Category: Film

A 1981 film by the talented German director Reinhard Hauff (Knife in the Head), who is one of the few New German cineastes more interested in narrative inflections than spectacular imagery. An ex-convict turned successful novelist is pressured by an old cell mate to join a terrorist plot to kidnap a millionaire—but the cell mate […]

A James Ivory-Ismail Merchant-Ruth Prawer Jhabvala Indian excursion (Shakespeare Wallah, Bombay Talkie), about a British woman (Julie Christie) retracing her grandmother’s romantic misadventure with a raja (Shashi Kapoor).

A 1919 film, based on medieval Swedish legend, by Mauritz Stiller. Six years later, Stiller discovered Greta Garbo and brought her to the attention of Louis B. Mayer; her career subsequently overwhelmed his, but there is evidence, in Erotikon and Gunnar Hede’s Saga, that he was one of the most significant contributors to early Swedish […]

Two experimental shorts by New York filmmaker Bette Gordon, whose feature film debut, Variety, has lately attracted some favorable attention.

Also known as The Rite, this 1969 exercise by Ingmar Bergman about three artists and a judge was originally shot for television and, by his own admission, contains elements of all of Bergman’s creative nature: “neurotic, bourgeois, organizing, and run-down.” A rarely seen but thoroughly captivating example of filmed chamber theater. With Anders Ek, Ingrid […]

Hiroshi Inagaki, famous in Japan for his samurai films, won the Venice Film Festival’s Golden Lion in 1958 for this sentimental study of a rickshaw driver (Toshiro Mifune) and his relationship with a widow and her son.