Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky's enigmatic, mesmerizing final film was released following his death in 1986. The Sacrifice is the story of a retired intellectual (Erland Josephson) living in a magnificent country estate, who learns that the world is about to be destroyed in an inevitable nuclear holocaust. Unable to bear the idea of the loss of his family, he digs deep with…
This gritty and engaging directorial debut by Mira Nair is a lively, poignant, ultimately heartbreaking portrait of a child who begs in the streets of contemporary Bombay in order to raise enough money to return to his mother's house in the country. Using a largely non-professional cast—selected from the streets and trained in special, improvisational workshops—Nair's s…
Sixteen children—eight boys and eight girls—are kidnapped by Fascists in World War II Italy. After arriving at a secluded, palatial villa, the children are bound, stripped, trained like dogs to follow strict orders, and then are systematically subjected to sexual humiliation, sadomasochistic torture, rape, indescribable violence, and finally savage, unbearable mutilation. Based on a …
The groundbreaking first feature by Angolan director Sarah Maldoror is the story of a black resistance leader arrested in 1961 by Portuguese colonialists, at the height of one of the early anti-Portuguese uprisings.
Rebellion In this powerful and hugely entertaining blend of social commentary and rip-roaring swordplay, Toshiro Mifune plays a father living under the feudal rules of Japan in the 18th century. But when a neighboring warlord claims that Mifune's daughter-in-law and new grandchild are the warlord's property and demands they be turned over to him, Mifune and his family have no choice …
Tsubaki Sanjuro In Akira Kurosawa's witty, jaunty, satiric sequel to his samurai classic Yojimbo, a talented but lazy samurai (Toshiro Mifune) comes to the aid of a well-meaning group of naive, bumbling young would-be warriors. Much more of a lark than the director's previous, darkly cynical samurai epics (particularly the pitch-black, hilariously bitter Yojimbo&…
Akira Kurosawa's assured and entertaining 1943 debut film as a director—based on a popular story about the rivalry between judo and jujitsu—chronicles an eager young student's education and training at the hands of a martial arts master. Kurosawa was 33 when he made Sanshiro Sugata, and since it was made during World War II, he wasn't allowed to tackle any story …
The Bailiff Sansho Dayu In 11th-century Japan, a woman (Kinuyo Tanaka) decides to go searching for her husband, a former official who was banished from his province years ago. She takes her two children with her on her quest, but soon the family is broken up and sold—the mother into prostitution, the children into slavery in the service of the cruel and ruthless Sansho (…
Rekopis Znaleziony W Saragossie This highly ambitious epic yarn is perhaps the best-known of the many rarely screened works of Polish director Wojciech Has. A movie that's become as legendary as the Jan Potocki novel on which it's based, The Saragossa Manuscript is the long and winding tale of a Belgian military officer (Zbigniew Cybulski) who encounters two beautiful p…
One of a flood of movies from that period about the bleak lives of the British working class, director Karel Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning is possibly the simplest most affecting of the bunch. The story—about a young machine operator (Albert Finney) who's so stifled by his family, his job, and his small town that he lives for the night life, booze, an…
The Naked Night Sunset of a Clown Gycklarnas Afton This somber 1953 Ingmar Bergman film details the grisly and humiliating experiences of a second-rate traveling circus as it rolls across a barren, desolate Swedish countryside. One of Bergman's darkest and most pessimistic films is built around the central story of the circus's owner (Ake Grönberg) and his relati…
A beautiful single mother (Catherine Deneuve), stifled and unfulfilled in her small French town, is sexually reawakened by an escaped convict (Wadeck Stanczak) who's hiding out near her home. Things become considerably more sticky when the convict resorts to physical violence to protect Deneuve's young son, who's already suffering the emotional effe…
The husband and wife are Marianne (Liv Ullmann) and Johan (Erland Josephson), and their marriage is in trouble long before she finds out about his affair with a younger woman (Bibi Andersson). Word has it that all of Sweden tuned in for director Ingmar Bergman's six-part television series chronicling the disintegration of Marianne and Johan's…
Mui du du Xanh The debut feature from director Tran Anh Hung is so assured and quietly intoxicating that—despite its deceptively languid pace—it may be nearly over before you realize that more than 90 minutes have passed. Set in Saigon in the 1950s and 1960s, this is the story of a young peasant girl who arrives from the countryside to take a job as servant to a bourgeois family. The…
Hortense (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) is an optometrist who decides to seek information about her birth mother when her beloved adoptive mother dies. She discovers that she was born to Cynthia (Brenda Blethyn), an anxious and unhappy middle-aged single mother who is different from Hortense in many ways, perhaps the least of which is the color of her skin. Director Mike Leig…
Un Heros Tres Discret A Very Discreet Hero When a young Frenchman (Mathieu Kassovitz) misses his chance to become an actual hero in World War II, he ingeniously fabricates an intricate and detailed scenario for himself in which he becomes widely known as a hero of the Resistance. Until the film's surprising ending, he is the only one who's aware that he is a hero who ne…
The Wanton Contessa In Venice in 1866, as loyal patriots join forces against the occupying Austrian military, an Italian noblewoman (Alida Valli) very nearly betrays her country as a result of her desperate, obsessive love for a cynical, handsome, greedy young Austrian officer (Farley Granger). Luchino Visconti's visually stunning, richly colored spectacle was co…
Pasqualino Settebellezze Pasqualino: Seven Beauties During World War II, Pasqualino (Giancarlo Giannini), a small-time, low-level Italian mafioso with seven ugly sisters (the “seven beauties”) to support, finds himself in a German prison camp under the tyrannical control of a grotesquely fat guard (Shirley Stoler). Using his sleazy but highly…
Shichinin No Samurai The Magnificent Seven In 16th-century Japan, a small village is plundered annually by bandits who steal not only the food supply, but some of the farmers’ lives and all of their self-respect. After the intimidating raid that opens the film, the farmers reach a breaking point; they're divided, however, between whether to simply hand over the grain and beg for merc…
Tini Zabutykh Predkiv Shadows of Our Ancestors Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors Wild Horses of Fire Sergei Parajanov's luminous, electrifying folk tale is set in the Carpathians in the 19th century; it's the story of a peasant who enters into a loveless marriage as a result of a bitter, murderous feud involving his own family and that of the woman he truly loved. This breathtaking …
Shall We Dansu? A sense of deja vu isn't uncommon at the movies, but there was something weirdly familiar about the Japanese sleeper hit Shall We Dance? that kept tugging at my sleeve as it rolled innocuously on. The obvious suspects popped into my head: Strictly Ballroom? Yes, but that's obvious. Saturday Night Fever? Well, sure—Sensei Night Fever, perhaps—though the h…
Married concert musicians Jan (Max von Sydow) and Eva (Liv Ullmann) flee a violent and terrible civil war by seeking refuge on a small island near their unnamed country's coast. Inevitably, they discover that even on their island the war's impact is felt, and before long their lives become a struggle not only for mere survival, but to maintain a measure of…
Yao a Yao Yao Dao Waipo Qiao In the corrupt, gangster-run Shanghai of the 1930s, a young rural boy named Shuisheng is brought to town by a gang boss to become the personal servant of the boss's mistress, Bijou (Gong Li). Told primarily though the progressively less innocent eyes of Shuisheng, Shanghai Triad begins as an explosion of color, music, and sensual decadence that dra…
Two young shoeshine boys, struggling to survive in a wartime Rome occupied by American Gls (“shoeshine” is what the street kids of Rome shouted at Gls to make money during the war), become involved in the black market and are jailed. Once in prison, their sense of abandonment and hopelessness becomes overwhelming, and even their friendship ultimately falls victim to the…
Tirez sur le Pianiste Shoot the Pianist Former concert pianist Edouard Saroyan (Charles Aznavour), disillusioned, unlucky in love, and world-weary, has changed his name to Charlie Kohler and now plays a very different kind of tune at the piano of an undistinguished Parisian bar. Yet even here he's unable to avoid commitments, and the underworld types he falls in with lead him …
Tystnaden The third in Ingmar Bergman's so-called “crisis-of-faith” trilogy. The Silence is at once the most enigmatic and the most disturbing of the three (the earlier films were Through α Glass Darkly and Winter Light). The two women in the film, Ester (Ingrid Thulin) and Anna (Gunnel Lindblom) have checked into a large, somew…
Les Silences du Palais This elegant and quietly powerful debut film from Tunisian director Moufida Tlatli is the story of Alia (Ghalia Lacroix), whose mother is a servant in the palace of the Bey. Her mother's lifelong role has been to serve food and make her body available for the amusement of Tunisia's royal princes. Alia is now an admired and talented singer in a mod…
Simon del Desierto Based loosely on the life of the 15th-century saint Simeon Stylites, Buñuel's dark, 43-minute comedy is the story of Simon (Claudio Brook), who dwells in self-imposed solitude at the top of a 30-foot pillar in the middle of a barren desert in order to devote himself to repentance and contemplation. But Simon discovers that solitude doesn't come…
La Fille Seule At an early morning meeting over coffee, a young woman tells her boyfriend that she's pregnant and that she's not sure what she's going to do about it. After a bit of tense discussion, she leaves abruptly and walks the short distance to a small Parisian hotel, where she begins her first day on the job as a room service waitress. For the next hour or so, we follo…
The enchanting directorial debut from Soviet director Nikita Mikhalkov (Oblomov, Dark Eyes) is the story of a film crew trying to complete a project they're shooting in the Crimea in 1917, even as the revolution erupts all around them. A Slave of Love is a romantic and poignant love story on a number of levels, including the director's nostalgic longing for a time long …
L'Agent de Poche Truffaut followed his dark The Story of Adele H. with this deceptively sunny look at the world of children—some who thrive and some who barely survive. Small Change was lambasted in many quarters for what was considered sentimentality, yet Truffaut's treatment of children—a subject he began with in The 400 Blows and returned to regularly—was base…
Sommarnattens Leende Eight Swedish aristocrats become romantically and comically intertwined over a single weekend in Ingmar Bergman's charming, witty, and exceptionally graceful comedy of manners, sex, and blank cartridges. Bergman's elegantly worked-out screenplay keeps all of the simultaneous intrigues and bedroom farces spinning zestily, and keeps the overall effect uplifting, sw…
Le Peau Douce Silken Skin Truffaut's first feature following the worldwide triumph of his Jules and Jim was a decided flop in the United States. It may have been that, following Jules and Jim’s perceived assault on bourgeois values (represented by that film's central ménage-à-trois), this seemingly conventional tale of a married man's affair …
Near the planet Solaris, a space station orbits as the cosmonauts inside try to understand why they've been having emotionally overwhelming visions of their earlier lives on Earth. They discover that the ocean of Solaris is actually a vast, intelligent entity that is affecting their memories and thought processes in life-changing ways. The brilliant Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky tried t…
Marcel Ophüls's great 1971 The Sorrow and the Pity is the result of the questioning of a widely held belief—that every man, woman, and child who lived in Nazi-occupied France either joined the Resistance or helped it. Ophüls turned his attention to a single French town—Clermont-Ferrand—and interviewed those residents who remembered and would speak, as well…
Una Giornata Specials The Great Day The day of a huge rally celebrating Hitler's visit to Rome in 1939 serves as the backdrop for an affair between a weary housewife (Sophia Loren) and a lonely, gay radio announcer (Marcello Mastroianni). Marcello and Sophia give it their all, but Ettore Scola's film never ignites. There's a predetermined, schematic…
Thirty years after his father's murder by fascists, a young man (Giulio Brogi) returns to that small Italian town to learn why the killing took place. When the townspeople resist his inquiry, he becomes trapped in a mysterious and ever-widening web where history and its convenient revision exert a stranglehold on the truth. (That truth, by the way, turns out to be stran…
A master criminal (Rudolph Klein-Rogge) poses as a reputable, well-recognized financier in order to gain access to secret government plans and instigate worldwide economic chaos.
El Espiritu de la Colmena A lonely young Spanish girl named Ana (Ana Torrent of Cria) becomes enthralled and eventually obsessed by a Saturday matinee screening of the 1931 Boris Karloff version of Frankenstein. Encouraged by her older sister Isabel (Isabel Telería), intrigued by the creature's emotional vulnerability, and completely convinced by the illus…
A meteorite crashing to Earth has created a desolate wasteland area known as the Zone. The Zone is forbidden to anyone except special guides known as Stalkers. Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky's epic metaphysical fantasy focuses on three Stalkers who enter the Zone, searching for “the room,” a spot at the Zone's center that supposedly has the power to reveal and materia…
Etat de Siege Costa-Gavras—arguably the original Oliver Stone—directed this rip-snorting, fact-based conspiracy thriller about the events surrounding the death of U.S. Agency for International Development employee Daniel Mitrone (here called Philip Michael Santore and played by Yves Montand), suspected to be involved in the torture and murder of Uruguayan dissidents in …
In Weimar Germany, a provincial stationmaster's wife (Elisabeth Trissenaar) expresses her boredom with her ineffectual, servile husband (Kurt Raab) by entering into a series of shallow sexual affairs. Both a stylized portrait of dead-end marital despair and a thinly veiled political parable about a Germany too hedonistically self-absorbed to grasp the dangers fas…
Il Ladro di Bambini Every so often a picture just seems to loom up out of nowhere and—totally and unexpectedly—overwhelms you. In 1992, that film, for me at least, was Gianni Amelio's The Stolen Children (Il Ladro di Bambini), the saga of a shy and sensitive carabiniere (Enrico Lo Verso) and the two children he's been assigned to escort from …
Baisers Voles Antoine Doinel, the troubled 13-year-old of François Truffaut's The 400 Blows, had already made a second screen appearance when this full-fledged sequel—the third Doinel film—was released. (He appeared as a love-struck teenager in the Antoine and Colette segment of the 1962 omnibus film Love at Twenty.) Stolen Kisses begins with Antoine…
The Heir to Genghis Khan In Central Asia in 1920, a wounded Mongolian trapper is discovered to be a descendent of Genghis Khan, and he is placed in the position of puppet emperor of a British-controlled Mongolian province. As he regains his health, the evil designs of the oppressive, would-be colonialist rulers—in league with treacherous White troops—becomes clear to him, and he turn…
L'Histoire d'Adele H. François Truffaut called his 1975 film The Story of Adele H. “a musical composition for a solo instrument,” though it's impossible to discern whether that instrument is the character (Victor Hugo's daughter Adele) or the actress who plays her (Isabelle Adjani). In the final analysis it doesn't…
Qiu Ju Da Guansi Qiu Ju Goes to Court The pregnant Qiu Ju's husband is assaulted and injured by the head of their rural Chinese village. Outraged and angered at the lack of any justice or compensation for the injury, the determined, quietly obsessive Qiu Ju (a nearly unrecognizable Gong Li) slowly climbs up the labyrinthine Chinese administrative ladder from official to higher…
Une Affaire de Femmes One of the last women to be guillotined in France was Marie Latour, whose hand-to-mouth existence was supplemented with a little extra cash when she began performing illegal abortions in occupied France during World War II. Her story is the centerpiece of Claude Chabrol's dark and disturbing The Story of Women, which gives us a Marie (Isabelle Huppert) wh…
Fresa y Chocolate Sex, politics, and friendship set in 1979 Havana. University student David (Vladimir Cruz) is slouching morosely in a cafe eating chocolate ice cream when he's eyed by the older, educated, gay, strawberry-eating Diego (Jorge Perugorria), who persuades David to visit him at his apartment. Resolutely heterosexual (and just as committedly co…
This tense, smart, assured early feature from Akira Kurosawa is the story of a rookie police detective (Toshiro Mifune) whose service revolver is plucked from his pocket while he's riding on a bus. Soon after its theft, he comes to the horrifying realization that his gun being used to commit a series of murders. Together with his seasoned, cynical older partner (Takashi…
Sergei M. Eisenstein's 1924 debut film is an audacious and astonishing depiction of a pre-revolutionary (1912) factory strike and the resulting violent clash between strikers and the Czar's brutal military forces. Strike is an electrifying film in which Eisenstein first demonstrated the power of his theories of film editing, which he characterized as “montage.&#x…
Three unlikely friends, all misfits to varying degrees and all fed up with the brutal and uncaring Berlin neighborhood they live in, decide to chuck it all for a shot at the American Dream in rural Wisconsin. Eva Mattes (Céleste) stars with Clemens Scheitz and the enigmatic Bruno S. (The Mystery of Kaspar Hauser) in Werner Herzog's bizarre, hilarious, and …
France's Luc Besson first drew attention with his stylized, post-apocalyptic, New New Wavish Le Dernier Combat; his 1985 Subway was a more direct bid for the francs of disenfranchised, movie-loving French punks. It's the story of a spike-haired renegade (Christopher Lambert) on the lam from the law, the mob, and a rich man's beautiful wife (Isabelle Adjani…
Rue Cases Negres An utter, unexpected delight. Euzhan Palcy's glowing coming-of-age story is set in Martinique in 1931, when much of the population toiled in the sugar cane fields under French colonial rule. Jose (Garry Cadenat) is an 11-year-old who lives with his wise and spirited grandmother (Darling Legitimus, the eccentric concierge in Bertolucci's Last Tang…
Zuckerbaby Marianne (Marianne Sägebrect) is a hefty, lonely mortuary attendant living in Munich who falls for a young, handsome subway conductor (Eisi Gulp). When she's not dolling herself up, Marianne spends her time tracking down the man of her dreams, stalking and staking out trains and stations to discover who he is, where he lives, and how she can mak…
Illicit Interlude Summerplay Sommarlek Just before an opening night performance, a prima ballerina, Marie (Maj-Britt Nilson), receives the diary of a boy she had an affair with ten years ago, when they were both students. The boy has since died, and the diary stirs memories in the dancer that will alter the course of her life, and will clear her mind and heart in ways she could never…
Les Dimanches de Ville d'Arvay Cybele A traumatized war veteran (Hardy Kruger) suffering from amnesia and vertigo develops a strong emotional bond with a young orphaned girl (Patricia Gozzi). When the innocent relationship between the two is misunderstood and greeted with hostility by the local townspeople, an inevitable but tragic series of events converge to de…
This lyrical and lovely exploration of childhood continues the complex Bergman family saga that began with the autobiographical Fanny and Alexander and left off just prior to the birth of little Ingmar in The Best Intentions. Sunday's Children takes up the story eight years after the director's birth (though it never turns into the story of little Ingmar's fascination w…
An American dancer (the petite, frail-looking Jessica Harper) arrives at a strange European ballet school and finds she has to do some fancy pirouetting to get out of the way of all the bodies, blood, and mayhem. Italian fear-master Dario Argento directed this certifiably weird cult item in 1977, and its American release was spotty. Some cities saw the film in a pruned, less gory ver…
In the aftermath of a tragic, small-town accident in British Columbia that takes the lives of 14 schoolchildren, a sophisticated big-city lawyer (Ian Holm) arrives on the scene to convince parents of the need to assign blame—and to collect a settlement. Atom Egoyan's thoughtful and skillfully performed adaptation of Russell Banks's story is a carefully layered pi…
Jane Campion's stylized and striking tragicomedy is the story of two sisters—Kay, a withdrawn, nearly paranoid Plain Jane (Karen Colston), and Dawn (Genevieve Lemon in a brave and amazingly effective performance), a manic, corpulent, wildly extroverted misfit who reenters her family's life with a vengeance and turns it upside down. Dawn, who was, an…
Swept Away…By an Unusual Destiny in the Blue Sea of August A rich, beautiful, arrogant Milanese woman (Mariangela Melato) is shipwrecked on a desert island with the masculine deckhand (Giancarlo Giannini) she used to treat like a slave. Lina Wertmüller's sexual fable takes on a not-so-subtle political dimension when material girl Melato becomes the …
One Plus One Jean-Luc Godard's legendary experiment tells two simultaneous stories; one is of the death of a young revolutionary, while the other is of the creation of a song by the Rolling Stones. One works, the other doesn't. Yet the sequences chronicling the Stones’ assembly of “Sympathy for the Devil,” lick by lick and track by track, while the camera glides …