Category: Film

A toned-down, rather depressive Fellini allegory (1984) set aboard an ocean liner carrying the ashes of a famous diva to her final resting place, in the days just before the outbreak of World War I. Symbols of life (a rhinoceros suffering in the hold, a band of Gypsy refugees picked up by the well-meaning captain) […]

1 hour 49 min

Hal Barwood and Matthew Robbins, who wrote Steven Spielberg’s Sugarland Express and together made the fine, virtually unseen Corvette Summer, are the authors of this superbly atmospheric sword-and-sorcery tale. Peter MacNicol stars as the archetypal sorcerer’s apprentice; his mentor is Ralph Richardson, in a wonderfully weird performance. The film excels as a visual exercise, as […]

The succes de scandale of Jeanne Dielman brought Chantal Akerman the opportunity to make a film for the French major Gaumont; the result was this moody, terse, haunting feature about a woman filmmaker (Aurore Clement) on a promotional tour of Europe. In each city she takes the chance to look up relatives, friends, and ex-lovers, […]

A Chekhovian study of a gamekeeper’s daughter and her relations with three men: her jealous husband, the local nobleman, and the young lawyer she really loves. Emil Lotenau directed this Russian production (1977).

1 hour 39 min

Ivan Acosta’s stage comedy about New York’s Cuban subculture, filmed by Leon Ichaso and Orlando Jimenez-Leal in 1979. Raymundo Hidalgo-Gato is the refugee hero—a bus driver in Havana, now reduced to tending a tenement on the Upper West Side. In Spanish with subtitles. 90 min.

Volker Schlondorff draws a political allegory from an 1821 incident, in which seven German peasants robbed a tax collector and were left with no idea of how to spend the money. Rainer Werner Fassbinder reportedly can be glimpsed somewhere down in the cast (1970).

2 hours 10 min

Caught in a moral crisis, a Soviet scientist leaves Moscow for Siberia, where he meets and falls in love with another emotional refugee, a young woman who once attempted suicide. Larissa Shepitko directed (1971).

Universal survived the Depression thanks to Boris Karloff and Deanna Durbin, the latter horror being a reedy-voiced child star who infected a number of late 30s musicals before creeping puberty ended her career. This is one of her more tolerable vehicles, with Deanna seducing Leopold Stokowski (1937). Henry Koster directed.