Soy Cuba Ja Cuba In 1964, Soviet director Mikhail Kalatozov (The Cranes Are Flying) collaborated with poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko and writer Enrique Pineda Barnet to create a propagandistic portrait of an oppressed Cuba—one that was ripe for a rebellion against decadent, imperialist enslavement of the Cuban people's bodies and minds. The film consists of four “chapt…
Jag Ar Nyfiken—Gul Jag Ar Nyfiken—En Film i Gult There is a plot; Swedish filmmaker Vilgot Sjöman, playing Swedish filmmaker Vilgot Sjöman, decides to make a film starring actress Lena Nyman. Her character, Lena, is curious about Vietnam, the Swedish class system, and civil rights. She is also curious about sex, and has it many times during the film, usually with her bo…
J'Ai Pas Sommeil In the back alleys of Paris, a number of seemingly disparate story fragments simultaneously spin into motion during the course of a summer. An actress arrives from Lithuania, looking for a job; a series of murders is taking place in which the victims are all elderly women; a West Indian musician is imploring his wife to move back to Martinique with him. Not all of the loose…
De Eso No Se Habla The widowed Dona Leonor (Luisina Brando), who lives in a small Argentine town in the 1930s, is determined to see that her daughter, Charlotte (Alejandra Podesta), achieves as much happiness in life as possible. She refuses, though, to as much as acknowledge the fact that her daughter is extremely short, and will not allow any mention of the girl…
Joan Webster (Wendy Hiller), a smart and determined young working woman whose journey through life has been planned for years, is committed to marrying a wealthy and socially well-positioned Scottish fuddy-duddy. But while on her way to marry him, Joan becomes stranded by a storm in a small coastal town where she meets the handsome young Naval officer Torquil MacNeil (Roger Li…
Record of a Living Being Kimono No Kiroku As daring as Stanley Kubrick's 1964 Dr. Strangelove may be, you might be surprised to know that Japan's Akira Kurosawa conceived of a satirical film on the subject of the bomb as early as 1955. Though he finally realized that a darkly comic essay on the subject of nuclear war would be far too controversial—this was, after all, just ten…
The Young and the Passionate Vitelloni Spivs Fellini's third feature—his second solo directing effort—is a spellbinding portrait of aimless, post-World War II youth adrift in a small Italian town. It is also, quite possibly, his finest film. Designed neither as an exploitative exposé nor as a fully sympathetic portrait of “misunderstood” youth, I Vitelloni…
Ladri di Saponette A movie director (Maurizio Nichetti) is invited to host an Italian TV station's screening of one of his classic, neo-realist films: The Icicle Thief (Ladri di saponette). The black-and-white movie about an impoverished family (a movie-within-a-movie parody of De Sica's The Bicycle Thief) is constantly being interrupted by c…
Director Lindsay Anderson created enormous controversy in a year in which controversy was the norm with his 1968 epic about tradition, cruelty, and, finally, machine-gun-totin' rebellion at a British boys' school. Malcolm McDowell plays Mick Travis, the angry young man whose anti-establishment leanings contrast with the embalmed tradition of the British public education system portra…
To Live Doomed Living Describing Ikiru to friends who haven't seen it often provokes a polite but unenthusiastic response. When they learn that it's about a aging bureaucrat who's been diagnosed with terminal cancer, they may understandably think that, well, it may indeed be a classic and sure, it might actually be good … but why should they put themselves through it? A…
Handsome Antonio One of the high points in the great career of the irreplaceable Marcello Mastroianni was his immensely poignant portrayal of Antonio Magnano, a man who decides to stop bedding down all the “easy” women of the lower classes who have taken up so much of his life and, instead, finally embraces the sanctity of the Catholic church's teachings by marrying a well-bre…
Illuminacja Krzysztof Zanussi was one of the most interesting directors of the Polish film renaissance of the 1960s and 1970s. Many of his films centered around earnest, well-meaning intellectuals who were attempting to use their science or their art to clarify some of the emotional mysteries of their lives. Illumination, Zanussi's fourth film, deals with the intellectual dilemmas of a youn…
During the 1950s, Peter Sellers appeared in a number of modestly budgeted British comedies of varying quality and staying power. The one constant in all of the films was Sellers, who didn't simply seem to be a different character each time, he seemed to be a different actor. In John and Roy Boulting's gloriously funny 1959 I'm All Right, Jack, Sellers plays the Hitler-mustache…
In a Year with 13 Moons In einem Jahr mit 13 Monden If you've ever felt rejected, victimized, or just plain misunderstood, take a look at Rainer Werner Fassbinder's In a Year of 13 Moons and you'll probably decide you're not so bad off after all. Volker Spengler gives a legendary performance as Elvira Weishapt, who started life as Erwin but remedied all that with a sex-…
It's tempting to blame the obscurity of this superb little picture on insensitive movie distributors or unadventurous audiences, but really, the movie did play theatres and it did get seen by a few people. The fact is that it's a Dutch movie with an unknown cast about a man (Helmert Woudenberg) who checks into a hospital for tests and discovers he's dying of canc…
Ai No Corrida Japan's Nagisa Oshima based his 1976 film on an actual murder case that took place in Japan in 1936. A woman had strangled her lover to death during intercourse, after which she cut off his penis and carried it around with her until the police arrested her. (It had to be love; after all, Lorena Bobbitt simply tossed her husband John's freshly severed penis out of…
Dans la Ville Blanche Swiss director Alain Tanner directed this absorbing and visually intoxicating dream of a movie about a sailor (Bruno Ganz of Wings of Desire) who jumps ship in Lisbon, where he blends into the hallucinatory landscapes and alleyways of the hauntingly beautiful “white city.” Ganz becomes sexually involved with a waitress, loses most of his money, and…
Vietnam lite. The proud and beautiful Eliane (Catherine Deneuve) is the owner of a rubber plantation in French Indochina in the 1930s. She lives there with her father (symbol of the old world) and her adopted Indochinese daughter Camille (symbol of the new world). After mom has a brief fling with the handsome young French naval officer Jean-Baptiste …
L'lnnocente The Intruder Director Luchino Visconti's final film is a satisfyingly rich, 19th-century drama about a spoiled, hypocritical aristocrat (Giancarlo Giannini) who's sexually bored by his seemingly meek wife (Laura Antonelli). He takes up with a beautiful countess (Jennifer O'Neill) who becomes a pleasant enough distrac…
Better than it sounds. Terry Johnson's screenplay (based on his play) is a kind of compressed Ragtime, in which a number of his torical figures cross paths—and more—on one 1954 summer night. Marilyn Monroe (Theresa Russell) is the warm and life-giving sun around whom Joe DiMaggio (Gary Busey), Joe McCarthy (Tony Curtis), …
A Swedish homicide cop (Stellan Skårsgard of Breaking the Waves and Good Will Hunting) is sent to Norway to investigate what appears to be the sexually motivated murder of a teenage girl. But the 24-hour daylight makes sleep impossible for the detective, and soon a disturbing, ominous and previously repressed side of the already tense and anxiety-plagued investigator begins to…
Federico Fellini's Intervista There's no point in briefly criticizing or, God forbid, analyzing Federico Fellini's Intervista, because that's something each of us will do on a very personal level, based on our own feelings about this legendary artist. The maestro's second-from-final film (his Voices of the Moon has yet to receive American release) i…
Paris Brule-t-il? What a mess. This international super-production was designed to dramatize the liberation of Paris from the Nazis, and to detail the events that halted the German plan to burn the city to the ground before the Allies reached it. In the “style” of The Longest Day, an international cast of stars was assembled to impersonate actual historical figures as well as fiction…
Ivan Groznyi Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein's brilliant, two-part historical epic Ivan the Terrible was filmed between 1944 and 1946. Though it was conceived of and written as a two-part film, what now exists as Ivan the Terrible, Part 2 is really just the first portion of Eisenstein's envisioned second half of the story; as the production grew in scope, he intended to turn the r…
See Ivan the Terrible, Part I.