Category: Film

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.

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.

This Peruvian back-to-the-land drama (or, more accurately, back-to-the-jungle) became a minor cult item after its exposure at the 1970 Chicago Film Festival. The director, Armando Robles Godoy, is entirely innocent of technique, but his sincere fumblings give the cliche themes some charm. In Spanish with subtitles. 110 min.