Category: Film

Otto Preminger’s 1955 adaptation of Nelson Algren’s novel is something of a crossroads movie, suspended between the swirling expressionism of Preminger’s early career and the balanced realism that would later become his forte. Frank Sinatra, as the drug-addicted poker dealer, plays a reasonably naturalistic character, but he’s surrounded by a collection of bizarre archetypes (Eleanor […]

The Warner Brothers version of 1937, which solves the problems of trick photography by casting twins—Billy and Bobby Mauch—in the title roles. With Errol Flynn, Claude Rains, Henry Stephenson, Barton MacLane, and Alan Hale; Warners workhorse William Keighley directed. 120 min.

Two features from Luis Buñuel’s “commercial” Mexican period. Illusion Travels by Streetcar (1953, 90 min.) is a surprisingly gentle folk comedy in which two streetcar conductors find that their car is going to be retired and take it out for a last run through the streets of Mexico City. The undoubted highlight is Buñuel’s interpretation […]

A rarely shown late effort by Alexander Dovzhenko, made in 1939 at the specific request of Stalin, who wanted a Ukrainian epic to pair with the Vassiliev brothers’ rousing Chapayev. The chosen hero was Nikolai Shchors, who commanded the Red Army in the Ukraine during the civil war. The results lack the lyrical intensity of […]

Rene Clair, the French director (A nous la liberte, Le million) who spent the 30s in Hollywood, did a very workmanlike job with the classic Agatha Christie thriller about ten weekend guests on a secluded island who find themselves being murdered one by one. It was Clair’s last American film (1945) and it shows him […]

There’s so little to the subjects in Marguerite Duras’ films—here it’s that old favorite, doomed love among the rotting aristocracy—that it’s easy to think of her as the most perverse of minimalists. But Duras’ thin dramas are perceived through layers upon layers of style—she’s the Busby Berkeley of structuralism. In this 1974 film, she uses […]

Tom Selleck tries again in a comedy-adventure about a professional jewel thief who is hired by Scotland Yard to intercept a shipment of Nazi diamonds. TV director Roger Young makes his theatrical debut; Jane Seymour, Lauren Hutton, Bob Hoskins, and Ed Lauter costar.

An earnest problem drama, about three Australian soldiers who are court-martialed for brutality during the Boer War (1979, 107 min.). Bruce Beresford’s film was based on a successful stage play, and the theatrical structure is clear and rigid throughout. The film handles difficult issues of wartime morality, with clear parallels to the American experience in […]

Sergio Giral’s 1975 Cuban film reproduces a 19th-century antislavery novel as its upper-class liberal author wrote it, then runs through the story again with Marxist revisions. It’s an interesting structural experiment, but the ideas are often better than the execution. 100 min.

1 hour 35 min

The video artist will be present to show two works: Possibly in Michigan, a “fairy tale” about midwestern cannibals, and Beneath the Skin, an experimental narrative.

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This 1984 film’s few and unimpressive special effects evidently qualify it as science fiction, but the genre it really belongs to is the male weepie: there hasn’t been a gooier buddy romance on the screen since Joe Buck took Ratso Rizzo to Miami. William Shatner’s blubbering Captain Kirk sacrifices everything he has—his career, his ship, […]