Category: Film

Otto Preminger’s epic study of a young priest’s rise through the Vatican, set against a background of 20th-century social upheaval, was largely despised in its time (1963). But Preminger’s legion of detractors has always had a hard time seeing past the triteness of his forms to the high quality of his execution. This is an […]

Rita Marley, Third World, Gregory Isaacs, Mutabaruka, and the Skatalites are among the performers featured in this record of the 1983 Reggae Sunsplash Festival in Montego Bay, Jamaica. Robert Mugge directed.

A documentary on Gil Scott-Heron as man, musician, and poet. Robert Mugge directed.

A rarely seen (in Chicago) Busby Berkeley musical (1932), directed by Leo McCarey and starring Eddie Cantor as a cowardly young fellow mistaken for a famed bullfighter. Look for Betty Grable and Paulette Goddard in the chorus line, and marvel at Gregg Toland’s lensing of some of Berkeley’s most lavish production numbers.

John Huston got all the publicity, but Richard Fleischer kept turning them out; Conan the Destroyer was his 44th film since 1946. There’s nothing very special about it, apart from the sense of relaxed and happy professionalism it exudes. For Fleischer, it’s simply a question of getting the job done with as little fuss or […]

Yet another obscure Eddie Cantor musical (1931), costarring George Raft, Charlotte Greenwood, and Frances Dean (Betty Grable), in the tale of a young man (Cantor) who becomes the patsy for a shady fortune-telling gang. The music is strictly unmemorable, but Busby Berkeley staged the dance numbers and Gregg Toland photographed them, which makes the film […]

Danish photojournalist Jacob Holdt will be present to introduce this film record of the five years he spent hitchhiking through the United States—a journey that took him from the home of Nelson Rockefeller to the rebellion at Wounded Knee.

Paul Robeson, in one of the films made during his exile in England, plays a French soldier who deserts to Africa and becomes a sheikh. Thornton Freeland directed (1937).

Stage director Joshua Logan, never a natural on film, transferred this overheated William Inge play to the screen in 1956, and much of it seems forced and out of scale. A rodeo cowboy (Don Murray) falls in love with a saloon singer (Marilyn Monroe), and Logan turns it into the most tempestuous affair since Caesar […]

The prolific Richard Lester takes a well-deserved rest on this one, but he still makes Terrence McNally’s updated bedroom farce much funnier than it has a right to be. The locale has been switched from the standard Palm Springs motel to a Manhattan gay bath, but the creaky one-liners would still suit David Niven. Jack […]

MGM paid a whopping $50,000 for the rights to Michael Arlen’s hot best-seller, The Green Hat, only to have the censors object to everything from the plotline (which touched on syphilis) to the title, even down to using the characters’ names. Greta Garbo plays the tragic heroine, racing around in her Hispano-Suiza in a desperate […]