, but t…
The old “senseless crime” myth is hung out to dry again, this time with freshness and energy by Peter Jackson. Heavenly Creatures is the real-life story of two teenage girls—Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker—who, in 1952, rocked New Zealand by brutally murdering one of their mothers. The killing and the events that led up to it—as well as the sensational trial and …
Probably the weakest of the Boulting brothers' comedies of the 1960s, this is the story of a prison chaplain (Peter Sellers) who's transferred by clerical error to an upscale parish. The movie's tongue-in-cheek satirical digs at the hypocrisies of the church and its flock are like an undistinguished slice of cheese: too mild, too many holes, not particularly shar…
Heimat-Eine Deutsche Chronik Sixteen hours, with barely a single memorable moment. Director Edgar Reitz's multigenerational family soap is intended as nothing less than the history of modern Germany, seen through the eyes of its central character/cipher, Maria (Marita Breuer), who had the symmetrically good fortune to be born in 1900. From the vantage point of Maria�…
If greater joys await, this will do nicely until they come along. Conceived with the goal of building morale among a beleaguered, Nazi-bombarded British public, Laurence Olivier also knew that the mounting of this film was a rare opportunity to bring Shakespeare to the screen with an audacity and freshness that could make it accessible to millions. Olivier sought other directors before accepting t…
Kenneth Branagh's visually handsome, full-bodied film of Shakespeare's Henry V was generally received well by critics, yet it likely would have received an even more rousing reception had it not been for the obvious need to compare it with Laurence Olivier's 1945 masterpiece. Was that fair? Probably not. But it was inevitable. And part of the pleasure in Branagh's brash…
Four middle-aged men gather in Belgrade in the 1980s for the funeral of a girl they all loved as youngsters. In flashback, we get glimpses of the fun they had in the 1950s, saturated with American rock and roll, American movies, and American cigarettes. Far from American, however, was their local Communist Youth Group leader, who's the villain of the piece on both a personal and political l…
Kakushi Toride No San Akunin Three Rascals in the Hidden Fortress Three Bad Men in the Hidden Fortress During the civil wars of Japan's 16th century, a princess bearing an important and priceless treasure is being chased by a ruthless enemy bent on her destruction. If you change the era and geography (or galaxy) you'll immediately see why George Lucas has cited Kurosawa…
Tengoku To Jigoku Akira Kurosawa's dense, crackling thriller is based on King's Ransom, an 87th Precinct novel by Ed McBain (Evan Hunter). In Kurosawa's version, a high-powered shoe tycoon (Toshiro Mifune) is interrupted during a business meeting with the news that his son has been kidnapped. After agreeing in front of associates that he will pay th…
The seven principal characters in Mike Leigh's ironically titled High Hopes are sharply drawn and indelible, and though they all represent different dead ends of Margaret Thatcher's England, they don't symbolize political positions to the point of simply being labels. One aging mother and three couples—one poor but sane, one maniacally desperate to climb socially, one y…
Fire Festival Mitsuo Yanagimachi's Himatsuri (Fire Festival) is a powerful, poetic, visionary work about one individual's increasing disillusionment with the world of man, and his growing, obsessive, and ultimately religious relationship with nature. The hero is a lumberjack in a small, magnificently scenic Japanese village, where the stately trees that the lumberjack v…
Alain Resnais had made a number of acclaimed documentaries (one of them—Night and Fog—was already considered a masterpiece) when he directed his first feature film, Hiroshima Mon Amour. The two stars are simply called he and she (Eiji Okada and Emmanuelle Riva); they are both married to others, and meet in modern Hiroshima. They become lovers, and during t…
Terence Stamp turns in a knockout performance in this witty, off-kilter little picture about a mob informer (Stamp) who's managed to escape the long arm of the “family” for a decade. As The Hit begins, his luck runs out. Killing him right away would mean no movie, however, so world-weary, zombie-like hit man John Hurt and his moronic, weasely gunsel Tim Roth �…
Believe Me When the nine-year-old son of a divorced couple begins to show signs of physical abuse, the boy's physician father (Martin Donovan)—now openly gay—finds himself unable to prove his suspicion that his ex-wife's new lover is the cause. Hollow Reed looks for all the world like a made-for-cable movie during its first ten minutes or so, but soon its …
Daoma Zei Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Horse Thief is an epic Chinese film of startling visual and emotional richness, set against the fantastic landscape of Tibet. It's the story of a horse thief named Norbu, who is banished from his tribe in order to keep it cleansed of evil. Refusing to renounce his Buddhist faith, Norbu and his wife attend temples as often as possible. But the odd job…
Vargtimmen Artist goes nuts; audience pays price. That's the cinematic version of frontier justice, perhaps. Still, Ingmar Bergman's 1968 The Hour of the Wolf—the story of a painter who vanishes, leaving behind only the diary in which he describes his descent into madness—is the closest the great Swedish director has ever come to making a psychoanalytical slasher film; …
I went to see Richard Lester's rabidly antiwar comedy the night it opened, at a small “art” theatre just north of Detroit in 1967. The place was packed with teenagers (I shouldn't complain, since I was one, too) who had gotten word that John Lennon was making his first non-Beatle film appearance. The audience talked through the entire film, more loudly whe…
One of the most extraordinary achievements of the post-war Japanese cinema is director Masaki Kobayashi's epic trilogy of films, each more than three hours in length, based on the acclaimed novel by Jumpei Gomikawa. Together, the three films—No Greater Love, The Road to Eternity, and A Soldier's Prayer (The Human Condition is the name of the trilogy)—tell …
See The Human Condition: A Soldier's Prayer.
See The Human Condition: A Soldier's Prayer.