Three brothers – Rocco (Peppino Mazzotta), the brains, Luigi (Marco Leonardi), the brawn, and Luciano (Fabrizio Ferracane), the goat-herding outcast – each with a different vision of what direction the “family business” should take. The stories are workaday, but the storytelling is anything but in Francesco Munzi’s instant gangster classic. …

Certainly not the only, but perhaps the single greatest, exception to the rule about sequels never surpassing their forerunners. A lively and densely packed hour and a quarter, overrun by an unsuppressed sense of humor, it begins with a one-stormy-night prologue in which the story is resumed by Mary Shelley …

Clint Eastwood grappling, both behind and in front of the camera, with the Robert James Waller bestseller about a four-day affair between a nomadic National Geographic photographer and an Italian-Iowan farm wife (Meryl Streep). Whatever has been or could be said about this being an American Brief Encounter, and about …

The opening shot from writer-director Apichatpong Weerasethakul is packed so full of visual information that it would take a mausoleum to house it all. From the distanced perspective of a front porch, we watch as soldiers oversee a pair of earth-grinding steam shovels. The veranda is attached to a small …

The surrealist fashion plate, jointly made by Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel (his first movie, and already several of his staples are on display: insects, donkeys, razor blades, comical clergymen). Very exciting for the dream logic that allows a portion of a scene to change course while the remainder of …

Closed Curtain arrives with more than its share of baggage. Do yourself a favor and spend a few moments reading up on filmmaker Jafar Panahi’s plight before taking in his movie. The Iranian government has placed the master director under house arrest for six years — with an additional 20-year …

What kind of movie — what genre of movie — is this, anyway? It starts out as a classical but lurid mystery thriller; then wanders off on a search for a shared border between horror/fantasy and honest-to-God religious art; then takes a final superhuman broad jump into the purview of …

Godard described his movie as an Antonioni subject done in a Hitchcock style. That's a start. A French couple, out of an Alberto Moravia novel, drift apart, glumly, passively, uncommunicatively, after they travel to Italy in order for the husband to patch up the screenplay of a troubled Fritz Lang …

Judy Heumann. The mere mention of her name sends shivers down the spines of all who look to cut corners at the expense of denying the disabled community equal access. A former employer cursed her name when told he would have to shell out thousands to build a lift stage-right …

The loosely connected sequel to Val Lewton's Cat People is stiffer than its forebear, less smooth and supple in its movement. (Gunther von Fritsch was chosen to direct the project, rather than Jacques Tourneur, who had moved on to bigger things, and von Fritsch had to be replaced early in …

The modesty of means and of goals is much overcome by the passionateness of creative effort in this B-grade British horror film. The story pits an arrogant diabolist named Karswell (Niall MacGinnis) against a pooh-poohing American rationalist (Dana Andrews), who has a stiff drink in hand at every convenience. The …

Visconti's horrendous dredging up of the Nazi nightmare begins inside a blast furnace, and for nearly three hours thereafter, his vision of human depravity rages like a fever. It's open to question whether Visconti was very interested in Naziism as a historical fact, or whether he was merely interested in …

Witchcraft in 17th-century Denmark, with something for almost everyone, the moralist, the feminist, the occultist, the cinephile -- especially him. It's not at all for the dogmatist, of whatever persuasion. Carl Dreyer starts out leading your sympathies where they will go most readily. A hoary old Lutheran pastor oversees the …

Four fleshy and sophisticated Calcuttans go on rural holiday. Not a lot "happens," but a lot comes to light. Shakespeare's Polonius, one might imagine, would flourish in the attempt to pin down what kind of movie this is. It is comical, pastoral, political, poetical, historical, spiritual, and God knows what …

Luchino Visconti's beautifully cadenced rendition of the Thomas Mann novella. In slow zooms and panning shots, it scrutinizes the deterioration, amid wilting heat and epidemic, of a prissy musical composer, lingering too long at a deluxe hotel, held there by the physical magnetism and riveting gaze of an aesthetic-erotic ideal …