Category: Film

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1982 film is centered on a Godard-like director (played by Jerzy Radziwilowicz, the Polish star of Man of Iron) who divides his time between re-creating classical painting for a movie he is making and contradictory love affairs with Hanna Schygulla (the wife of a factory owner) and Isabelle Huppert (a virginal proletarian). The […]

Roger Donaldson’s film of the classic tale of discipline and revolt in the British navy (1984) is far better than its predecessors, despite the dim wattage of Anthony Hopkins (as Captain Bligh) and Mel Gibson (as Mister Christian). Robert Bolt’s screenplay was originally prepared for David Lean, and it contains a lot of Bolt-ish/Lean-ish disquisition […]

Marcello Mastroianni plays a married man who falls in love with a woman who may be his daughter. Nastassia Kinski (Klaus’s daughter) is the woman, Alberto Lattuada directed.

Otto Preminger’s epic rendition of the aftermath of Pearl Harbor. It’s a huge film, intertwining the Navy’s preparation for war with a dozen personal stories, yet all the elements are kept in perfect balance. No one was better at these big-scale melodramas than Preminger; the cross-references here are Jack Smight’s Midway and Rene Clement’s Is […]

1 hour 34 min

A strangely warm-hearted Ken Russell movie, portraying the silent star (played by Rudolf Nureyev) as a man of dignity and charm—if not a whole lot of smarts—beset by baroque horrors of the sort that could only arise in a Ken Russell vision of Hollywood. Russell’s supercamp sensibility is not for all tastes, but this is […]

Robert Riskin, Frank Capra’s favorite screenwriter (It Happened One Night), took his only shot at directing with this 1937 vehicle for soprano Grace Moore. She plays an opera star who hires Cary Grant to pose as her husband, in order to protect her from her legions of fans. She also gets to sing “Minnie the […]