Category: Film

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 the boy is released at the end of the war, he is punished for collaboration. A 1964 film by Miklos Jancso (Red Psalm), it’s said […]

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 succeeds, though it’s hard to warm to a film as intentionally slight and safe as this. With Gordon John Sinclair and Dee Hepburn.

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 what seems to be a wholly impersonal system.

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 his estranged wife Loy, which leads to a lot of falling down elevator shafts, etc. Beer instead of champagne, but still bubbly. With Gail Patrick […]

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 extreme. If it were exciting, I suppose it wouldn’t matter, but it’s not: Higgins can’t be bothered to bring the slightest bit of conviction to […]

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 obsessed with tiny tasks—a man taking a bath, a maid filling a water jug, a group of librarians who jerk through their rounds like robots. […]

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, James Gleason, Ricardo Cortez, Wallace Ford, Frank McHugh—all at or near the end of their careers, it feels as if Ford is holding a funeral […]

Not for nothing did Ron Howard grow up on television: even as a filmmaker, he’s got TV in his blood, slipping smoothly and instinctively into the chatty rhythms and open-ended sitcom plotting. This mild 1984 comedy about a mermaid (Daryl Hannah) who falls in love with a New York City yuppie (Tom Hanks) isn’t at […]

Philippe De Broca’s romantic comedy about a lady police inspector (Annie Girardot, the French Joan Crawford) who falls in love with a rumpled classics professor (Philippe Noiret). The standard French fare designed for export, complete with tons of whimsy and periodic shots of the Eiffel Tower. Cute as a bug, and utterly undistinguished.

G-man Chester Morris gets the goods on underworld czar Joseph Calleia with the help of the mobster’s right-thinking sister, Jean Arthur. An MGM programmer from 1935 with a good reputation; the director was J. Walter Ruben, the cinematographer Gregg Toland. With Lionel Barrymore, Paul Kelly, and Lewis Stone.