During the Hungarian revolution of 1848, a young lieutenant is unjustly jailed for sedition; while he is in prison, his depression turns to apparent mental illness. A 1984 feature, directed by Laszlo Lugossy (Identification).

A masterpiece of mise-en-scene (1958) by Douglas Sirk, transforming an Erich Maria Remarque melodrama into a haunting story of the search for beauty in a dead world. John Gavin and Lilo Pulver are lovers who meet among the ruins of a bombed-out German town during World War II. Despite their efforts to make contact, happiness […]

It’s hard to see why Taylor Hackford (An Officer and a Gentleman) wanted to remake Jacques Tourneur’s classic film noir Out of the Past: he spends the first half of the movie trying to establish a plausible 1984 context for the 1947 plot, and the second half struggling to twist Tourneur’s fatality into a typically […]

John Huston’s sort-of sequel to The Maltese Falcon, with Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, and Sydney Greenstreet together again in an equally obscure plot, involving Nazi spies in Panama. In any analyzable way, this 1942 feature isn’t all that inferior to the somewhat overrated Falcon, but it doesn’t quite have the charisma. For a static director, […]

An actress gains the lead in a social-realist musical when the star is injured, but her big break turns bad when the state police discover she was once married to an aristocrat. Branded a “class enemy,” she’s banished to a provincial labor farm. Peter Bacso (The Witness) directed this Hungarian comedy-drama.

Two short features from Ireland. Bob Quinn’s Lament (1974) is credited as the first Irish “experimental” film; it intercuts readings from a 1773 widow’s lament for her outlaw husband killed by the English with rehearsals for a play based on the same subject. Cross and Passion, by Kim Longinetto and Claire Pollak, is a documentary […]

Michel Drach scores high on compassion but low on inspiration in this film, an examination of the plight of French Jews suffering the Nazi occupation and the double standard of the French bourgeoisie. The cloying film—>within—>the—>film structure

The San Francisco experimental filmmaker will screen a selection of his work, including Neptunian Space Angel, Freedom’s Skyway, I’d Rather Be in Paris, Honeymoon in Reno, Voyeuristic Tendencies, and Hit the Turnpike.

A novel by film theorist Bela Balasz is the basis for Janoz Rozsa’s 1982 Hungarian feature about a boy who witnesses the political excommunication of his father, a village schoolteacher.

Separated by the divorce of their parents, a brother and sister defy legal and social strictures by searching for and attempting to live with each other. Juliana Nyako and Zoltan Jakab star in this 1983 Hungarian film, directed by Janos Rozsa.

The Chicago-based independent filmmaker will be present to screen two works: The Shelter, a 1983 video about two terminally bored servicemen assigned to a missile silo, and The Paled Man, a short film about a mental patient who may or may not be the target of a nefarious plot.

MGM scrapped the story of Victor Herbert’s 1913 operetta in favor of a genuinely droll script by Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell, making this 1938 feature the most entertaining of the Jeanette MacDonald-Nelson Eddy musicals. It was directed by W.S. Van Dyke in a bantering style that recalls his Thin Man films, and photographed in […]

Gyorgy Szomjas’s Hungarian feature is a bleak, depressed Eastern-bloc variation on a Noel Coward theme: released after two years in prison, a downtrodden young man returns home to find his wife living with another man. Though they agree to a divorce, the husband refuses to leave the apartment and mounts a strident campaign to win […]