Category: Film

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

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.

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).

Paramount Pictures bakes a $40 million loaf of Wonder Bread—this 1979 movie adaptation of the cult TV series is blandness raised to an epic scale. Robert Wise’s bloodless direction drains all the air from the Enterprise, as his characters inevitably lose their individuality in the mechanical click-clack of his crosscutting. This is the sort of […]

3 hours 10 min

Bill Forsyth, director of the frail and strenuously charming Gregory’s Girl, more or less gets his act together with this fable of an American executive (Peter Riegert) who succumbs to the mooniness of the Scottish fishing village he has been sent to buy for his company. The languorous, almost extinguished rhythms and the casual placement […]

For his first feature, Jean-Jacques Beineix borrowed the formal innovations of the French avant-garde—Godard’s colors and conflicting tones, Rivette’s screwball thriller plotting—for a work of unalloyed entertainment, which was such a sharp commercial idea it’s a wonder no one had thought of it before. A young postal messenger who worships an American opera singer makes […]

A year-long series on the development of movies as an art form begins with a program on “The Origins of Cinematic Narration.” Among the films to be shown, all shorts, are several “views” created for the Edison Kinetoscope, a selection of the Lumiere brothers’ films, George Melies’ 1902 A Trip to the Moon, and some […]

Northwestern’s A&O Films has assembled another 18-hour mind-number, and while strictly speaking there aren’t any B films in the bunch (B movies were produced by the major studios to fill out the bottom halves of double bills), there are more than enough wretchedly impoverished exploitation films to satisfy the most discriminating tastes. Shown end to […]