Category: Film

Craftsmanship, intelligence, and refined sentiment are the hallmarks of Bertrand Tavernier’s exquisite French feature (1984), a model of how much ground can be covered with the smallest movements. In 1912 […]

The bucketloads of sanctimonious message mongering ladled on by director Peter Hyams still can’t disguise the sheerly mercenary basis of this 1986 project, a wholly uncalled-for sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Shyam Benegal’s Indian film is an update of the Mahabhatata, transposing the story of two warring families to the newly industrialized India of the 1950s. The Puranchads and the Khubchands […]