Category: Film

Reinhard Hauff’s 1978 feature comes on like a political fable but ends by asserting personal psychology over ideological impulses. Bruno Ganz is an innocent man shot and crippled in an antiterrorist police raid; as he fights to recover his life and memory, both leftists and rightists try to turn him into a symbol. Hauff’s vision […]

Souvenir psychedelia, with intrusions of art nouveau and Peter Max (1968). The animation is imaginatively conceived, but stiffly executed. A Fantasia designed for heads, the film does no more justice to the music than Disney’s artists did. But Disney had the excuse of innocence, whereas this shrewdly conceived commercial project does not. George Dunning directed.

Naceur Ktari’s 1976 film follows a group of Tunisian “guest workers”—told by their government that they will be acting as “ambassadors” for their country—as they encounter poverty, racism, and outright violence in the slums of Paris.

Lloyd Bacon, one of Warner Brothers’ breezy, engaging hacks, directed this 1940 comedy about an Irish girl (Priscilla Lane) who falls for a Scottish boy (Dennis Morgan) and touches off the blustering outrage of her father, a retired cop running for alderman (Thomas Mitchell). With Alan Hale, Irene Hervey, and Virginia Grey.

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).

This 1970 cult favorite enjoyed a blue-chip DVD release from the Criterion Collection, though its genesis story is more entertaining than the movie itself. Made for $6,500 by a trio of teenage horror geeks, abetted by Famous Monsters of Filmland publisher Forrest J. Ackerman, it’s a charmingly amateur retread of H.P. Lovecraft: four teens discover […]