First up in the recent “Tales of the Four Seasons” cycle by France's Eric Rohmer is the story of Natasha (Florence Darel), a romantically minded, meddling young high-school student who hopes her father (Hugues Quester) will dump the woman he's been dating in order to take up with Natasha's smart and charming philosophy teacher (…
Conte d'Hiver The second chapter in Eric Rohmer's “Tales of the Four Seasons” cycle tells of the romantic trials of Félicie (Charlotte Véry), a young woman who simply cannot choose between her two smitten lovers and the man she truly longs for (and the father of her child), Charles (Frédéric Van Den Driessch…
Dandelion When it premiered here in 1986, this second film from the late Juzo Itami (his debut, The Funeral, caused something of a modest scandal in Japan) seemed all the sweeter for being so thoroughly unexpected. Yet recent, repeated viewings—minus the element of surprise—reveal Tampopo to be a marvel of comic structure so inventive, knowing, sweet, and tart that this…
A talented filmmaker named Sally (Sally Potter) who has a single hit movie behind her (not unlike, perhaps, Potter's own successful Orlando) becomes distracted from her new film project when she finds herself immersed in the sensuous world of the tango. Her passion for the dance—and for other things—deepens when she meets and takes lessons from a ha…
Ta'm e Guilass Taste of Cherries A man drives around the outskirts of Teheran on a bright, airy day, stopping people at random and engaging them in small talk, looking for someone who has the time and the willingness to help him with a project—his own suicide. Well, perhaps his own suicide. If he changes his mind—which he's not ruling out—he'll need that s…
Marusa No Onna On the heels of the popular domestic success of Japanese director Juzo Itami's first two films, The Funeral and Tampopo, Itami turned his attention to the very real and very hot topic of tax evasion in Japan. In his smartly comic “issue film,” A Taxing Woman, the crooked boss of a chain of quick-turnover “love hotels” is successfully escaping the t…
Feng Yue Conceived as a sweeping romantic drama depicting years of tumultuous change in China, Chen Kaige's Temptress Moon features the stars of Chen's Farewell My Concubine, Leslie Cheung and Gong Li, as childhood friends who grow up to be adversaries in a complex test of wills involving rival gangs and rival families. Complex is the key word, since I must confess that I lost track …
October The book of the same name by American reporter John Reed (who in turn was the subject of Warren Beatty's Reds) was the basis for Sergei Eisenstein's incredibly ambitious, government-commissioned, 10th-anniversary commemoration of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Eisenstein turned what had been recent history into a sweeping, spectacular epic of mythological propor…
Le Locataire Roman Polanski's supremely creepy The Tenant is a Kafkaesque story about a meek, hapless office worker (Polanski) who moves into a big, decaying, spooky Parisian apartment building (How spooky? The concierge is Shelley Winters, that's how spooky.) Once ensconced in his new digs, Polanski spends much of his time obsessing on the previous tenant…
Testament in Evil Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier Jean Renoir's strange and disturbing experimental fantasy, freely adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, is the tale of a physician (played brilliantly by the great Jean-Louis Barrault of Children of Paradise) who, transformed by his own hand into a murderous lunatic, stalks the streets and dark…
Le Testament d'Orphee Cocteau's final film is usually compared unfavorably to his masterworks like Beauty and the Beast and Orpheus, but this kind of comparison is both unfair and absurd. The Testament of Orpheus is designed as a personal and highly poetic home movie (pointedly subtitled “Don't Ask Me Why”), in which Cocteau, at age 70, looks back a…
The Ironman Well, here's something you don't see every day (though the film is so successful at what it does that I feared we might). Thematically, Tetsuo is a movie that seems a natural progression of all fears modern: man's gradual loss of his humanity, his enslavement to technology, his fears of disease, plus the particularly Japanese obsession and dread surro…
Cet Obscur Objet du Desir A wealthy, widowed Spanish aristocrat (Fernando Rey) becomes erotically obsessed with his beautiful, seductive new maid, but she refuses to give in to his pleadings. In the hands of master director Luis Buñuel, Pierre Louÿs's often-filmed novel La Femme et le Pantin, becomes a savagely funny portrait of a man endlessly stimulated by his …
Thérèse is based on the true story of the 15-year-old Thérèse Martin (Catherine Mouchet) whose desire to become a Carmelite nun—and whose love for Jesus—bursts through the boundaries of exhilaration and religious exaltation, becoming romantic, obsessive, and, at least in its intensity, implicitly sexual. Thérèse was granted the …
Shivers The Parasite Murders Frissons The parasites on the rampage in a neat and tidy Canadian apartment building seem like a blessing in disguise at first. They stimulate intense sexual desire among the tenants with more high-powered effectiveness than a pound of Viagra dumped into the water supply. But, alas, they entail far more gruesome side effects than just “blue vision.” David…
Vor In 1952, Katya (Ekaterina Rednirkova) and her six-year-old son Sanya (Misha Philipchuk) are traveling across Russia by train, struggling for food and shelter in the difficult post-World War II era. On board, Katya meets a handsome young officer named Tolyan (Vladimir Mashkov) and is immediately entranced, but soon learns that far from being a military …
Le Voleur This gentle study of a 19th-century burglar, Georges (Jean-Paul Belmondo), who enters his profession out of necessity but stays because of obsession, is one of the most unjustly overlooked films of Louis Malle's career. The Thief of Paris has many light moments, but at heart it's a gloomy and melancholy tale of a man lost in the details of his job—his w…
Using an approach as unconventional as his subject, Canadian director François Girard has illuminated the life of the enigmatic pianist Glenn Gould with ingenuity, intelligence, and frequent flashes of brilliance. Gould's genius came complete with a thick layer of eccentricity and controversial decisions, not the least of which was his sudden retirement from live performance in order…
Que la Bete Meure Uccidero Un Uomo Killer! When a young boy is killed by a hit-and-run driver, the boy's father (Michel Duchaussoy) swears revenge. But after successfully locating his child's killer, the man decides that to simply dispatch the monster isn't enough; it's at this point that the complex and brilliantly insightful real plot of Claude Chabrol&#…
One of the best and most-discussed of the British working-class “angry young man” films of the 1960s was this gritty and despairing portrait of Frank (Richard Harris), a former coal miner who breaks into the violent world of professional rugby. Handling social differences off the field becomes as difficult and confrontational as his sport, and when Frank begins an affai…
Tre Fratelli Three adult brothers—one a judge (Philippe Noiret), one a teacher (Vittorio Mezzogiorno), and one a mechanic (Michele Placido)—whose lives, concerns, and politics have become very different, are summoned to their small Italian village on the occasion of their mother's death. Over the course of the next few days these men w…
In a modern high-rise in Seoul, two women living across the hall from each other—each identified only by her apartment number—discover that they have something in common: a fascination with food. Fascination is not a one-size-fits-all word, however, especially in this case of the obsessive, endlessly cooking, slightly deranged gourmet chef in 301 (Eun-Jin Pang) who does…
Die Dreigroschenoper L'Opera de Quat'Sous Beggars’ Opera Set in the Soho section of London in the late 19th century, G.W. Pabst's 1931 screen adaptation of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill's brilliant reworking of John Gay's The Beggar‘s Opera is a near-perfect melding of director and subject. The creator of a number of classic German “street&#x…
Kumonosujo, Kumonosu-djo Cobweb Castle The Castle of the Spider's Web After seeing Akira Kurosawa's ingenious screen adaptation of Macbeth, which sets the timeless story of greed, ambition, and murder in 16th-century Japan, it's tempting to think that this is how Shakespeare should have done it in the first place. Isuzu Yamada is absolutely mesmerizing as the Lady Macbeth figu…
Sasom I En Spegel The first in a series of Ingmar Bergman films known as his religious or “crisis of faith” trilogy, Through a Glass Darkly is the story of Karin (Harriet Andersson), a young woman who has read in her psychologist father's journal his diagnosis of her incurable schizophrenia. Karin's husband (Max von Sydow) is unable to help h…
Under the Olive Trees Zire Darakhtan Zeyton This third in a trilogy of films about village life by Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami concerns the production of a film about the making of the trilogy's second film, And Life Goes On. The director of the film-within-the-film is a thinly veiled portrayal of Kiarostami, and he's portrayed by the actor Mohamad Ali Keshavarz. (Take i…
Canada's Ralph L. Thomas directed this bombastic but engrossing and often nastily funny portrait of a troubled young man (Nick Mancuso) whose unhappiness over a romantic breakup leads him straight into the waiting arms of a religious cult. Ticket to Heaven compresses his entire cycle—despair, vulnerability, indoctrination, kidnapping by family, deprogramming—into…
Atame Psychiatric patient Antonio Banderas kidnaps a former porno actress and prostitute (Victoria Abril) he's long had a crush on and holds her captive, convinced that he can make her fall in love with him. Pedro Almodóvar's comedy is neither as witty or subversive as its champions would suggest nor as vile as its detractors would have you believe. Banderas and …
The Law Though the setting is African, the opening scene suggests The Ox-Bow Incident; a rider (on donkey, not horseback) is returning home to his village after a long journey, and immediately stops to ask about his fiancée. It's bad enough that he learns she's gotten married while he was away, but it's quite another matter when he finds out that the other…
Megall Az Ido In Budapest in the 1960s, two schoolboys are dogged by their classmates because a decade earlier the boys’ father fled Hungary for the promise of America. Branded “an enemy of the people,” the father unwittingly bequeathed a legacy to his children that turns out to be a social and political nightmare given the realities of Hungary's oppressive socialist re…
Die Blechtrommel Oskar (David Bennent), a horrified German child of the 1920s, wills himself to stop growing in response to the ballooning Nazi presence in his country. As his chosen means of expression, the boy communicates his anger, fear, and outrage by pounding on a tin drum. Loudly. Director Volker Schlöndorff's widely praised adaptation of Günter Grass�…
Tito i Ja Tito and I If you've ever looked at old newsreels in which the schoolchildren living under repressive regimes line up to adoringly smile and wave to their fascist leader, you might have wondered what was actually going through their little heads at that very moment. This remarkable but sadly neglected picture by Goran Markovic—which holds the distinction of being the very l…
Huozhe The fifth feature film from China's Zhang Yimou follows the lives and fortunes of one family—the weak but adaptable Fugui (Ge You), his strong-willed wife Jiazhen (Gong Li), and their young daughter and son—from pre-revolutionary China in the 1940s through the Cultural revolution of the 1960s. Fugui's loss of the family fortune to gamb…
Of the many big-screen documentaries that have tried to convey a sense of the excitement, drama, and physical splendor of the Olympic Games, Kon Ichikawa's spectacular 1966 Tokyo Olympiad may be the most elegant, the least agenda-laden, and—sadly—the least-well-known, at least in the United States. Ichikawa (Fires on the Plain, The Makioka Sisters) had the usual …
Tokyo Monogatari Their First Trip to Tokyo An aging couple (Chieko Higashiyama and Chishu Ryu) decides to make the trip from their small town to Tokyo to visit their busy children, but the trip is strenuous and—in many ways—disappointing. On their journey home one of the parents becomes ill and dies, and the children and surviving parent must come to terms with the expe…
Toni (Charles Blavette) is an Italian farm worker who comes to Provence in the 1930s looking for work. He falls in love, but the woman he adores (Jenny Hélia) marries Toni's new boss (Max Dalban),a brute whose subsequent death leads to Toni being accused of a murder he didn't commit. Though made in 1934, Jean Renoir's filmȁ…
Trop Belle pour Toi Successful car salesman Gérard Depardieu, married for years to the extraordinarily beautiful Carole Bouquet, discovers to his surprise that he is irresistibly drawn to his overweight, physically unexceptional secretary (Josiane Balasko). Bertrand Blier's screenplay contains the seeds of a rich, complex dramatic comedy that touches on a number of subj…
Hets Frenzy The 25-year-old Ingmar Bergman wrote the screenplay for this gripping 1944 tragedy—rarely seen now—that was directed by Alf Sjöberg. It's the story of Jan-Erik (Alf Kjelin), a student who becomes romantically involved with Bertha (Mai Zetterling), a troubled girl who lives nearby. Eventually it's revealed that Bertha has be…
Toto the Hero As a child, Thomas always believed that he'd grow up to do fabulous things—in particular, he saw himself becoming the super secret agent “Toto the Hero,” saving the world, righting wrongs, and being adored. But now, as a bitter, disappointed old man, Thomas (Michel Bouquet) has decided that his failure to achieve those dreams was not his faul…
All the Mornings of the World One of the most unusual films—at least in subject—to ever become an American art house hit, Alain Corneau's hauntingly beautiful Tous les Matins du Monde (All the Mornings of the World) is the story of two 17th-century baroque composers. Gérard Depardieu portrays the aged and ailing Marin Marais, who became a successful court …
With the exception of a short, minor television documentary that followed it, the 1971 Traffic was to be Jacques Tati's last feature film. Tati's concern here, as always, is the depersonalization of modern society. He settled on a perfect visual metaphor, too—man ensconced in his private automobile, rushing off hither, thither, and yon at the same moment and often in the same …
L'Albero Degli Zoccoli Director Ermanno Olmi's 1978 epic tells the stories of four sharecropping peasant families in turn-of-the-century Lombardy. Although a specific incident gives the movie its title—a father risks punishment by cutting down one of the landlord's trees to make new shoes for his son—The Tree of Wooden Clogs is for the most part that most difficu…
Le Proces Der Prozess Il Processo It would appear that Orson Welles felt an affinity with Franz Kafka's story of a man facing the onslaught of an impossible bureaucratic nightmare and who is presumed guilty no matter what. Anthony Perkins plays Joseph K., the man who finds himself being interrogated without any hint of his alleged crime, and who turns to a mysterious and self-important defe…
When adapting the 80-page novel by Benito Pérez Galdós upon which Tristana is based, Luis Buñuel remarked that “it allows me to observe some aspects of Spanish life and customs in which I am interested.” After seeing Tristana, the director's wryly innocuous description may make you burst out laughing. Set in Toledo, Spain, in the late 1920s, during a perio…
Triumph des Willens “In all of my films there was … yes; let us say purity,” Leni Riefenstahl told Cahiers du Cinéma in 1965. “It repulses me so much to be faced with false men that it is a thing to which I have never been able to give artistic form.” Considering that she made that remark more than 30 years after creating one of the cinema's most in…
Three Colors: White White The centerpiece of Krzysztof Kieslowski's Trois Couleurs trilogy acts as a kind of bitter comic relief. It's the story of Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski), a bewildered, impotent, sad-sack Polish hairdresser who's not only divorced by his sexually frustrated wife Dominique (Julie Delpy), but is cleaned out by her financia…
Three Colors: Blue Blue In 1993, Poland's Krzysztof Kieslowski completed three films which he dubbed the Trois Couleurs trilogy, with one film named after each of the colors in the French flag. Bleu (Blue), the first of the films to be released and the most downbeat of the three, is the story of a woman (Juliette Binoche) whose composer husband and child are kill…
Three Colors: Red Red Irène Jacob is Valentine, a stunning young fashion model in Geneva whose life unexpectedly intersects with an unhappy, voyeuristic, retired judge (Jean-Louis Trintignant in a warm, dignified, extremely welcome performance) in the third film in Krzysztof Kieslowski's extraordinary and audacious Trois Couleurs trilogy. The seeming randomness of their…
Hab Og Karlighed Before embarking on the massive project that would become the prize-winning Pelle the Conqueror, Danish filmmaker Bille August directed this beguiling coming-of-age story set in the Beatles-saturated Denmark of 1963. Bjorn (Adam Tonsberg) is a drummer whose romance with the lovely Anna (Camilla Søeberg) results in her pregnancy, while Erik …
Teen Kanya This exquisite two-part film by India's Satyajit Ray was adapted from stories by Nobel Prize—winner Rabindranath Tagore. In “The Postmaster,” a young man from the city becomes the new postman for a small rural village. A ten-year-old orphan girl befriends him and cares for him when he contracts malaria, but the primitive conditions of the village are too much…
Les Deux Anglaises et le Continent Anne and Muriel Anne and Muriel (Kika Markham and Stacey Tendeter) are turn-of-the-century English sisters who become acquainted with Claude (Jean-Pierre Léaud) after Anne meets him on a study trip to Paris. Over the next seven years and beyond, the complex relationship between the three—in which love, friendship, pride, …
Louise (Emma Coles) and Kelly (Kris Bidenko) are two 15-year-old girls whose friendship has ended. Both girls had had their wishes come true by being accepted for enrollment at the same prestigious school, but Kelly has been forbidden to attend by her hard-line stepfather, who thinks the girl will become a snob. Jane Campion's 1986 Two Friends would end here, wer…
Deux ou Trois Choses Que Je Sais d'Elle In the labyrinthine, assaultive, spectacular, and constantly evolving Paris of 1966, a housewife (Marina Vlady) turns to prostitution when day-to-day expenses of life in the big city become overwhelming. The 24 hours that Jean-Luc Godard's film covers is presented like a continuing dream state of motion, space, and images, in whic…