Category: Film

1 hour 35 min • 1950

Andrew Horn’s independent feature uses distorted, Caligari-like sets and a score by Evan Lurie of the Lounge Lizards to tell the tale of a suicidal English professor who falls madly […]

The most famous of the many adaptations of Max Brand’s story of a shy sheriff who tries to tame a wide-open town without using his guns (1939). The material makes […]

Carol Reed’s careful if passionless adaptation of the musical was mounted handsomely enough to win the best-picture Oscar back in 1969. In retrospect, it seems emblematic of the triviality Reed […]

Eleven animated shorts that up the genre’s usual quotient of sex and violence. Includes work by Gordon Lawson, Jeff Carpenter and Mary Lambert, Dave Bishop, George Griffin, Rick Goldstein, and […]

Captured by the Russian army in its 1945 advance across Hungary, a boy is put to work herding cows with a young Russian soldier. The two become friends, but when […]

Very, very modest whimsy from Scotland, about a gangly teenager’s first crush. The only ambition of writer-director Bill Forsyth is to beguile—he has no insights worth mentioning—and I guess he […]

An early (1964) film by Hungary’s Miklos Jancso, made between his documentary and experimental phases. A young doctor wanders the white corridors of a hospital, searching for human compassion in […]

Jack Conway’s lowbrow propensities turn this 1941 William Powell-Myrna Loy comedy into more of a slapsticky affair than usual. Powell pretends to have gone insane in order to lure back […]

Director Colin Higgins plays foul with the audience, constructing some of the most dishonest suspense sequences ever filmed, and ends with a thriller that is obnoxious and manipulative in the […]

Patrick Bokanowski’s experimental animated feature takes as its framework a man ascending an apparently endless flight of stairs toward a zone of light. On each landing, he encounters various characters […]

John Ford’s 1958 film looks like a family wake, only it isn’t his family that he’s invited. As the familiar faces glide past—Spencer Tracy, Pat O’Brien, Basil Rathbone, Edward Brophy, […]