A Few Days in the Life of I.I. Oblomov Neskolko Dnel iz Zhizni I.I. Oblomov This is a wonderful film version of the classic 19th-century Ivan Goncharov novel about a symbolically inert Russian aristocrat whose childhood friend helps him find a reason to get up out of the house and back into life. This is a stately, deliberate, funny, and eloquent picture that in some ways represents a triumph of c…
The Key Kon Ichikawa's dark comedy is the story of an elderly Japanese gentleman (Ganjiro Nakamura) whose sexual impotence leads to a bizarre series of events. His idea for producing his desired erection through an elaborate scheme does indeed work, but it also generates considerably more excitement than he bargained for. Odd Obsession surfers somewhat from a necessary obfusca…
Fag Hag Syoko (Misa Shimizu) is a single young working woman living in an apartment that's small even by Tokyo standards. Syoko meets a gay man and his older, married, closeted lover and when they become friendly she lets them use the apartment as their love nest. Complications ensue, but not before we get a peek into the motives and personal rewards of Syoko's preferen…
Agnieszka Holland's wrenching film is based on a 1984 French newspaper story that evoked themes explored in The Return of Martin Guerre. An adored 9-year-old boy disappears from his home in a small French town and his family comes completely unstrung. The mother (Brigitte Rouan) obsesses on Olivier's disappearance and lapses into trances; the father (Franç…
Incredible, incomparable, great. Sergio Leone's amazing Once Upon a Time in the West is, on one level, an ingeniously scripted western in which a number of characters slowly reveal their purposes to each other and the audience, culminating in a grandly designed finale. But what director Sergio Leone and his co-writers Segio Donati, Dario Argento, and Bernardo Bertolucci have achieved is som…
This is the violent and deeply poignant story of a struggling Maori family, the Hekes, who have left their rural New Zealand roots to live in the city. Feisty mother Beth (Rena Owen) is struggling with five children and her abusive, volatile husband Jake (Temuera Morrison) who's always out of work, always drunk, always brawling, and always blaming everybody but h…
L'Une Chante, L'Autre Pas Two very different women who met and became friends in the 1960s share personal and political experiences as they journey together into the 1970s.Valérie Mairesse and Thérèse Leotard star as Pomme, a radical feminist and singer, and Suzanne, a don't-rock-the-boat conservative and wife, in Agnes Varda's schematic, dramatical…
The Demon The Devil Woman A brutal parable about a mother and her daughter-in-law in war-ravaged medieval Japan who subsist by murdering stray soldiers and selling their armor. One soldier beds the daughter, setting the mother-in-law on a vengeful tirade. She dons a grisly looking samurai mask in order to scare the girl away from the soldier, but discovers to her horror that she is unable to remov…
Roma, Citta Aperta Rome, Open City A leader in the Italian underground resists Nazi control of the city. Roberto Rossellini's landmark work was filmed in actual locations within months of the Allied liberation of Italy. The film changed virtually everything about the possibilities of moviemaking, since it once and for all discarded all the old certainties about what constituted “docu…
Prova d'Orchestra Federico Fellini's clever and entertaining Orchestra Rehearsal is the result of a commission Fellini received from Italian television for the production of a short film about—an orchestra rehearsal. The resulting political satire is not exactly what was expected, and the 72-minute film set off a firestorm of controversy when it was first screened (the …
The Word A man who believes he is Christ (Preben Lerdorff-Rye) is ridiculed until be begins performing miracles—including a resurrection—that result in the healing of a broken family. Danish director Carl Dreyer's statement on the continuing struggle between religious dogma and personal faith is a profoundly demanding work of art from the deeply religious Dreyer.…
Sally Potter's stylistically inventive, witty adaptation of Virginia Woolf's 1928 novel—covering 400 years in the life of an English nobleman whose defiance of death is small potatoes next to his evolution from a man into a woman—is as elegant visually as it is conceptually. Orlando (played charmingly throughout by the coolly androgynous Tilda Swinton) is …
Orphee The legend of Orpheus, the poet whose fascination with death takes him on a search that leads from this world to the next, is updated to a modern Parisian setting by perhaps the only other poet up to the job: Jean Cocteau. Cocteau's Orpheus (Jean Marais) is a brooding, masculine, dissatisfied dreamer whose earthly wife, Eurydice (Marie Déa), is disp…
Luchino Visconti's legendary first feature was an adaptation of James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice, transferred to fascist Italy. The classic story of a drifter who conspires with a innkeeper's wife to murder her husband, Ossessione is widely considered to be the first example of what would later be classified by film historians as cinematic “neo-realism.&#x…
Wake in Fright A horror movie about beer: that's something you don't see everyday, and neither is a film that manages to be this unnerving while containing this much sunlight. Outback is the story of an Australian schoolteacher (Gary Bond) on summer vacation, who gets off his train at a stop just to stretch his legs, promptly gambles away his money, and finds himself st…
The Cloak Shinel A meek little clerk named Akaky Akakyevich (Roland Bykov), who is the tiniest of cogs in the huge wheel of a Dickensian 19th-century St. Petersburg, believes there will be a change in the heartless world in which he lives once he finally attains the magnificent new overcoat of which he has long dreamed. Bykov's performance as the pathetic little man tossed abo…