The final hours of a suicidal alcoholic out-patient, movingly played by Maurice Ronet. One of the grayest of movies, not just visually (the filthy weather, the charcoal-y photography by Ghislain Cloquet), but emotionally and morally as well. The Satie soundtrack does a lot for the movie, but the movie does …
Hou Hsiao-hsien reimagines the gangster genre in the form of a Taiwanese slice of life, an anti-drama, an anti-melodrama, that eases, glides, sneaks into its moments of animosity and violence. Or better say slices of life, plural, to emphasize the unconnected, random, desultory quality. What passes for a narrative has …
Celebrated journalist Jep Gambardella (played with mournful comic pall by Tony Servillo) wrote a great novel — 40 years ago. Since then, he's been living a life of social ascendance and moral decline, and now, in the wake of his 65th birthday blowout, he suddenly finds himself surrounded by dead …
Alain Resnais inundates this pensive political thriller with homely details: the tidy and deliberate unpacking of an underground agent at the finish of a routine, eventless, perilous mission; the exchanged intimacies and cups of coffee among long-time comrades; their plain, quiet sweaters and overcoats. Of course, Resnais is interested in …
From its bold opening long take – one of the most audaciously disconcerting and seductively executed lead-ins in many a moon — director Amat Escalante sends viewers hurtling downward on a topsy-turvy journey through his hellish depiction of Mexico’s war on drugs. Same familiar terrain, different cartel, you ask? Guess …
Kurosawa's first use of the wide screen, and his ingeniousness with images of that shape becomes apparent fairly soon — say about the first or second shot. The storyline, if not the images alone, pulls you in, and along, with a folk-tale kind of enchantment, and it makes room for …
Out of an Ed McBain 87th Precinct novel, Akira Kurosawa has fashioned a formula kidnapping melodrama that, elaborated to two-and-a-half hours, manages to engage all his burning moral concerns, undimmed, as well as all his ingenuity as an action director unsurpassed on the wide-screen. Kurosawa makes good use of McBain's …
Published in 1966, Hitchcock by Francois Truffaut was the first book to take a title-by-title approach to exploring a director’s career. It also made it cool to like Alfred Hitchcock. A Hollywood master and an internationally acclaimed Parisian newcomer couldn’t have been more diverse, but Hitch, instantly sensing a fellow …
A callous American doctor stationed at a military facility in Seoul orders an underling to dispose of formaldehyde by pouring it down the sink, never once stopping to consider the havoc it might wreak once the toxic chemicals reach the water system. It’s on this basis of fact that Bong …
For a guy who has spent the better portion of his life playing cinephilic matchmaker, this about-face ring-up endures as a marriage made in “Hell.” “Quick! Turn on channel 9,” the voice on the other end of the line commanded. “You gotta see the way the dad catches the football.” …
Robert Aldrich's slightly feverish vision of the assorted dreamers and schemers in the City of Angels, over their heads in hot color and murky shadow. Scriptwriter Steve Shagan's post-mortem on a teen-age runaway, apparently a suicide, is teasingly well plotted around numerous interruptions and postponements, and ultimately is unable to …
Commie propaganda has never had a champion capable of rising to the cause in a manner as distinctly and visually sumptuous as Mikhail Kalatozov’s (The Cranes are Flying). Politically facile? You bet! Sexually on par with Hef’s Playboy philosophy? Damn straight! But with images such as this, who has time …
Ashamed of her heritage, Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) — the light-skinned daughter of Annie (Juanita Moore), a live-in housemaid employed by a vainglorious actress (Lana Turner) — tries to pass for white. John Stahl’s magnanimous adaptation of Fannie Hurst’s best-selling sudser had proven successful enough in 1934 for Universal to …
With 133,000 residents speaking 167 languages, the 300-acre stretch of land known as Jackson Heights, Queens boasts the most culturally diverse neighborhood in the world. It’s also the subject of 85-year-old proudly self-professed, “non-fiction filmmaker” Frederick Wiseman's (National Gallery) 40th feature, a mammoth, 190 minute undertaking shot with his trademark …