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

A John Huston film in the tradition of his Moby Dick, The Red Badge of Courage, and Wise Blood, in which another unfilmable novel proves, indeed, to be unfilmable (1984). I’ve never understood what Huston hoped to gain with these overambitious adaptations, which admit from the start their inability to equal the source material, and […]

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

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 […]