Category: Film

Three recent works about Asians living in the U.S. by the independent documentarist. Includes Adopted Son: The Murder of Vincent Chin, Sei Chien: Goddess in Flight, and Bittersweet Survival.

The Oscar winner for 1929, this MGM feature was the first movie musical. The staging is wooden, the story insipid, and the dialogue sequences mostly painful, but the film’s integration of song, dance, and story (“100% All Talking! 100% All Singing! 100% All Dancing!”) was a clear narrative advance over the music pictures being released […]

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.

Told that his daughter is dying of a rare disease, a peasant applies to the local landowner for financial help. But when the girl is cured, he feels ashamed of his failure to provide for her, and sends her to live with her benefactor. Valeria Sarmiento directed this French-Portuguese coproduction; Raul Ruiz contributed to the […]

Cosmo Topper (Roland Young) helps the ghost of a showgirl (Joan Blondell) solve her own murder in this last entry in the series. Roy Del Ruth directed; with Carole Landis, Billie Burke, Dennis O’Keefe, Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, and Patsy Kelly.

The stars of Notorious, Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant, are reunited for Stanley Donen’s 1958 film—with a title that may or may not be an allusion to Hitchcock’s masterwork. The action also runs somewhat parallel: Bergman is in love with Grant, but he keeps putting her off for reasons that remain mysterious. A fine light […]

Edward G. Robinson, a mousy office clerk, discovers that he’s a look-alike for a notorious gangster in John Ford’s 1935 comedy. The wit and easy grace of this film further belie the myth that The Informer is all there is to Ford’s career in the 30s. Jean Arthur costars. 95 min.

An animated gloss on George Orwell’s anti-Soviet fable, rendered in dull, grayish tones by the British team of John Halas and Joy Batchelor (1955). Why is it that cartoons made for adults inevitably bore both adults and children? Louis de Rochemont, of “The March of Time,” produced; the film has more than a trace of […]

The nebbishness of Woody Allen’s Bogart-worshiping film buff has started to date badly, revealing an uncomfortable strain of narcissism beneath the fumbling charm, but this is still one of his most appealing performances, perhaps because Herbert Ross’s pedestrian direction reins in some of Allen’s ego excesses (1972). But the dramatic center of the material—Allen falling […]