If you make even a modest survey of the trauma that the coming of sound in 1927 inflicted on the art of motion pictures, you'll encounter legions of actors, directors, writers, and cinematographers who, having mastered that pinnacle of 20th-century artistic expression known as the silent film, were suddenly told to invent a whole new way of telling stories. Many celebrated directors of the …
My Favorite Season Emilie (Catherine Deneuve) is a lawyer whose reserved and “civilized” persona is being challenged daily by the swelling tensions and increasingly unavoidable dissatisfactions of her marriage. Her brother Antoine (Daniel Auteuil), a doctor and confirmed bachelor who refuses to conceal his disgust for family life and bourgeois hypocrisy, i…
La Vie Devant Soi Intolerable. This maudlin, sentiment-sodden tearjerker is so intensely and single-mindedly determined to rip at your heartstrings that you should only see it with a cardiologist. Simone Signoret plays the world-weary Madame Rosa, an aging prostitute and holocaust survivor who stays young at heart by taking in street kids as if they were kittens. (Will Mia Farrow star in th…
Girls in Uniform When a young girl (Herta Thiele) arrives at an upper-crust girls’ boarding school, she nearly collapses under the weight of the school's Prussian, regulation-crazed authoritarianism. Her only ray of hope comes in the form of one sympathetic, patient, and understanding female teacher (Dorothea Wieck), with whom the girl falls completely in …
Ingmar Bergman was commissioned in 1975 to create a special television presentation of Mozart's The Magic Flute, a broadcast which would commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Swedish radio. As a concept it made sense, of course, since there's always been a streak of Mozart's elegant romanticism in Bergman films like Smiles of a Summer Night (The Magic Flute is even re…
Before David Mamet carved a niche for himself as America's most perceptive and provocative chronicler of modern man as con artist (that's con as in confidence), Sweden's Ingmar Bergman created this dark, scary, and brutally funny portrait of a 19th-century hypnotist/artist/con-man who must wrestle with private demons—as well as the supernatur…
Kon Ichikawa's leisurely but always engaging film—set in 1938 Osaka—is a portrait of four lovely Japanese sisters who are heiresses to a dwindling but still considerable family fortune. The movie is about the traditional system that dictates how the two youngest sisters are to be matched with proper husbands, and how the desires or stubbornness of any one of the sisters can se…
The great Anna Magnani is Mamma Roma, the Roman prostitute who hopes to turn her life around and win respectability for the sake of her 16-year-old son. In his second feature film, director Pier Paolo Pasolini clearly implies that Magnani's feeling for her son goes somewhat beyond the traditional mother-son bond, but that doesn't diminish the purity or sincerity of Magnani's m…
Un Homme et une Femme A man and a woman (Jean-Louis Trintignant and Anouk Aimée), both widowed, meet and become interested in one another, but find that it's not easy committing their past lives to the past. Claude Lelouch's swirling, insistently lyrical love story was one of the most popular foreign films of the 1960s. It's become a part of many people&#x…
C'est Arrive Pres de Chez Vous Ben (Benoît Poelvoorde) is a serial killer being followed by a two-man camera/sound crew (which he's hired). They record his casual carnage without lifting a finger to stop him, and they have a good reason; the robberies he commits while on his murderous rampage are paying for the film being shot, and therefore …
Un Condamne a Mort s'Est Echappe, Ou le Vent Souffle ou II Vent A Man Escaped, or the Wind Bloweth Where It Listeth A Condemned Man Has Escaped Describing director Robert Bresson's art by any method other than showing it is a tantalizing but futile task. “I have been influenced by no one,” Bresson said in a 1966 interview, “I am a painter as well as a director, w…
A humble laboratory assistant (Alec Guinness) in a textile mill invents a white cloth that won't stain, tear, or wear out, and it can't be dyed. The panicked garment industry sets out to destroy him and the fabric, resulting in sublimely comic passages. Guinness achieves (once again) perfection, this time as the prototypical, eccentric, absent-minded profe…
Covek Nije Tica A factory engineer and a hairdresser meet and fall in love in a small Yugoslavian town. The first feature film from the gifted Dusan Makavejev is a disarming and truly bizarre comedy/drama mixing sex, politics, and hypnotism, for reasons that happily defy conventional analysis. This is a freewheeling film that was influenced by the early 1960s films of Jean-Luc Godard, but h…
Because of his strict, religious upbringing, Charles (Norman Kaye), a reclusive art collector has great and embarrassing difficulty coping with his sexual impulses. His (partial) solution is to pay a beautiful young woman—an artist's model—to disrobe in front of him once a week, though she's instructed to stop short of reaching compete nudity…
Czlowiek z Zelaza Andrzej Wajda's sequel to his 1976 Man of Marble focuses on a reporter who's been sent as a government shill to cover the Gdansk shipyards’ strike. He's been instructed to do a smear of one of the most outspoken of the strikers, Tomczyk (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), the son of the central figure in Man of Marble, now married to the reporter �…
Czlowiek z Marmur In Poland in the mid-1970s, a young filmmaker (Krystyna Janda) sets out to make a documentary about a bricklayer (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) who, because of his exceptional skill, once gained popularity with other workers. The bricklayer became a champion for workers’ rights and was the subject of many newsreels and much media attention. The filmmaker…
Manen Pa Taket The director of Elvira Madigan shifts gears dramatically in this tense and effective little thriller, which begins with a policeman being gruesomely murdered in his hospital bed. Soon, the investigating team suspects police corruption may be at the heart of the case, and it all leads to a rooftop sniper endangering a densely populated section of busting Stockholm. The Man on the Roo…
L'Homme Qui Aimait les Femmes A charming, intelligent, and thoroughly obsessed bachelor writes his memoirs and remembers the many women he's loved, which is pretty much the same number of women he's known. François Truffaut's movie is heartfelt, risky, sophisticated, and—for the most part—joyous, though after the hero's accidental death some …
Chelovek s Kinoapparatom Soviet filmmaker and theorist Dziga Vertov set out to create a new way of looking at the world through the use of experimental editing and innovative special effects. In his near-cubist 1929 film, The Man with a Movie Camera—a pulsating and rousing portrait of one day in the life of the Soviet Union—Vertov stretched the envelope to the near-breaking point. Th…
The Money Order Le Mandat Unlocking—perhaps for the first time on screen—the complex daily world of modern Africa, Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembène's second feature was a bright burst of lightning on the world cinema scene. Mandabi (The Money Order) is a deceptively simple story of a man who receives a money order and runs straight into a barrage of bu…
Manon des Sources Jean de Florette 2 The conclusion of Claude Berri's two-part epic that began with Jean de Florette finds that Jean's young child, Manon, has grown into a stunningly beautiful woman (Emmanuelle Béart). Manon inadvertently discovers a horrible secret; that her father's death and her own childhood misery were needless, because an underground…
The Manster—Half Man, Half Monster The Split This cheapo 1959 exploitation picture—a Japanese/American co-production—is truly awful. Yet the picture sticks with you because there's a weird kind of sincerity in its ineptitude, and it approaches being truly grotesque as opposed to merely gross. An extremely American reporter (Peter Dyneley in a bizarrely sti…
In a small New Brunswick town in the 1940s, Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter) neglects her mother's stern and hard-earned advice by falling in love with a man who works in the area's dangerous mines. Though he tries to stay away, the disastrous economy leaves him no alternative. Yes, there's an inevitability and even a predictability about the direction in which ev…
The German Sisters Die Bleierne Zeit Personal and historical politics combine in Margarethe von Trotta's portrait of two German sisters in the 1970s. Juliane (Jutta Lampe) is the editor of a left-wing feminist journal, while Marianne (Barbara Sukowa) is active in a notorious, well-organized gang of deadly terrorists. Juliane's natural tendency toward compa…
See Fanny (1932).
During the Franco-Prussian War, a lovely young Italian widow (Edith Clever) is saved by a gallant Russian soldier (Bruno Ganz) from an impending rape. Yet months later, she is alarmed—and utterly puzzled—to find herself pregnant. Eric Rohmer's elegantly reserved and wonderfully witty adaptation of an 18th-century novella by Heinrich von Kleist has t…
Die Ehe der Maria Braun Hanna Schygulla, Rainer Werner Fassbinder's discovery, is given the full-blown movie star treatment in Fassbinder's 1978 breakthrough film. She stars as a woman who refuses to accept the loss of her husband—a soldier in World War II—as a personal defeat, using every tool at her disposal (including those Dietrich-like legs of hers that appe…
La Femme Mariee A young married woman (Macha Méril) tries to make up her mind whether to leave her husband or her lover. The urgency of her crisis is prompted by her pregnancy, though she's not sure which of the two men is the baby's co-founder. Jean-Luc Godard's film looks and feels like it could have been made by a wicked student of his trying to imitate…
Masculin Feminin In the Paris of 1965, a young interviewer who questions authority (Jean-Pierre Léaud) meets a young would-be pop star (Chantal Goya); they're the pair that the film's brilliant, pioneering director, Jean-Luc Godard, has dubbed “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola.” Their affair progresses through a series of 15 loose an…
Eyes of Hell The Spooky Movie Show This wacky Canadian horror movie from 1961 tried—as happens every few years—to resuscitate the brief 3-D craze of the 1950s. It's the story of a psychiatrist (Paul Stevens) who comes into the possession of an ancient Aztec mask, and sees the physical manifestations of his unconscious sexual desires whenever he puts it on. We get…
Pedro Almodóvar's inventive, erotically charged, non-PC black comedy stars Nacho Martinez as a retired matador who satiates his deeply rooted desire to kill by guest-starring in snuff films. He meets his match in the equally deadly Assumpta Serna, and the two are drawn together by a young bull-fighting student who confesses to a series of murders. This early work of Almodóvar&…
Tulitkkutehtaan Tytto Iris (the wonderfully deadpan Kati Outinen) is a plain, shy outsider who shares a drab dwelling with her one-dimensional mother and stepfather, works in a match factory, and hopes desperately for romantic love. Her world is transformed when the extraordinary occurs—she spots a brightly colored party dress in a shop window, buys it, wears it to a bar, and …
Max, My Love Peter (Anthony Higgins), a refined British diplomat living in Paris, has become suspicious of the occasional disappearances of his wife, Margaret (Charlotte Rampling). He follows her, and discovers that she's in love with a chimpanzee named Max. Ever the British gentleman, Peter suggests that everything would be neater if Max simply moved in with the…
Milou en Mai Milou in May A bourgeois family gathers at a country estate for the funeral of the clan's matriarch, while the student riots of May 1968 unfold far from the peaceful sanctuary. The political effects are felt even here, however, for the national strikes which have seized the country are making it impossible to bury the woman on schedule. As the family members wait, the squabbles…
Memorias del Subdesarrollo Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's remarkable 1968 film—the first feature produced in Castro's Cuba to receive American release—is the story of a thoughtful and sympathetic man caught between two worlds. He believes—in theory, at least—in the revolution, but he's far too attached to the comforts and privileges he enjoyed…
Tora No O Wo Fumu Otokotachi They Who Step on the Tiger's Tail Walkers on the Tiger's Tail The wartime Japanese government commissioned Akira Kurosawa to film the most popular of kabuki dramas, the story of a 12th-century lord forced to escape with only six retainers to guard him. The expectation was that Kurosawa would produce a rousing, patriotic movie that would sing the praises o…
An egomaniacal, ambitious German actor (Klaus Maria Brandauer) sides with the Nazis to further his career. Hungary's István Szabó directed a trilogy of films starring the gifted Brandauer, all of which explored different aspects of selling one's soul for personal gain throughout German history. Szabó makes no bones about this story being a modern re…
An acutely bored university student (Clementine Amoroux) meets a shop assistant (Catherine Retore) while hitchhiking.
Fritz Lang's astounding 1925 science-fiction epic is a classic of the German cinema's golden age. It's the story of a future in which society is neatly divided into haves and have-nots; the “masters” run the city from their palatial above-ground digs, while the workers are squeezed into underground tenements and work like slaves. (Did I say science fiction…
Jana Aranya Even among diehard devotees of foreign film, the late Satyajit Ray remains one of the directors whose work is more frequently discussed or alluded to than actually experienced. A case in point is this 1975 tale of a university graduate applying for a job in Calcutta. Carefully and thoughtfully, the young man puts the finishing touches on his job application, seals the envelope and drop…
Two tramps on a religious pilgrimage encounter all manner of startlingly surrealistic sights, incidents, and adventures. As they wander through this series of dreamlike, often hilarious sketches, they discuss and debate Catholic religious doctrine even while the shape of the film itself suggests a somewhat unconventional reinterpretation of the Trinity. (Having an intimate knowledge of that…
Mina (Romane Bohringer) and Ethel (Elsa Zylberstein) meet at the age of seven, and together they experience childhood and teenage traumas, including the desperate pangs of first love. As adults, Mina is consumed by her passionate commitment to her painting, while Ethel, a journalist, remains passionate only about her incorrigible flirtatiousness, as well as her friendsh…
Minbo No Onna The Gangster's Moll The Anti-Extortion Woman The Japanese mobsters known as yakuza are known for shakedowns and general intimidation of businesses. In Juzo Itami's 1992 Minbo—or the Gentle Art of Japanese Extortion, a group of obnoxious, ill-mannered yakuza enjoy congregating at a plush hotel, much to the detriment of business and much to the consternation of the…
Ways of Love The great Anna Magnani is the peasant woman who believes that her pregnancy by a shepherd will produce a holy offspring. That the shepherd is played by Federico Fellini (who wrote the story on which the film is based) is but one of the many extraordinary aspects of Roberto Rossellini's stunning, 43-minute parable; The Miracle may have generated more controversy pe…
Miracolo a Milano Vittorio De Sica's incomparable fantasy is an immensely satisfying neo-realist fable about heavenly intervention in the form of the miracle-working Toto the Hero (Francesco Golisano), whose missions include driving capitalists out of a Milanese ghetto while showering undreamed of blessings on the city's impoverished. De Sica managed to address the very…
Andrei Tarkovsky's The Mirror is a stunning, imagist memoir of a child's life in Russia during World War II, but that's only on the surface.
Froken Julie Miss Julie (Anita Björk), a wealthy but confused noblewoman, is irritated and angered by—as well as attracted to—the masculine butler who works for her and her father. It is Midsummer's Eve and a celebration is planned, but Miss Julie is heartbroken over the breaking off of her engagement. To console herself, she carefully plans the seduction …
Le Sirene du Mississippi François Truffaut's dark romance about a plantation owner (Jean-Paul Belmondo) who sends for a mail-order bride and ends up with the very special delivery of Catherine Deneuve was indifferently received by critics and largely ignored by audiences (the dubbed version shown in many American cities was no help). The film's negl…
Confidential Report As in Citizen Kane, Orson Welles here looks at and stars in the story of another ruthless millionaire, but Gregory Arkadin (Welles) isn't anxious to admit the unsavory source of his wealth. Also as in Kane, an outsider (Robert Arden) is our investigator/guide into the man's mysterious world, examining the trail of his life throug…
My Uncle My Uncle, Mr. Hulot Jacques Tati's justly celebrated comedy contrasts the simple life of his Monsieur Hulot with the technologically complicated life of his family when he aids his nephew in war against his parents’ ultramodern, pushbutton home. Tati's first film in color is an often inspired work in which an impersonal, mechanized future clashes with Hulot's q…
This portrait of a young boy's Christmas in a small Quebec mining town in the 1940s is no saccharine, rose-colored remembrance; Canada's gifted Claude Jutra has blended the natural beauty of the surroundings with the community's grim economic realities to create a bittersweet, heartbreakingly beautiful masterwork. The small joys and humiliations that the boy, his working-class…
Les Somnambules Director Alain Resnais tracks three characters as they encounter success of various kinds in modern Paris. Their adventures are interspersed with ironic, enlightening, and hilariously relevant lectures from Professor Henri Laborit, about the biology that impels and influences human behavior. (When these lectures are particularly impersonal or scientific in nature, we will se…
A Dog's Life A Dog's World It's hard to remember, but there was a time when the Italian word “mondo” was not an official part of the English language. That was the day before the release of Mondo Cane (A Dog's World), a 1963 exploitation film about bizarre human behavior around the world, directed by Gualitero Jacopetti and produced by Franco…
Hei Ma A young boy is sent to live with an orphan girl and a foster grandmother in the Mongolian grasslands. The boy and girl become extremely close, and when she's grown and becomes pregnant by a lover, the brother runs off out of anger and jealousy. Twelve years later he comes back; he's a celebrated musician now, but his “sister” and his entire remembered world have …
Summer with Monika Teenagers Harry and Monika (Lars Ekborg and Harriet Andersson), one an errand boy and the other a beautiful shopgirl, run away together for the summer and find that the winter brings more responsibility than they can handle when Monika becomes pregnant and gives birth. That changes the family dynamic, so to speak, because before long Monika decides that she'…
M. Hire As Monsieur Hire spends his time trying to peer through his window at his beautiful young neighbor (Sandrine Bonnaire), he is transfixed—and appalled—by her romantic encounters. But, as Hitchcock showed us in Rear Window, voyeurs pay a price for their obsession, and rarely remain passive observers no matter how desperately they try. Patrice Leconte's bril…
Monsieur Vincent is the true story of the 17th-century priest who became St. Vincent de Paul. Monsieur Vincent forsakes his worldly possessions and convinces members of the aristocracy to finance charities for the less fortunate. Pierre Fresnay gives a legendary performance in a film that managed to rise to the occasion in every sense. Jean Anouilh wrote the simple and elegant screenplay, and Clau…
Il Mostre In The Monster, the Italian comic actor and director Roberto Benigni plays an ordinary, lovesick nebbish who's mistaken for a serial killer. Benigni finds endless possibilities for mistaken identity gags, double takes, pratfalls and slamming doors in this admittedly obvious farce, but while it's obvious, it's also hilarious. Benigni takes running gags further than yo…
This is a gentle, eloquently told story of two British World War I veterans, one an archaeologist (Kenneth Branagh) and the other an expert in the conservation and restoration of paintings (Colin Firth), who come together when working in a small Yorkshire town. Firth's character suffered great emotional damage during the war, and as he removes layers of grime fro…
The last of the Monty Python feature films is a strong contender for their best—most of it is truly inspired stuff. Notable among the linked sketches are a live sex enactment performed before bored schoolboys, a student-faculty rugby game that turns quite violent, and an encounter between a physician and a reluctant organ donor. The amazing—and amazingly funny—sequence in whic…
La Lune dans le Caniveau In a ramshackle harbor town, a stevedore (Gérard Depardieu) searches the docks for the person who killed his sister many years before. Supposedly the screenplay for Moon in the Gutter was based on a novel by American crime writer David Goodis; if that's true, how did Goodis make a living? Not having read the novel on which the film is based, som…
A group of Polish workers is illegally brought into London to renovate a house. But when martial law is declared back in Poland, the group's foreman (Jeremy Irons) makes the god-like decision to keep the men in the dark so as to get the project completed on time and on budget. Jerzy Skolimowski's simple but brilliantly worked out fable about manipulation and power is a …
Moscow Distrusts Tears Moskwa Sljesam Nje Jerit Three man-hungry girls arrive in Moscow in the 1950s, hoping to find love and happiness. Over the course of the next 20 years, we discover their successes, their compromises, and share in what they've learned about love and life. If you change the setting to New York or Los Angeles, you'll be reminded of glossy 1950s Hollywood movies th…
La Maman et la Putain Arriving on the international film scene in 1973 amid a glut of self-indulgent films about student unrest, Jean Eustache's epic was mistaken in some quarters as just one more of those, especially since the young man at its center—played by Jean-Pierre Léaud in his prime—is perhaps the screen's ultimate self-indulgent student. Comfortably ens…
Mutter Kusters Fahrt Zum Himmel Mrs. Küsters's husband is a frustrated factory worker who flips out and kills the factory owner's son and himself. Left alone, Mrs. Küsters (Brigitte Mira) discovers that everyone is using her husband's death to further their own needs, including her daughter, who uses the publicity to enhance her singing career. Sava…
Mosura Daikaiju Masura Most fans of Japanese monster movies have their favorites, though sometimes this is a tough fact to drag out of adults in public. All the monsters have their charms. Godzilla is the king—this of course is undeniable—and his little smoke-ring-blowing son, Minya, is heir apparent. Rodan has that great wing span, and can knock over buildings (the same three…
A lonely 14-year-old French girl (Nadine Nortier), daughter of an alcoholic father and a terminally ill mother, exhausts her capacity to live with her spiritual and emotional pain. Based on the novel La Nouvelle Histoire de Mouchette by Georges Bernanos, Bresson's film is a structurally simple yet emotionally complex portrait of a tortured soul achieving redemption and release…
Muriel, Ou le Temps d'un Retour The Time of Return Muriel, Or the Time of Return Alain Resnais's 1963 Muriel is the story of Hélène (Delphine Seyrig), a middle-aged widow living in Boulogne with her stepson, Bernard (Jean-Baptiste Thierée). Recently returned from the war in Algeria, Bernard is something of a mess. He's obsessed …
The overweight, dowdy, achingly lonely Muriel (Toni Collette) dreams of a fairy-tale wedding to a vague, fantasized Mr. Right, yet has a classic case of low self-esteem, thanks to her unsupportive family (dad Bill Hunter gives a terrifically flamboyant performance) and creepy, bitchy, back-stabbing “girlfriends.” How Muriel fulfills her obsessive wedding f…
Dearest Love La Souffle au Coeur Louis Malle's smashing 1971 Murmur of the Heart, a brilliantly comic and delicately persuasive portrait of a smart, sensitive, confused 14-year-old French boy and his smart, sensitive, confused Italian mom, remains one of the most audacious and exhilarating movies of Malle's career. Young Laurent Chevalier (Benoit Ferreux) and his brothe…
Ken Russell hit the skids relatively early in his career with a film that made his The Devils (also made in 1971) look like a 1950s educational filmstrip. The Music Lovers purports to contrast Tchaikovsky's musical achievements with his tormented private life—but do we have to be tormented too? The gay Tchaikovsky marries out of convenience, only to discover to his horr…
A headstrong young woman (Judy Davis) spurns the social expectations of turn-of-the-century Australia and pursues opportunities to broaden her intellect and preserve her independence. Davis is a knockout—wonderfully intriguing and completely surprising at every turn—as the energetic and charismatic community trendsetter, and Sam Neill makes a strong impression as the ri…
This miraculously unsentimental and profoundly moving drama is based on the life and autobiography of writer, artist, and cerebral palsy victim Christy Brown. Considered an imbecile by everyone but his mother (Brenda Fricker) until he teaches himself to write, Brown survives his impoverished Irish roots to become a painter and writer using his left foot, the only appendage over which…
Mitt Liv Som Hund 12-year-old Ingemar Johansson (Anton Glanzelius in a charmingly intelligent, unsentimental performance) is separated from his brother and sent to live with relatives in the country when his brother is taken ill. Unhappy, confused, and going through the normal nightmare of puberty, little Ingemar is struggling to understand sexuality and love while trying to find sec…
Vivre Sa Vie It's My Life A woman (Anna Karina) struggling to pay her bills is evicted from her apartment and turns to prostitution. Jean-Luc Godard's probing and eloquent examination of sexual and social relations in the early 1960s is structured as 12 episodes in the woman's life, and it is directed and edited with a tender directness that is both complex and e…
Les Ripoux The French need their popcorn movies too, and sometimes they recruit great actors to star in them. My New Partner (Les Ripoux) is a pleasant but undistinguished police buddy movie featuring amiable performances from Philippe Noiret as a cynical, been-around-the-block detective, and heartthrob Thierry Lhermitte as his by-the-book, young rookie partner. There's nothin…
My Night with Maud Ma Nuit Chez Maud Jean-Louis (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is an engineer who is also a practicing Catholic; he's designed his life as if it were one of his engineering projects, but a moral crisis ensues when he's forced to spend a snowbound night at the home of the beautiful—and atheistic—Maud (Françoise Fabian). Not lo…
Vesnicko Ma Strediskova This wistful, charming film from Czech director Jiri Menzel (Loves of a Blonde) is a seemingly simple portrait of everyday events in a small rural community—a teenager develops a crush on a schoolteacher, a woman cheats on her husband, a doctor keeps getting into accidents. Yet as the film progresses, you can see a pattern in the “simplicity;…
Az en XX. Szazadom This bracingly intelligent and often overlooked gem is a charming and perceptive journey through the early 1900s.Twins Dora and Lili are separated in early childhood. They reunite as grown (very different) women traveling on the Orient Express after they both (unknowingly) have sex with the same man. Dora is coquettish and seductive; Lili is a radical…
Legendary mystery writer Hirai Taro, whose pen name was Edogawa Rampo, was considered Japan's Edgar Allan Poe (pronounce Rampo's entire name slowly and phonetically—get it?); he's propelled into his own stories in this lush, slightly mad, visually stunning fantasy. Set in the period just prior to World War II. Rampo (Naoto Takenaka) is despon…