Category: Film

Jeanne Moreau is the director, star, and, more or less, subject of this story about an actress and her circle of friends, all trying to cope with the problems of celebrity, feminism, and romance. Despite a murky narrative, it’s an interesting exercise in egoism (Moreau’s main influence seems to be Jerry Lewis), while for a […]

Ever since screenwriter David Newman wrote it up for a Film Comment article on his “Guilty Pleasures,” this grungy exploitation film from 1953 has been a staple of the underground screening circuits. The director, Edward D. Wood, was himself a transvestite (he boasted of wearing women’s underwear throughout his hitch in World War II), and […]

Luchino Visconti stifles his operatic voice and prostrates himself before the altar of Camus. The result is a totally schematic vulgarization of Camus’ philosophical treatise in novel form. It’s not Visconti’s “fault” exactly, nor is it the fault of Marcello Mastroianni as Meursault. But Camus’ desperate either/or existentialism is perhaps better left not visualized.

A variant on the Lolita myth by Bertrand Blier (Get Out Your Handkerchiefs), with Patrick Dewaere as a philosophical nightclub pianist who finds himself with an amorous 14-year-old (Ariel Besse) on his hands. Though the film has a disturbing tendency to lay all the sexual aggression off on the girl (thus taking the male off […]

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.

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 […]

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

1 hour 19 min