Category: Film

The hopelessness of human life as represented by a marathon dance contest in the darkest 30s. The material is simple and irresistible, and Sydney Pollack stages it well (though without transcending the essential superficiality of his talent). Jane Fonda offers the first signs that she inherited something more than her father’s jawline, and Gig Young […]

Justin Ackerman’s 1982 documentary about the Khmer Rouge’s continuing battle with Vietnam for control of Cambodia. It contains the only footage to be shot in the areas of the country held by Pol Pot since the 1978 fall of Phnom Penh. Chicago premiere.

Brid Brennan plays the title character, a young woman returning to the Belfast she hasn’t seen since she was a school girl. As she moves through the strife-torn city, looking up old friends and family members, directors Pat Murphy and John Davies draw parallels baetween her personal quest for freedom and the struggles that grip […]

The German film historian Lotte Eisner, who should know, finds this 1923 production to be one of the finest and most controlled of expressionist films. Directed by Arthur Robison, an American working in Germany, the film is the story of a husband who murders his unfaithful wife, and is then consumed by the standard expressionist […]

Egypt’s most celebrated filmmaker, Youssef Cha

The best of the Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn cycle, not so much for the Garson Kanin-Ruth Gordon screenplay (which lacks the sophisticated bite of Adam’s Rib) as for the magnificently relaxed and graceful teamwork of the stars. George Cukor directed this 1952 film of a hustling trainer (Tracy) who grooms an extraordinarily gifted gym teacher (Hepburn) […]

Eleanor Antin, Suzanne Lacy, Miriam Schapiro, and Arlene Raven are among the artists featured in this documentary on ten years of feminist art in California, produced by the Long Beach Museum of Art Video.

O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms transposed to a Cairo setting for an Egyptian film directed by Raafat El Mihi (1981).