Category: Film

Kurt Maetzig, an assistant in the German film industry, joined the communist underground to fight the Nazis, and after the war became one of the leading filmmakers in the newly created German Democratic Republic. His 1947 debut, a study of a “mixed marriage” under Hitler that becomes an indictment of the German intelligentsia’s refusal to […]

An early Indian neorealist film, about a boy abandoned to an orphanage by his impoverished mother. He escapes, falls in with a band of boy thieves, and is eventually rescued by the wife of a wealthy industrialist. K.A. Abbas directed (1954).

This 1932 RKO feature was thought lost until a print turned up unexpectedly in the Universal vaults. It’s an adaptation of a stage play by Philip Barry (Holiday, The Philadelphia Story), starring Leslie Howard as a playboy determined to settle down and Myrna Loy (in her first drawing room part) as the straitlaced girl he […]

A rabbi and his family escape from Nazi Germany in a 1979 film by Peter Lilienthal, Germany’s first Jewish director.

Yakov Protazanov was one of the few prerevolutionary Russian filmmakers who continued to make movies under the new regime (the pioneering science fiction film Aelita is his best-known effort). This feature, a peasant melodrama, dates from 1918.

A school-of-Rivette fantasy by British experimentalist Ken McMullen. Taking off from Leon Trotsky’s notion that ghosts operate in the modern world through radio waves and electricity, McMullen spins a tale of contemporary spiritualism centered on two women, an anthropologist and a political activist, who seem to have shared a past life. With Leonie Mellinger, Pascale […]

Alan Freed’s 1959 rock ‘n’ roll show, viewed as a turning point in teenage consciousness. Floyd Mutrux’s 1978 feature exemplifies many of the worst tendencies of the American film in that era: its sentimentality is clumsy and insincere, it has no plot or structure to speak of, and people run around and scream a lot […]

Jack Benny made this 1945 box office dud into something of a legend over the years by constantly citing it as the film that sank his movie career. It’s one of those morbid 40s fantasies, like Here Comes Mr. Jordan, about a trumpet player who dreams he’s Gabriel, sent to earth to announce the apocalypse. […]