Author Archives: Ted Shen

Harold Bucquet, who handled the Dr. Kildare series at MGM, directed this maudlin 1939 fantasy in which a curmudgeonly grandfather (Lionel Barrymore, of course) stalls Death (in the guise of dapper Englishman Cedric Hardwicke) to prevent the forced adoption of his orphaned grandson (Bobs Watson). The film’s studio back-lot version of small-town America and its […]

A psychic and her husband, who works as a sound-effects technician, unwittingly get involved in a kidnap case, and she tries to use her powers to locate the victim. This loose 2000 remake of the psychological study Seance on a Wet Afternoon (1964) is less straightforward and more metaphysical than the original, raising just as […]

An international potpourri of morality-minded shorts. The most sophisticated and impish is Your Choice! by Japanese animator Koji Yamamura, a series of visually striking non sequiturs featuring squiggly caricatures. Hassan-Hussen, by Kyrgyzstan filmmaker Aktan Abdykalykov, is a sweet vignette about two kid brothers, carrying pails of water, who get into a tussle and then are […]

Life in rural Sweden during the mid-1800s was nasty, brutish, and short, at least according to Bo Widerberg’s 1986 adaptation of the novel by Torgny Lindgren. Teah is a tenant farmer with children fathered by various men (including Stellan Skarsgard) and a wan landlord who torments her, treating the whole family as his personal property. […]

Jean Odoutan wrote, directed, and stars in this 1999 comedy from Benin about a down-on-their-luck couple—a cocky, temperamental, daydreaming husband and his headstrong yet resilient wife—coping with adversity while bickering with fellow villagers. He manages to get plenty of laughs out of the couple’s volatile relationship, and his depiction of the daily lives of Africa’s […]

Rosa von Praunheim’s 1999 biopic sets out to link German sex researcher Magnus Hirschfeld with the struggle for gay rights, but it’s more coherent and less blatantly polemical than some of his earlier films. Fascinated with sex at an early age, Hirschfeld began to question the notion of abnormal behavior while attending medical school in […]

A slick German video (2000, 93 min.) on the music and life of John Lee Hooker, the prolific and influential Delta bluesman who hit the big time in the 1960s after white fans anointed him “king of the boogie.” Director Joerg Bundschuh presents a chronology of key events from Hooker’s career, new and vintage performances, […]

The humor of Italian comedian Toto always thrived on regional and class differences, and this 1963 military satire, set in occupied Greece during World War II, gives him plenty of ammunition. He plays a bumbling but pompous colonel engaged in a battle of wits against his British counterpart (Walter Pidgeon) for control of a village; […]

Similar to Startup.com but much less critical, this 2001 video documentary by Wonsuk Chin (Too Tired to Die) chronicles the rapid rise and fall of Kozmo.com, one of the more spectacular casualties of the dot-com crash. Kozmo was an Internet parcel service that pandered to its customers’ need for instant gratification through one-hour bicycle delivery, […]

Enchanting in its first half but floridly melodramatic in its second, this 1960 Indian romance is set in the Islamic enclave of the city of Lucknow, where a store owner (Guru Dutt) discovers that his new wife, veiled according to custom, is coveted by his best friend, who doesn’t realize her true identity. Directed by […]

A shy, slow-witted sandwich-board man (Choky Lim) who meets with rejection at every turn daydreams of being a caped superhero in this 2000 film by Masahiro Sugano, a talented manipulator of pop-culture references with a delightfully warped imagination. Controlled yet completely loopy, Lim evokes the sort of loneliness that borders on insanity, and Sugano’s deliberately […]

Italian director Valerio Zurlini establishes some of his characteristic themes—love thwarted by social circumstance, politics shaping individual destiny—in this 1959 second feature, a wartime melodrama about a 30-year-old patrician widow (Eleonora Rossi Drago) whose affair with a callow, privileged youth (Jean-Louis Trintignant) causes a scandal in the resort town where they live. The story is […]