Roberto Rossellini followed the international triumph of his Open City with this six-part look at Italy during World War II. Each of the film's sequences tells a different aspect of the Allies’ arrival. One sequence is the story of a man from New Jersey who tries to develop a relationship with a young woman without knowing a word of Italian. Another focuses on a young street robber w…
Die Buechse der Pandora The era of German expressionism was drawing to a close by the time of G.W. Pabst's silent classic Pandora's Box, which established Louise Brooks as one of most electrifying, erotically charged screen personalities in movie history. Brooks plays Lulu, a tempestuous, irresistible knockout who seduces or murders (or both) just about everyone she com…
A Passion Ingmar Bergman's film is a complex psychological drama about four people alone on an isolated island. Max von Sydow is an ex-convict living a hermit's existence when he becomes involved with a widow (Liv Ullmann) and her friends (Erland Josephson and wife Bibi Andersson), all of whom have secrets in their past that they would prefer to conceal. E…
Renée Maria Falconetti appeared in one film in her lifetime, Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc. To call her performance legendary would be a gross understatement; to call the film a masterpiece is not enough. The film is based on historical records of Joan's trial, which took place when she was 19. The film is extremely straightforward, and it is unrelentin…
The Song of the Road The Saga of the Road The Lament of the Path Apu, a young Bengali boy, is growing up in rural India with his parents, his sister Durga, and his aged, beloved Auntie, who is somewhat disabled and more than a little cranky. While Apu's father goes off to the city on one of his many attempts to find work, his mother becomes overwhelmed by the difficulty of keeping her famil…
Pauline á la Plage 15-year old Pauline (Amanda Longlet accompanies her beautiful, considerably more experienced older cousin Marion (Arielle Dombasle) to the French coast, vaguely considering the possibility of romance. As is typical in the comedies of Eric Rohmer, a great deal of conversation takes place on the subjects of fidelity, love, sex, and trust. And as is inev…
This is an overpowering tale of a Swedish boy (Pelle Hvenegaard) and his widower father (Max von Sydow) who serve landowners in late 19th-century Denmark. Director Bille August's compassionate saga of the human spirit contains many wonderfully conceived, aria-like sequences of hardship, tragedy, and intrigue, all of them anchored on the stunning performances of y…
Julien Duvivier's incomparable ?épé le Moko is the story of a gang leader (Jean Gabin), living in the Casbah of Algiers, who survives by successfully playing an intricate game of cat-and-mouse with the police. ?épé's charmed life changes dramatically when he falls under the spell of a stunning Parisian woman (Mireille Balin), wh…
A famous actress (Liv Ullmann) decides that she will stop speaking, and is treated by a lively, talkative, forthcoming nurse (Bibi Andersson) at a secluded cottage. As they learn more about each other and their relationship turns increasingly tense, the women's personalities begin to merge and they become psychologically—and perhaps physically—indis…
L'Inde Fantome In 1967, after a disappointing critical reception for his still-underrated The Thief of Paris, Louis Malle took a cinematographer and a sound recorder and flew to India. Malle wanted to recharge his creative batteries and to get away from the rat-race of the commercial film business by making a documentary on Calcutta. The resulting 90-minute film, Calcutta, is remarkable, bu…
Le Fantome de la Liberte The Specter of Freedom Master surrealist Luis Buñuel's immensely enjoyable, episodic funhouse glides from character to character and bizarre event to bizarre event with the sure logic of a dream. A man rearranging the objects on his mantel disgustedly proclaims, “I'm fed up with symmetry.” A child comes home with a set of pornographic pos…
Ada (Holly Hunter), a mute Scottish widow with a young daughter (Anna Paquin), agrees to an arranged marriage with Stewart (Sam Neill), a colonial landowner in 19th-century New Zealand. Absent speech, Ada expresses her feelings by playing her cherished piano, left behind on the beach by her new husband. Another settler, George (Harvey Keitel)…
Though Robert Bresson's great Pickpocket is a scripted film, meticulously photographed, edited, and performed, it leaves you with the feeling that you have seen something more authentic, naked, and true than any work of so-called cinéma vérité. The movie's protagonist (played by a non-professional actor, as are most of the parts in Bresson's films&#…
A school outing in 1900 to a mountainous outback region of Australia ends tragically when a schoolteacher and three young girls vanish without a trace. The eerie, early film by director Peter Weir (Witness, The Truman Show) is haunting, intriguing, and memorably unnerving—an achievement that is all the more formidable because so much of the film takes place in daylight-saturat…
A woman (Anna Karina) fleeing gangsters joins a man (Jean-Paul Belmondo) fleeing his wife and together they race across the South of France in their shiny, 1962 Ford Galaxie. This exhilarating and unclassifiable work from New Wave pioneer Jean-Luc Godard is a brilliantly colored, romantic, melodramatic, funny, and shocking tale of a political and cinematic world in tran…
A young Japanese girl, whose calligrapher father celebrates her birthdays by lovingly painting a ritualized message on her face grows into a woman (Vivian Wu) who's driven inexorably into an obsessive, all-encompassing quest for erotic perfection. The Pillow Book is one of director Peter Greenaway's most accessible and visually intoxicating works, exploring themes of th…
Director Hector Babenco's wrenching portrait of an orphaned boy's nightmarish existence on the crime-ridden streets of Sao Paolo, Brazil, is one of the most grueling, powerful, and disturbing films of the last quarter-century. Pixote has justly been compared to Luis Buñuel's great Los Olvidados, yet there has perhaps never been a vision of childhood on screen as thoroug…
Monsieur Hulot (Jacques Tati) tries in vain—but with remarkable tenacity—to keep an appointment in a forbidding modern landscape of glass and steel. The third film in Jacques Tati's trilogy about Hulot's struggle with modernization (after Mr. Hulot's Holiday and Mon Oncle) was an extraordinarily ambitious and costly production, featuri…
Jackie Chan's Police Force Police Force Jackie Chan's Police Story Ging Chaat Goo Si As of this writing, Jackie Chan was still making movies, still doing his own stunts, and still ambulatory (on most days). Diehard fans of the great Hong Kong action star like to debate which of his films is the best, which has the best stunts, and which has the best outtakes—a si…
Four-year-old Ponette (Victorie Thivisol), whose mother has died in a car accident, progresses through stages of grieving, ultimately emerging—together with the audience—at a glorious and completely new awareness of what it means to be alive. Ponette wants to know what death is—what it means—and the more questions she asks grown-ups, the more we realize th…
Il Postino A bittersweet, charming film about Mario (Massimo Troisi), a shy postman who winds up the personal postman of poet Pablo Neruda (Philippe Noiret), who is exiled from his beloved Chile in 1952, granted asylum by the Italian government, and who finds himself living in the tiny Italian community of Isla Negra. The tongue-tied Mario has fallen in love with barmai…
Yokihi The Empress Yang Kwei Fei Set in 8th-century China, Kenji Mizoguchi's elegant film is based on the life of the last T'ang emperor and the beautiful servant girl he loves and makes his bride. She falls victim to court jealousies and he to his greedy family, though even death cannot end their love (which we see in a staggering final sequence that rivals anything in Mizogu…
Kavkazsky Plennik Prisoner of the Caucasus Two Russian soldiers whose small unit has been ambushed are taken prisoner by Chechen rebels who hope to swap them for hostages held in a Russian jail. The mother of one of the soldiers (who's played by director Sergei Bodrov's son)—angered by the conflict and determined to get her boy back-sets off on foot to do what sh…
At the moment I sat down to watch director Peter Lynch's National Film Board of Canada production Project Grizzly last year I considered myself a relatively sophisticated moviegoer, able to separate—to a reasonable degree, anyway—complete fabrications from photographed reality. That's why when the lights went up after the screening was over I was able to assure myself t…
Jocelyn Moorehouse's directorial debut is a quietly engaging tale of manipulation, friendship, and erotic obsession between a young blind man named Martin (Hugo Weaving), his housekeeper (Genevieve Picot), and the young man he befriends (Russell Crowe). Martin, mistrustful since his youth of those around him, takes photographs of his environment &#x…
Nizza Jean Vigo was 24 when he bought a camera to make his first, short film, A Propos de Nice. The cinema club he had started in Nice wasn't enough for him, and though he devoured the films of others, he felt the need to create his own. Reminiscent of the “Kino Eye” films of the brilliant Soviet theorist and filmmaker Dziga Vertov, A Propos de Nice is social criticism of a hi…
A dying writer (John Gielgud) spends a sleepless night in nearly intolerable pain, which he tries to fight off with bottle after bottle of cold white wine. As the night wears on, his imagination weaves his terror, his memories, and his desires into a fantastic, hallucinatory novel in which the members of his family act out a mysterious melodrama—though his story's progr…
Plein Soleil Lust for Evil An amoral, social-climbing, money-hungry American named Ripley (Alain Delon) is hired by a wealthy businessman to go to Europe to bring back the man's wealthy playboy son, Philippe (Maurice Ronet). It soon dawns on Ripley that there might be considerably more money and power (i.e. women) in it for him if he were to find a …