Category: Film

It’s hard to dislike this 1983 movie, if only because of the warm glow of liberal well-being John Sayles’s work always gives off—it’s a chance to bask in noble attitudes. But Sayles’s talent as a writer isn’t well served by his efforts as a filmmaker. The basic affinity for the medium isn’t there, and he […]

Frank Capra’s first crack at screwball comedy (1931), made three years before the style congealed with It Happened One Night. The forgotten Bobby Williams turns in a dynamic performance as a fast-talking reporter who marries a society dame (Jean Harlow, in a strange bit of casting). The tempo is there, but the gags aren’t up […]

Paul Robeson plays an unemployed stoker who sacrifices himself to save the lives of the workers in a Welsh coal mine. Pen Tennyson directed this 1939 English film.

A documentary on the role of women in the Sandinista revolution.

A documentary by Jill Godmilow (Antonia: Portrait of a Woman) on why she couldn’t make a documentary on the Solidarity movement. Frustrated when the Pol

British writer-director Peter Greenaway’s 1982 film is entertaining as an avant-garde exercise cleverly adapted to commercial ends. In 17th-century England a landscape artist makes an agreement with the wife of a wealthy landowner to trade his work for her sexual favors. All goes well until mysterious objects begin to clutter the grounds (and the artist’s […]

The development of space as an expressive tool in cinema is traced through Gustavo Serena’s 1912 Assunta Spina, a tragic romance set in the slums of Naples that contains some early experiments with depth of field, and Buster Keaton’s 1922 Cops, a classic short comedy by one of the silent era’s great masters of mise-en-scene.

Rita Marley, Third World, Gregory Isaacs, Mutabaruka, and the Skatalites are among the performers featured in this record of the 1983 Reggae Sunsplash Festival in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Robert Mugge directed.

A documentary on Gil Scott-Heron as man, musician, and poet. Robert Mugge directed.

Otto Preminger’s epic study of a young priest’s rise through the Vatican, set against a background of 20th-century social upheaval, was largely despised in its time (1963). But Preminger’s legion of detractors has always had a hard time seeing past the triteness of his forms to the high quality of his execution. This is an […]

British feminist Sally Potter (Thriller) directed this didactic tale about two women, a typist (Colette Lafont) and a movie star (Julie Christie), who decide to explore the mysteries of the male-dominated world of money. Chicago premiere (1983).