Category: Film

Shaken when a bomb destroys the nightclub where he’s working, a saxophonist embarks on a private quest to find the perpetrators. Neil Jordan (The Company of Wolves) directed this 1982 Irish film; Stephen Rea stars.

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.

Former vaudeville partners Clark Gable and Norma Shearer meet again in an Italian hotel on the eve of World War II. Clarence Brown directed the film (which features Gable in the soft-shoe number excerpted in That’s Entertainment) from Robert E. Sherwood’s play (1939).

Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott are aging gunfighters ushering a gold shipment to a mining town in an early, prestardom western (1962) by Sam Peckinpah. It’s one of his best achievements: warmly elegiac but not sloppily nostalgic, with the thesis, for once, taking a backseat to the drama. 94 min.

Barry Levinson’s warm, engaging 1982 comedy pinpoints the moment in American culture when girls began to turn into women and the social ideal shifted from east-coast urban to western pastoral. In the Baltimore of 1959 (photographed in a way that filters out all organic colors), a gang of old high school pals gathers nightly in […]