Jacquot de Nantes Filmmakers Jacques Demy and Agnès Varda had been married for nearly 30 years when Demy was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. Their life together had been based on their mutual passion for the cinema, and it was only natural that Demy's last project should be a cinematic portrait of how the love for movies developed in him as a child growing up in Nantes. It …
The Music Room Biswambhar Roy (Chhabi Biswas) is a still-arrogant member of the declining aristocracy of Bengal in the 1920s. The proud patriarch of a once-wealthy family, Roy has spent the family fortune on self-indulgent, ruinously expensive concerts at his home; these expenses have fed his ego and sense of cultural refinement, but have also, through a terrible twist of fate, cost …
Ham Ham Stop the presses! It's a movie about sex and food! OK, so it's not the first time. But writer/director Bigas Luna's 1992 Spanish comedy is so gleefully, joyously vulgar that it is a breakthrough of sorts; it allows a generation of refined art house attendees to guiltlessly let their hair down a bit even while learning about the class structure of modern Spain. S…
Faust Admirers of Jan Svankmajer's short animated films should be aware that much of his modern adaptation of the Faust legend is actually live action, complete with real, photographed human beings. But don't be put off by that; Faust is as strange and disturbing a film as Svankmajer has ever made, and one of the most nightmarish movies to come out of Europe in years. There's …
French author and filmmaker Marcel Pagnol made the first version of Manon des Sources (Manon of the Spring) in 1952, following which he expanded the same story into a two-part novel called The Water of the Hills. This was the source that director Claude Berri and co-screenwriter Gérard Brach drew from when conceiving their 1986 epic two-part screen version of Pagnol's t…
Sweden's Bille August, director of the Cannes prize-winner Pelle the Conqueror, used a celebrated, fact-based novel by Nobel Prize-winning Swedish author Selma Lagerlof as the basis for this extraordinary story of hardship and disillusionment. Set in an impoverished rural Sweden at the turn of the century, Jerusalem is a portrait of a small community torn apart not just by hunger, but by a …
Jesus de Montreal A Montreal church has decided that its annual Passion Play is becoming overly rigid in its staging, and perhaps is becoming less relevant to its parishioners as a result. The church decides to appoint a young, talented actor named Daniel (Lo haire Bluteau) to rework and revamp the Passion Play, but the church gets more than it bargained for. Daniel casts himself as …
I admit it; I'm a Benigni fan. There are a lot of us around, yet until now, the movies of Italy's premier cinematic comic, Roberto Benigni, have simply not caught on in the United States. There are lots of reasons; some of his comedy, as in every country, is based on a national sense of humor and simply doesn't travel well—inadequate subtitling doesn't help. Some…
Jonas—Qui Aura 25 Ans en l'An 2000 Movie directors are usually not great at summarizing their own films; that's why they make movies. But I have to hand it to Swiss director Alain Tanner, who once described his dazzlingly beguiling Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000 as “a dramatic tragicomedy as political science fiction.” Jonoh is set eight years after that p…
The Big Day Holiday In The Silent Clowns, his indispensable book about the golden era of silent comedy, Walter Kerr examines the phenomenal success of a few of the most famous figures from 1920s, including Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, and Harry Langdon. But in examining their staying power, Kerr notes that Langdon, major star that he was, was a phenomenon of his time. While films of Keaton and …
Street of Sorrow Die Freudlosse Gasse German director G.W. Pabst's famous silent film The Joyless Street created a sensation in 1925 because of its dramatized, vivid portrayal of Vienna's post—World War I economic collapse. The film tells multiple stories of the residents of a single despair-ridden street: a professor's daughter (Greta Garbo) does her best…
In 1920s China, the elderly owner of a textile factory buys a young, beautiful bride for himself, though he proves to be both impotent and abusive. In despair, she takes the young man who is the factory's only employee as her lover, and together they have the son the old man could not give her. The unforeseen yet inevitably violent twists and turns that follow are more reminiscent of James …
Le Juge et l'Assassin In late 19th-century France, a sergeant (Michel Galabru) is discharged from the army as a result of his raging, violent episodes, which seem to alternate between anger and religious outbursts. After attempting to kill his wife, the sergeant is sent to an asylum, does a little time, is sent home over his own objections, and then commits a series of rapes a…
It sounds like something you'd want to avoid at all costs; a psycho has planted a number of bombs on a luxury ocean liner, and the legendary demolition expert sent to the scene sweats heavily while deciding whether to cut the blue wire or the red wire. As it happens, director Richard Lester's 1974 Juggernaut is probably one of the most enjoyable and breezy thrillers of this type ever…
Jules et Jim For his third feature, François Truffaut selected an autobiographical novel by Henri-Pierre Roché about the complicated relationship between two men and the woman they both love. Jules and Jim opens just prior to the outbreak of World War I, presenting us with the friendship between the reserved German, Jules (Oskar Werner), and the extroverted Frenchman, J…
Giulietta Degli Spiriti Fellini seemed to be so concerned with the fantastic images in his first color feature that he allowed most of his ideas to escape through the back door. Juliet of the Spirits is the story of a woman (Giulietta Masina) whose life is a disappointment on just about every level; her husband has forgotten their anniversary, and his philandering is a considerably l…