Abel Gance's Napoleon, completed in 1927 and restored by historian Kevin Brownlow in 1980, remains one of the world's great film experiences. The picture follows the conqueror's life from childhood through his Italian Campaign, and in its execution the film is an astonishingly successful blend of traditional and experimental storytelling techniques; with its sweeping camera mo…
Nelly and Mr. Arnaud Films like Claude Sautet's thoroughly wonderful Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud are what many of us immediately flash on when we dream the dream of French cinema: a complex tapestry of relationships, revelations, and longing in which the romantic dilemmas and real-life despair of wounded human beings can be dealt with over coffee and croissants, rather than AK-47s and Uzis. T…
El Nido The extraordinary Ana Torrent, who was the wide-eyed young star of Cria and Spirit of the Beehive, is a 13-year-old schoolgirl who's the target of the unhealthy, obsessive interest of an aging, wealthy don (Hector Alterio). The Nest looks at first to be a teasing exploitation film disguised as art, but then something unexpected happens; it does become art. The Nest get…
Nybyggarna In the second half of director Jan Troell's epic about an impoverished Swedish family's mid-19th-century emigration to America (the first half of the story was told in The Emigrants), the family settles in their new home in Minnesota, where a different but equally difficult struggle lies ahead. As you settle into the opening scenes of this film, even if it&#x…
Nuit et Brouillard In the case of Alain Resnais's Night and Fog—the existence of which constitutes proof for all time that the motion picture is a great and unique art form—the comparatively brief running time (30 minutes) must never be used to relegate the film to some arbitrary category of lesser importance than what we normally consider the “feature-len…
al-Mummia This extraordinary modern classic of Egyptian cinema is based on a true event: the discovery of ancient treasures near Thebes in 1881. Perhaps the most suspenseful and disturbing of all cinematic attempts to equate the plundering of a nation's treasures with the violation of its soul, The Night of Counting the Years centers on the inevitable conflicts that arise when a mountain tr…
The Night of San Lorenzo La Notte di San Lorenzo In a small Tuscan village during the closing days of World War II, the Nazi occupiers and their fascist collaborators react to the knowledge that the Allied forces are only days away. This remarkable film by Italy's Paolo and Vittorio Taviani is quite unlike any other historical film ever made; it's told through the eyes of a woman who…
Il Portiere de Notte This pathetic trash was considered hot, chic stuff when it was unveiled in art theatres in 1974 (there were lines down the block in New York). It's a soft-core continuation/exploitation of the associations Visconti made between degenerate sexuality and fascism in his 1969 The Damned. Charlotte Rampling is the woman who was sexually abused as a girl …
Le Notti de Cabiria Cabiria In one of the most heartbreakingly poignant performances in screen history, Giulietta Masina plays Cabiria, the Roman street prostitute whose grasp on the value of continuing to live is tested to the breaking point. Fellini described the character of Cabiria as “fragile, tender, and unfortunate; after all that has happened to her, and after the collapse of her na…
Novecento Bernardo Bertolucci's impassioned, sprawling, operatic epic about two Italian families, one aristocratic, the other peasant. With enormous ambition, Bertolucci's attempts to portray nothing less than the changes brought about by the history of the 20th century, beginning with the trauma of World War I and culminating with the arrival of socialism and the corresponding death…
Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie des Grauens Nosferatu, A Symphony of Terror Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror Nosferatu, the Vampire Terror of Dracula Die Zwolfte Stunde F.W. Murnau's silent 1922 adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula remains one of the creepiest and most eerily atmospheric horror films ever made. The film follows Stoker's plot relatively closely, though the characters&#…
Werner Herzog's 1979 reworking of F.W. Murnau's 1922 silent classic is often dissed or dismissed for largely being a shot-by-shot remake of the original. There's no denying that many images are based on Murnau's, but Herzog has also infused the Dracula legend with unnervingly nightmarish qualities that seem entirely Herzog's. Klaus Kinski's performance is …