Le Salaire de la Peur Four desperate men, stuck hopelessly in a desolate town in Central America, agree to be paid $2,000 each to drive two trucks filled with nitroglycerine over 300 miles of bumpy, decrepit mountain roads so that the nitro can be used to put out a raging oil-well fire. Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear is one of the greatest movie thrillers—and one of…
Abandoned in the Australian outback after their father commits suicide, a teenaged girl and her little brother must depend on the kindness of a young aborigine in order to survive. Overcoming some inherent racism, the children eventually realize that their notion of what constitutes “civilization” has been stood on its head. Years later, in a coda to the story we've seen, the …
Wannseekonferenz The formalities and basic logistical arrangements for the systematic murder of millions of men, women, and children known as the Final Solution were decided in an 85-minute meeting of 14 Nazi leaders on January 20, 1942. From notes taken by the secretary at the meeting, as well as letters written by Hermann Goering and Adolf Eichmann, screenwriter Paul Mommertz and director Heinz …
Thirty years ago, Sergei Bondarchuk's massive, six-hour-plus-change adaptation of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace reputedly cost 100 million dollars, which would be the rough equivalent of 400 million today. That makes Titanic and Batman and Robin look like low-budget indies by comparison. War and Peace may not have been one of the world's great movies, but it is valuable in anoth…
Originally commissioned by the BBC as a cautionary tale about the ominous consequences of nuclear catastrophe, Peter Watkins's stunning 47-minute “documentary” was judged too horrifying to be televised, and was immediately shelved by the network. It's likely that even if the film had been shown as scheduled it would have had worldwide attention, but the banning of it&#x…
Paul Leni's 1924 Waxworks is a striking and still scary example of German expressionism used to make nightmares come to life. In the film, a poet strolls through a waxworks exhibit at a local carnival, encountering the figures of the tyrannical Haroun al Raschid, Ivan the Terrible, and Jack the Ripper. One at a time, the figures come to life in the mind of the poet, and grotesquely distorte…
Three men (Vittorio Gassman, Nino Manfredi, and Satta Flores) are united over three decades by their friendship and by their love for one extraordinary woman (Stefania Sandrelli). Ettore Scola's enchanting romance begins at the close of World War II, and covers not only the changes in Italy over the years since, but also the evolution of its cinema. Sandrelli�…
Director Goffredo Alessandrini's sprawling, solemn, three-hour 1942 version of Ayn Rand's first novel was originally designed to be seen as two separate films. We the Living is intermittently amusing, usually unintentionally, but is far too grandly self-important to be fully enjoyed as camp. Alida Valli's politically incorrect affair with counter-revolutionary Rossano Brazzi p…
Middle-aged, adulterous lovers Pierre (Michel Piccoli) and Lucienne (Stéphane Audran) have unleashed a frenzied erotic passion in each other that goes well beyond anything they've ever experienced in their marriages. They can't keep their hands off each other, nor can they resist new forms of sexual expression—like hiding out in a museum afte…
A tense Parisian couple (Mirielle Darc and Jean Yanne) hit the highway to take a weekend motor trip to visit the wife's mother. Along the way they encounter not only a surrealistic traffic jam, but also the stylized and bitterly satirical carnage that comes with it (a woman staggers from the twisted, bloody, flaming wreckage of her car, screaming “My Hermes pocke…
Onna Ga Kaidan O Agaru Toki Keiko (Hideko Takamine) is a young widow forced to work as a bar hostess in order to support her mother and lazy brother. As she approaches age 30, Keiko comes to realize that her relationships with the men who frequent the bar—some of them married—are leading nowhere. Yet asserting her independence by opening her own bar will prove to be a d…
The title of Emir Kusturica's 1985 film, set in the Sarajevo of the 1950s, refers to the “cover-up” that was invoked in trying to explain a father's whereabouts to the movie's six-year-old protagonist. Dad is in a political prison (he's a bit too vocal with his opinions on Tito), and little Malik is given an early start on the euphemisms and …
Chacun Cherche Son Chat Fed up with both her job as a modeling agency assistant and her lack of a satisfying love life, the young, vulnerable Chloé (Garance Clavel in a terrifically smart performance) returns to her tiny Parisian apartment from a brief but much-needed vacation only to discover that the one reassuring certainty in her life—her cat Gris-Gris—has di…
Badkonake Sefid Just before the eagerly anticipated celebration of New Year's Day in Teheran, Razieh (Aïda Mohammadkhani), a seven-year-old girl with an incredibly serious, completely irresistible face, loses the money she was given to buy a special, plump goldfish, a symbol of harmony for the new year. Over the next hour and a half, The White Balloon traces, in real ti…
Lo Sceicco Bianco Federico Fellini's first solo directing effort is a poignant and hilarious comic fable about a starry-eyed young woman (Brunella Bova) whose naive infatuation with a pot-bellied Valentino almost destroys her marriage—even though she's still on her honeymoon. The object of her obsession is a white-robed, scimitar-wielding character in the Italian…
L'Enfant Sauvage Though it initially seems like an anomaly among the films of François Truffaut, The Wild Child (L'Enfant Sauvage) may in fact be the most characteristic film of his career. Set in the 1700s, The Wild Child is a dramatization of the facts in a true case as documented in the diary of Dr. Jean Itard, a researcher who took up the task of trying to &#…
Les Roseaux Sauvages Set in the early 1960s at the end of the French war in Algeria, Wild Reeds is a complex, richly textured coming-of-age story about three friends in a French boarding school. François (Gael Morel) is just coming to the realization that he likes boys, and finds himself attracted to the working-class Serge (Stephane Rideau). Serge, however, is d…
Smultron-Stallet Professor Isak Borg (Victor Sjöström) has awakened from a dream of his own death. It is the day on which he is to receive an honorary degree, and he embarks on a motor trip to the university, accompanied by his daughter-in-law, Marianne (Ingrid Thulin). Along the way, the professor's memories are stirred by Marianne's scoldin…
Der Himmel Uber Berlin Even though movie audiences do tend to have strong and immediate reactions to most everything they see, that old cliche “you'll either love this movie or you'll hate it” is especially true of a couple of dozen pictures I know that keep coming up in conversation. Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life is one of these (if you…
Nattvardsgaesterna The centerpiece of Bergman's “crisis of faith,” or “religious” trilogy of films, which began with Through a Glass Darkly and ended with The Silence, focuses on four central characters: a village priest, Tomas (Gunnar Björnstrand), whose faith is in doubt since the death of his wife; a schoolmistress, Marta (Ingrid Th…
Häxan As much a cult oddity as it is a bona fide classic, Benjamin Christensen's Witchcraft through the Ages (Häxan) is an inventive and fantastic documentary-like depiction of the history of witchcraft from the Middle Ages to the modern era (1922, at least). Packed with black masses, gothic rituals, and copious nudity, this legendary film has a gen…
Suna No Onna Woman of the Dunes An entomologist examining beetles in a remote sand dune misses his bus back to the city. Put up for the night by a woman who lives alone at the bottom of a deep sand pit, the entomologist discovers the next morning that he is her prisoner, every bit as trapped as the futilely flailing insects he studies with his magnifying glass. Amid the heat and ever-changing terr…
By Rocket to the Moon Girl in the Moon Fritz Lang's visually spectacular but dramatically underwhelming silent science-fiction fantasy was difficult to see for over 20 years following World War II, primarily because the Nazis destroyed so many prints. It's not that they regarded the film as subversive, but rather that they wanted no films circulated around the world which would sugge…
Une Femme Est une Femme La Donna E Donna Four years before Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Jean-Luc Godard tried his hand at a musical of his own. Starting, as Demy did, with music of Michel Legrand. Godard's creation is something of a free-form, improvisational salute to the Hollywood entertainments of Stanley Donen and Vincente Minnelli. There is a plot—it has to …
La Femme d'a Cote With The Woman Next Door in 1981, François Truffaut dared to create a picture that was both deeply felt and unashamedly romantic. Truffaut had just completed The Last Metro to wide acclaim and boxoffice success, and while the movie was thoroughly honorable, there was an emotional artificiality about it that felt calculated, dry, and passionless. But The Woman Next D…
A Woman's Tale is one of those wonderful movies that it's nearly impossible to convince people to see. They hear that it's about a 78-year-old woman dying of cancer, and believe that it might indeed be very good, but they'll see it later, thanks. The standard device for encouraging people to see a film like this is to point out how “uplifting” it is, but i…
In a rural Chinese village, a tough-minded businesswoman runs a local sesame-oil factory that attracts the attention of Japanese investors. It seems that the secret ingredient in the oil—the local water, which carries with it much history as well as flavor—can't be reproduced elsewhere. She decides that the money such an investment will bring can be put to good use by buying a…
Mujeres al Borde de un Ataque de Nervios The wonderful Carmen Maura is Pepa, a woman whose life is coming apart at the seams, thanks to her elusive, maddening ex-lover, Ivan (he's just decided to dump her and she's just discovered she's pregnant), his new girlfriend, his son (Antonio Banderas), and his son's girlfriend (the truly weird…
Pas Si Mechant que Ça Swiss director Claude Goretta's second theatrical feature received some film festival play, but wasn't released in the U.S. until after the critical raves that greeted The Lacemaker two years later. Gérard Depardieu is Pierre, a married man and factory owner whose handmade furniture just isn't selling. He doesn't want to lay off his e…
Apu Sansat Apur Sansar In the final film of Satyajit Ray's great Apu Trilogy, Apu (played now by Soumitra Chatterjee) is forced to abandon his university studies for lack of funds. Though a strange, unplanned series of circumstances, Apu marries, but the marriage turns out to be a happy one, and Apu believes he has found his place in the world. His wife dies giving childbirth,…
Georg Büchner's play, written in 1836, told of an ordinary soldier (Klaus Kinski) who became a victim of the German obsession with militarism. Harassed by his commanders, experimented upon, pushed well beyond reasonable limits of human endurance, Woyzeck finally snapped and turned understandably homicidal. Werner Herzog has made a tense, terse, 82-minute film out of thi…
Abismos de Pasion Cumbres Borrascosas In his autobiography, Luis Buñuel wrote: “Like all surrealists, I was deeply moved by the novel, and had always wanted to try the movie. I knew I had a first-rate script, but I had to work with actors (the producer) had hired for a musical…including a rumba dancer and a Polish actress. As expected, there were horrendous probl…