Director Bertrand Tavernier (Capitain Conan, Life and Nothing But) created a sensation at the French boxoffice with this hard-hitting and uncompromising policier about a side of Paris that never appears in travel brochures. Written in collaboration with Parisian police inspector Michel Alexandre, L.627 chronicles the day-to-day frustrations—and occasional victories—of a…
Divertimento The Beautiful Troublemaker An aging, retired painter, whose marriage has become more of a deep friendship than a love affair, is introduced to an exquisite young woman and decides that he must paint her. He does. Four hours of screen time later, the painter has completed his work, the three principal characters have undergone unexpected changes, and the audience has been moved in ways…
The Human Beast Jean Renoir's La Bete Humaine (The Human Beast) stars Jean Gabin as railroad engineer Jacques Lantier, a man whose deep-seated hatred of women—and unresolved resentment over inheriting his parents' alcoholism—produces in him a periodic, uncontrollable compulsion to kill. His bitter life takes a new turn when he falls in love with a railroad…
Birds of a Feather When it began life 20 years ago it was called daring; now it feels indestructible enough to call it an old war horse. A comedy about the intrinsic humor of gender and role-playing in society, as well as the true meaning of “family values,” La Cage aux Folles is also a sure-fire, old-fashioned French farce of mixed-up identities and slamming doors, freshly fitted ou…
A Judgment in Stone Isabelle Huppert took home France's highest film honor, the César, for her performance as a deranged post office worker (another American trait the French have picked up?) who befriends a shy, illiterate, live-in housekeeper (Sandrine Bonnaire, who shared the Venice Festival's Best Actress Prize with Huppert) in Claude Chabrol&#x…
Isn't Life a Bitch? The Bitch Jean Renoir's first sound film is the tale of Maurice Legrand, an unhappily married bank teller (Michel Simon) who finds a bit of refuge from his harridan of a wife (Madeleine Bérubet) in the arms of an attractive street prostitute named Lulu (Janie Marèze).When Maurice discovers that Lulu and her l…
The Gentleman Tramp Is it the third or the fourth of Eric Rohmer's “six moral tales” cycle? Both, actually; it was the third to be filmed, but the fourth to be released, seeing the light of day only after the success of My Night at Maud's. La Collectionneuse is the story of Adrien (Patrick Bauchau), an antiques dealer who spends his vacation at a villa nea…
The Discreet Antoine (Fabrice Luchini) is an arrogant writer who is clearly not the lothario he imagines himself to be. Outraged and wounded by his latest girlfriend dumping him, he huddles with his publisher to plan a revenge that will kill two birds with one stone. He will advertise for a young female typist whom he will seduce and abandon—all the while keeping a diary of th…
The Sweet Life Upon returning to my hotel after a late movie during the 1997 Telluride Film Festival, the TV informed me that a car accident had taken the life of Princess Diana. The CNN newscaster reported that the crash scene had been besieged by paparazzi. For an instant I wondered if the image that next popped into my head was only there because I was at a film festival, but I don't thi…
The Unfaithful Wife Charles (Michel Bouquet) and Helene (Stéphane Audran) are a civilized, cultured, well-heeled bourgeois couple whose marriage has become passionless. Helene's response to this missing part of her life has been to take a lover (Maurice Ronet);Charles' rejoinder is to kill him. La Femme Infidèle is one of Claude…
A young French woman (Anne Parillaud) is reprieved from her death sentence (she's been bad) and taught to be a much neater, better-looking killer. After years of training and New Wave charm school (yes, it's Pygmalion again), she starts her new job as assassin for a super-secret government agency. The irony is that once she's taught st…
The Blow-Out There are food movies and there is La Grande Bouffe. Director Marco Ferreri's spectacularly unnecessary movie about four affluent, middle-aged men who decide to commit suicide by gorging can't exactly be called a cautionary fable; we see what the physical effects of non-stop eating are, but they're nothing we didn't suspect. Stomach pains, diarrhea, endless…
The Pier In 1962, French film poet Chris Marker's 29-minute La Jetée was de rigueur at university film societies and experimental film co-ops, but only with the release of the overwritten, overheated, Terry Gilliam/Bruce Willis remake, 12 Monkeys, did the original begin to receive exposure on a few “independent” cable networks. More than 35 years have passed sinc…
The Reader A Raymond Jean novel titled La Lectrice—the story of a woman whose seductive powers blossom when she reads aloud—is taken to heart by Constance (Miou-Miou), who's inspired enough by the book to try reading to her boyfriend in bed. Constance is quite smitten with the novel's premise, and imagines herself as its heroine, offering her services as a…
In 1938, Jean Renoir accepted the task of producing a film designed primarily to kindle strong feelings of patriotism and anti-fascism. He chose the most natural subject of all: the march on Paris of the Marseilles volunteers, and the capture of the Tuilleries in 1793, ending the Revolution and overthrowing the monarchy. The story is told in a series of vignettes, presented in rapid succession, wi…
The Night La Nuit In Milan, a middle-class writer (Marcello Mastroianni) and his wife (Jeanne Moreau) appear to have come to the end of their road together; without passion or a conviction that they need to stay together, they spend one long and lonely night observing the shapes and sounds of the city around them, trying to make sense of what appears to be a chaotic and…
This historical dramatic comedy is based on a celebrated chapter in French history, when Louis XVI (Michel Piccoli) and Marie Antoinette (Eleonore Hirt) fled from a Paris in the throes of revolution to Varennes in 1791. On their journey, they meet an unlikely and altogether remarkable group of characters, including Casanova (Marcello Mastroianni), Thomas P…
The Promise Just outside of Antwerp, Roger, a man running an illegal immigration mill, allows a critically injured immigrant laborer to die, and then covers up the crime by burying him in cement. Roger's 15-year-old son, Igor, has long assisted his father in running what is essentially a slave market, and he's forced to help bury the laborer and then lie to the dead man's fran…
Arthur Schnitzler's play was the basis for this lyrical and bittersweet series of linked episodes depicting love in all its tragic, comic, and unexpected manifestations. Linked by the image of love as a merry-go-round, the master of ceremonies (Anton Walbrook at his most suavely elegant) narrates and explains what we see as the carousel of love comes full circle. It begins wit…
The Breakup One of Claude Chabrol's more lurid and intense thrillers, La Rupture (The Break-Up) wastes no time plunging you into its alarming premise. Charles, the husband of Helene, is in a rage. Before the movie's credits he picks up their young son and throws him, injuring him severely enough to be hospitalized. After the credits, Charles has run off to his rich pare…
The Salamander The debut of Swiss director Alain Tanner is a funny and assured little comedy with a sharp, stinging aftertaste. When a journalist (Jean-Luc Bideau) notices an item in the paper about a young woman who's been accused by her uncle of attempting to kill him, he decides that the incident would make a swell made-for-TV movie. He contacts a novelist friend of his &#x…
The Bodyguards The Escorts This is a taut and intelligent fact-based thriller about four carabinieri who struggle to maintain some semblance of their normal lives after being assigned to protect a judge (Carlo Cecchi) who's volunteered to investigate political corruption and murder in a crime-ridden Sicilian town. The previous judge, and his escort, were assassinated while on …
Unavailable for many years in a subtitled print, this enchanting early work by Max Ophüls stars Isa Miranda as Gaby Doirot, “Everybody's Sweetheart,” a movie star whose professional success did not bring her happiness. Her story is told in flashback while she's hospitalized after an attempted suicide, and this structure lends a bittersweet tone to all of the even…
The Road At the price of a dish of pasta, a dim-witted peasant girl named Gelsomina (Giulietta Masina) is literally sold to a traveling performer named Zampano (Anthony Quinn), who will use her in his strong-man act, and will use her sexually as well. During their travels around the country, Zampano's brutality to Gelsomina is unrelenting—yet she stays wit…
Episoda Del Mare The Earth Will Tremble Luchino Visconti's portrait of an impoverished family in a Sicilian fishing village is a stately and magnificent achievement. As was the case in other Italian works of the neorealist period, Visconti used a non-professional cast. Yet the film's visual style is a long way from the off-the-cuff look of the Rossellini and De Sica films; Visconti&#…
La Dentielliere A shy young assistant at a beauty shop (Isabelle Huppert) and the student she falls in love with (Yves Beneyton) seem perfectly matched at the deserted Normandy resort where they meet. Upon their return to Paris, however, the myriad differences between them begin to reveal themselves one by one, creating, like the delicate lace the girl makes, a thinly t…
Louis Malle's memories of a childhood incident in which classmates were sent to their deaths during the German Occupation of France wouldn't actually be recreated in one of his films until Au Revoir les Enfants in 1987. But years earlier, in 1974, the incident was the inspiration for Malle's Lacombe, Lucien, a completely gripping and brilliant movie about a young man who becom…
Chekhov's The Lady with the Little Dog was the basis for this little-seen, completely wonderful Soviet film by director Josef Heifitz. In Yalta at the turn of the century, a vacationing married man named Dmitri (Alexei Batalov) meets a lovely young married woman, Anna (lya Savvina), when he notices her on her daily walks with her little dog. They begin an affair,…
The Age of Gold The Golden Age Explicitness and outrageousness should never be confused; it's because of the difference between them that even though highly graphic depictions of human sexuality are not unusual in the cinema of the 1990s, the release in today's cultural climate of a film as proudly subversive as Luis Buñuel's revolutionary 1930 L'Age d'Or …
Two Italian carpetbaggers (Enrico Lo Verso and Michele Placido) head for poverty-stricken Albania in 1991, the first year after the collapse of the communist dictatorship. Hoping to bleed money out of the instability and general chaos that the country has fallen into, the men attempt to set up a phony corporation with the goal of scamming government grant money, but they need an Alba…
Lancelot du Lac The Grail Le Graal A masterpiece. France's Robert Bresson dreamed of making a film about the King Arthur legend for more than 20 years. By the time he was able to film his Lancelot of the Lake (Lancelot du Lac) in 1974, Bresson's style had been honed to the point where he was able to tell his story with images that are reduced to their absolute bare esse…
In her great 1989 documentary American Dream, Barbara Kopple chronicled a grueling strike at a Minnesota meat-packing plant and showed how the strikers were constantly in danger of losing their war because they fought so many small skirmishes among themselves. It's not a new syndrome, and it crops up as the central issue in Ken Loach's Land and Freedom, his riveting portrait of divis…
Topio Stin Omichli As parents have been known to do when there's a family secret they want to hide from the children, the mother of young Voula and Alexander concocts an elaborate myth to explain an unpleasant truth.The 14-year-old girl and her younger brother have never met their father, and when the kids continue to press for answers to his whereabouts, their mother tries to protect them …
Money In 1983, at the age of 76, France's Robert Bresson returned to the screen with an unexpected and undeniable masterpiece. A counterfeit 500 franc note is given to a delivery man by a store clerk. The man uses the bill, is arrested, and sees everything in his universe devastatingly altered as a result. Bresson's L'Argent (“Money”) is a portrait …
Der Letzte Mann The great moment of German silent star Emil Jannings's career was his performance as the proud hotel doorman who is demoted to washroom attendant in F.W. Murnau's brilliant expressionist fable The Last Laugh. The doorman, whose age prevents him from lifting the guests' overstuffed baggage as easily as he used to, is so humiliated by the demotion that he hides t…
Le Dernier Metro In Nazi-occupied Paris, an acclaimed theatre director (Heinz Bennent) hides in the basement of his theatre, knowing that his German-Jewish heritage will cost him his life if he's discovered. Above ground, his beautiful wife (Catherine Deneuve) keeps productions running while dealing both personally and professionally with the theatre's dai…
An ostensibly repentant, pious Cuban slave owner in the 18th century decides to simultaneously cleanse his soul and convert his slaves to Christianity by having a dozen of them reenact the Last Supper. Based on a true incident, this bitterly satirical swipe at the ties between colonialism, religious repression, and racism is one of the angriest films by Cuba's Tomás Gutiérrez …
Marlon Brando, an expatriate American in Paris in an emotional daze after the suicide of his wife, meets a young girl (Maria Schneider) who's about to get married and is looking for an apartment. They spontaneously begin an affair while at the same time attempting to remain anonymous—meeting in the apartment for uninhibited sexual encounters while pretending to not reve…
L'Anee Derniere a Marienbad In a huge chateau, “X” (Giorgio Albertazzi) tries to convince “A” (Delphine Seyrig) that they've met before. “M” (Sacha Pitoeff) may be “A”'s husband or may not be. That's about it. What writer Alain Robbe-Grillet and director Alain Resnais do wi…
Le Chaland Qui Passe Juliette (Dita Parlo) is a newly married bride whose husband Jean (Jean Dasté) is a mate aboard the barge named l'Atalante. Unhappy with her unglamorous life aboard ship, and frustrated by tales of the outside world's wonders—spun magically by the cantankerous old first mate Père Jules (Michel Simon)&…
This masterpiece by Japan's Yasujiro Ozu tells a story that Ozu has related, with variations, many times: A widower (Chishu Ryu) living with his unmarried daughter is torn between the joy of her companionship and care, and the knowledge that she needs to create a life of her own apart from him. He knows that her devotion to him will prevent her from seeking a husband, so he te…
The Adventure Is it possible to refer to 1960 as just one of those years? It's not every year that sees the release of landmarks like La Dolce Vita, Hiroshima Mon Amour, or Rocco and His Brothers. It was even a great year for popular entertainments like The Apartment, Spartacus, The Entertainer, and even—on a different plane, perhaps—Little Shop of Horrors. All well and good, …
A Good Marriage The Well-Made Marriage More than a decade before Eric Rohmer made Le Beau Mariage, he cast the very young Béatrice Romand in his great Claire's Knee as Laura, a brilliant, precocious child almost frighteningly wise in the ways of romance. But while the earlier film was a tale of erotic obsession fulfilled, Le Beau Mariage finds Romand as Sabine, a 20-something yuppie …
Happiness In a picturesque French suburb, a young carpenter named François shares an idyllic existence with his wife, Thérèse, and their two children. When I say idyllic, I mean it; when the family isn't on picnics in the sun-dappled woods near their home, François and Thérèse are making love, usually with Mozart on the soundtrack. My early memories…
The Butcher In a small French village, a serial killer is spreading deep shadows of fear through the normally quiet, sheltered streets. A schoolteacher (Stéphane Audran) suspects the town's butcher (Jean Yanne) of the crimes, yet she doesn't want to believe that it's so. The clues that lead her to suspect him are also clues to the man'…
Luc Besson was 24 when he directed this visually striking, post-nuke survival pic about a group of youthful survivors who quickly remember what it means to be territorial.
Doulos—The Finger Man Jean-Paul Belmondo is a shady hoodlum who's suspected of being a police informer (a stool-pigeon/finger-man, or doulos) by the criminals who number themselves among his associates. As the film unfolds, we're let in on the secrets of this underworld bit by bit, tantalizingly, as the suspense mounts and the shocks and unexpected twists …
Chris Marker is an extraordinary artist; his films are varied, bold, and utterly fresh in their concept and concerns. His Le Joli Mai was conceived as a two-part examination of Paris in May of 1962, the month that the war in Algeria came to an end. Since this was, in effect, the first time France had been fully at peace since 1939, Marker wanted to document the city at this important moment in his…
Daybreak A lone man (Jean Gabin) sits locked behind the door of a rooming-house apartment as police downstairs discover the body of the man he has just murdered. As the police attempt to arrest him, Gabin remembers in flashback the lifelong series of events that inexorably led to this most desperate of moments. A brilliantly structured and stunningly designed example of “poeti…
Starving artist Michel (René Lefèvre) is thrilled to discover that he's the owner of a winning lottery ticket, but his joy turns to panic when he realizes that the ticket was in the pocket of a coat he sold at a secondhand store. In a splendid touch of irony, the artist's coat is purchased by an operatic tenor, who finds it authentically tattered enough to…
House of Pleasure The three stories of which Max Ophüls's exhilarating Le Plaisir is comprised are based on tales by Guy de Maupassant. A woman explains to a doctor that her husband is phobic about becoming wrinkled. A madame agrees to shut down her business temporarily, so that she and her employees can attend her niece's first communion. Finally, a painter and his model have…
The Samurai The steely eyed 32-year-old Alain Delon is Jef Costello, an ice-cold, contract killer who lives—and is prepared to die—by a personal code of honor, in a world where betrayal is the norm on both sides of the law. Jef's latest job, which requires him to murder a nightclub owner, has plunged him into a whirlpool of intrigue, treachery, and revenge that the trenchcoate…
The Hole The Night Watch II Buco Based on the true story of five prisoners who attempted a seemingly impossible escape from a notorious French prison in 1947, French director Jacques Becker's Le Trou (The Hole) has never received theatrical distribution in the United States. The distributors who turned it down should be sent to the slammer themselves, because Le Trou is one of…
Finnish wunderkind Aki Kaurismäki has built an international reputation with ironic, deadpan comedies like Ariel, The Match Factory Girl, and Drifting Clouds. His 1989 Leningrad Cowboys Go America was Kaurismäki's version of a “breakout” film, designed with enough physical comedy and bizarre sight gags to get wider play in the U.S. than his usual art house engage…
French-Canadian director Jean-Claude Lauzon's 1992 Léolo is a powerful, frightening, sometimes magical movie that suggests the work of a true visionary. This is a portrait of a child growing up in a mad Montreal house-hold, and it's told—both in its narration and its expressionist images—from that child's point of view. Young Leo has renamed himself L�…
The Heterosexuals A rich, amoral, sexually hungry socialite named Frédérique (Stéphane Audran) picks up a young artist named Why (Jacqueline Sassard) drawing on the streets of Paris, seduces her, and takes her to St. Tropez. Things heat up considerably when an architect (Jean-Louis Trintignant) appears on the scene, threatening the lov…
Michelle (Marie Tifo) is the unmarried mother of the 13-year-old Manon (Charlotte Laurier), who live in near poverty outside of Montreal. Almost obsessively in love with her mother, Manon becomes enraged and desperately jealous when she learns that her mother has become pregnant by a local cop (German Houde). Directed by Francis Mankiewicz, this is an inte…
The Soldiers Two young jerks decide that it makes sense to enlist in the army and fight for their king, thanks to the irresistible lure of looting, rape, torture and killing without justification. Calling Jean-Luc Godard's Les Carabiniers controversial would be an understatement. It appeared in 1963 as France was getting over its Indochinese “adventure” and America's wa…
In yet another Francis Veber sitcom starring Pierre Richard and Gérard Depardieu, a woman (Anny Duperey) suckers two former lovers into finding her wayward son (Stephane Bierry) by secretly telling each that he is the kid's father. That's all there is to the high-concept setup, so it's up to Richard (as a grotesquely hypochondriacal ne…
The Strange Ones “I like it in the middle of the night when I am writing,” director Jean-Pierre Melville said in an interview 30 years ago, “working completely alone in my room at three in the morning. This I enjoy.” Melville's version of Jean Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles, which he co-authored for the screen with Cocteau, feels like it was also filmed a…
The Mischief-Makers François Truffaut's first feature was his 1959 The 400 Blows; his first film was Les Mistons (known in the U.S as The Mischief-Makers). It's a half-hour portrait of a group of small boys who are both fascinated and repelled by a pair of lovers (Bernadette Lafont and Gérard Blain). The kids spy on them, laugh at them, follo…
The Devil's Envoys Marcel Carné's elegantly conceived fairy tale is the story of how the devil's henchmen try to wreak havoc on the love between ordinary mortals in 15th-century France. The devil himself ultimately discovers he is powerless in the face of deeply committed, true love. Les Visiteurs du Soir was—like Carné's great Children of Paradise&…
Thieves You keep hoping that this plot-heavy, complicated new film from the gifted André Téchiné is going to reward you mightily for the effort of adding it all up as it races along, jumping back-and-forth through time and defining the relationships between characters in tiny increments. It turns out to be a perfectly OK little thriller, but you can't dismiss that naggi…
This lovely and characteristically elegant turn-of-the-century love story was the last film Max Ophüls made in Germany; upon its completion, the rising Nazi tide forced his emigration to France, and, later, to America. Liebelei is based—as was Ophüls's later, 1950 La Ronde—on an Arthur Schnitzler play. This time, it's the story of a young Viennese woman wh…
Colonel Blimp Roger Livesey delivers a legendary performance as major General Clive Candy, a British officer whose confusion over the loss of honorable behavior by the military during World War II causes him to reflect back over his long and extraordinary career. This first production by the Archers—the British film company that consisted of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger as co-produ…
La Vie et Rien d'Autre Two women—one aristocratic (Sabine Azéma), one a provincial schoolteacher (Pascale Vignal)—search for their missing men on a bloody French battlefield following World War I. They are helped in this seemingly impossible task by a Major Dellaplanne (Philippe Noiret), whose commitment to accounting for the hu…
And Life Goes On… Zendegi Va Digar Hich… Following a catastrophic earthquake in northern Iran, a filmmaker who recently worked in the stricken area returns with his son to discover the fates of those he knew. Iran's master filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami examines the impact of a disaster on a human population by showing it through the eyes of a storyteller—a man who is used …
You can read about his unique, inclusive methods for preparing a film, and then you can watch the resulting picture over and over until you're blue in the face, but when a movie by Mike Leigh succeeds on the scale of Life Is Sweet, there's simply no way to figure out how he does it. This time, his plot centers on parents Andy and Wendy (Jim Broadbent and Allison Steadman…
Diary of Oharu Saikaku Ichidai Onna In 17th-century Japan, a prostitute (Kinuyo Tanaka) describes via flashbacks the long and terrible journey that has taken her from being the young, beautiful, sought-after daughter of a samurai, to the bottom rung of society on which she now exists. Kenji Mizoguchi's magnificent Life of Oharu was based on a novel by Ibara Saikaku that the di…
Though director Chen Kaige's tale of an aged musician and his young apprentice may seem just a bit too leisurely from time to time, the film's enchantingly spiritual story and poetic imagery more than compensate. The old musician has been blind since childhood, but he is not without hope; the teacher who taught him to master his stringed instrument, the sanxian, has assured him that …
Como Agua para Chocolate In the early part of the century, an old widow (Regina Torne) raises three daughters, the youngest of whom, Tita (Lumi Cavazos), knows her way around the kitchen. She knows her way around Pedro (Marco Leonardi) as well, and the two are anxious to marry. Family obligations are in the way, however; it seems that Tita's older s…
Little Dorrit is an adaptation of Charles Dickens's novel. It runs six hours, in two big chunks, and it's all plot. All you need to know of that plot here is that it's about a father and daughter trapped in debtor's prison, and that a great many things happen to them to change the course of their lives. Is it as good as being immersed in the novel? No, but it's h…
See Little Dorrit, Film 1.
The Little Thief was based on a story by François Truffaut, which Truffaut was reportedly preparing to film not long before his death. It's a delicately conceived story about an adolescent girl (Charlotte Gainsbourg) who reacts to her loveless environment by engaging in a series of petty crimes. The Little Thief was filmed in 1989 by Truffaut's long-time assistan…
Malenkaya Vera Natalya Negoda stars in this punkish blast of western-style rebellion, a 1988 harbinger of the soon-to-follow Soviet upheaval. Negoda (a lively, pretty actress) plays a young working-class woman in Ukraine who smokes, drinks, has sex with her boyfriend, wears leather, loves rock and roll, lives with her parents, and ridicules the system. Just as in American youth-rebel…
Mac (Peter Riegert) is an up-and-coming Texas oil company executive whose boss (Burt Lancaster) sends him to Scotland to acquire a prize piece of coastal property—which includes an entire town—as an oil drilling site. As Mac settles in and meets the locals, making them cash offers they're hard-pressed to refuse, he finds himself attached to the plac…
Jacques Demy's audacious first feature—a pioneering work of the French New Wave—is every bit as startling and fresh as it was when it captivated worldwide audiences in 1961. Lola is a romantic fable with music and dancing but it is in no way the conventional movie musical we've come to know. Lola (Anouk Aimée) is the dancer who was left with a baby …
The final film by the great Max Ophüls is a whirling and sensuous portrait of the famous 19th-century courtesan Lola Montès, who was mistress to Franz Liszt and King Ludwig of Bavaria, but who ended up as a circus attraction, recounting tales from her past in exchange for coins from the audience. Ophüls conceived the film as the culmination of his life's work; used to w…
A companion/sequel to his brilliant Distant Voices, Still Lives, Terence Davies's poetic and hauntingly lyrical The Long Day Closes is an autobiographical portrait set in the 1950s of an impressionable 11-year-old, whose obsession with movies is a way of escaping from the still-painful wounds of an abusive childhood. The palatial Liverpool movie house where Bud spends as much of his …
Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) is a self-important, self-made London mob boss on the brink of his greatest achievement; he's about to greet a delegation of American gangsters who just might pony up millions to invest in his bold, hands-across-the-sea casino/real estate venture. But on the eve of his biggest triumph, somebody's knocking off members of Harold's …
When we speak of the “angry young man” period of British films in the 1950s and 1960s, we can include any number of movies, but we always include this one. John Osborne's searing play is the story of a grown man (Richard Burton) who's still a rebel without a cause, and who takes it out on his wife (Mary Ure), his mistress (Claire Bloom…
The Young and the Damned After an eighteen-year hiatus from filmmaking—for political reasons that had the surreal, nightmarish logic of one of his films—the surrealist master Luis Buñuel returned to the screen triumphantly with this brilliantly lucid and utterly haunting portrait of gang youths in the slums of Mexico. Buñuel's vision is disturbing because these a…
Die Verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum When a woman (Angela Winkler in a strong, memorable performance) spends the night with a young man about whom she knows virtually nothing, she discovers to her horror that her brief “association” with this man—who is suspected of being a terrorist—will change her life forever in ways she could never have imagined. With…
In the 1950s, Louis Malle's The Lovers struck a cultural nerve with its portrait of a bourgeois woman (Jeanne Moreau) who—refusing to deny her repressed sexuality any longer—bolts her suffocating marriage for the passion of a younger lover. In the 1980s, it was Nelly (Isabelle Huppert), wife of a middle-class, modestly successful executive, whose ch…
Szerelem When a man is arrested by Stalin's secret police, his wife (Mari Töröcsik) is alarmed at the prospect of telling his aged mother (Lili Darvas) the truth about his arrest and probable fate. Instead, she takes matters into her own hands by telling the ailing old woman—who she lives with in a cramped apartment—what she wants to h…
Film d'Amore et d'Anarchia In 1932, a peasant (Giancarlo Giannini), who's reached the end of his rope after a friend is murdered, decides that he will be the one to assassinate Mussolini. The center of his assassination attempt is to be a bustling brothel, but as soon as he settles in, he falls in love with one of the help (Lina Polito), and suddenl…
Amore in Citta Not everything that came out of Italy's postwar, neo-realist period was a masterpiece, and here's the proof. The five-episode film about the different kind of love that can be found on the streets of Rome at any given moment was the work of six directors: Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Dino Risi, Alberto Lattuada, Francesco Maselli and Cesare Zavattini. The …
L'Amour en Fuite François Truffaut's fifth and final film about his cinematic alter ego, Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), finds Antoine divorced from Christine (Claude Jade) and coping with the death of his mother. In Love of the Run, Antoine, now in his thirties, is looking back over his life and loves, which necessarily entails the inclu…
Into the strange and barren little town of Sunray, Australia ambles D.J. and self-appointed king of cool Ken Sherry (George Shevtsov)—fresh from Brisbane—to take over the town's airwaves (such as they are) and position himself as a heartthrob/dreamboat fantasy to the town's female population. Two of those females are sisters Vicki-Ann …
The film that secured an international reputation for Louis Malle was his second feature, a portrait of a rich, unsatisfied, provincial wife (Jeanne Moreau) and her two adulterous affairs. The Lovers was controversial for a few reasons, and the biggest one was the fact that Moreau drives off at the end of the film with the second—and younger—of her lovers (Jean-M…
Amantes Paco (Jorge Sanz), a young man recently discharged from the army, searches for a job and an apartment so that he can begin to earn enough money to make an honest woman of his sweet and trusting fiancee, Trini (Maribel Verdu). But Paco doesn't realize that the apartment building he chooses comes complete with a scheming, sexually insatiable (and inv…
A Blonde in Love Lasky Jedne Plavovlasky Andula (Hana Brejchova) is a shy teenage factory worker who falls in love with Milda (Vladimir Pucholt), a compulsively womanizing musician, after spending a night with him. She's convinced that the pianist is truly in love with her, and she decides the next weekend to visit his parents, arriving unannounced at their home.…
Les Bas Fonds Underground Renoir's adaptation of Maxim Gorky's play is set in no specific land, and yet it's a universal location; this is the bottom rung of the human ladder, a cramped world of derelicts, thieves, and gamblers, scrambling over each other for the meager crumbs they find. Renoir assembled a fine cast, including Jean Gabin as the thief and Louis Jouvet as the ba…
Donzoko Akira Kurosawa has transported the characters of Maxim Gorky's 1902 classic to an old Edo tenement at the beginning of the 19th century. In an ancient lodging house, a number of derelicts are assembled, including a kabuki actor, a sick old woman, a prostitute, a shamed, former samurai, and a thief (Toshiro Mifune). Lording over them are a corrupt, greedy landlord and h…