Category: Film

A rabbi and his family escape from Nazi Germany in a 1979 film by Peter Lilienthal, Germany’s first Jewish director.

This 1932 RKO feature was thought lost until a print turned up unexpectedly in the Universal vaults. It’s an adaptation of a stage play by Philip Barry (Holiday, The Philadelphia Story), starring Leslie Howard as a playboy determined to settle down and Myrna Loy (in her first drawing room part) as the straitlaced girl he […]

Yakov Protazanov was one of the few prerevolutionary Russian filmmakers who continued to make movies under the new regime (the pioneering science fiction film Aelita is his best-known effort). This feature, a peasant melodrama, dates from 1918.

A school-of-Rivette fantasy by British experimentalist Ken McMullen. Taking off from Leon Trotsky’s notion that ghosts operate in the modern world through radio waves and electricity, McMullen spins a tale of contemporary spiritualism centered on two women, an anthropologist and a political activist, who seem to have shared a past life. With Leonie Mellinger, Pascale […]

Alan Freed’s 1959 rock ‘n’ roll show, viewed as a turning point in teenage consciousness. Floyd Mutrux’s 1978 feature exemplifies many of the worst tendencies of the American film in that era: its sentimentality is clumsy and insincere, it has no plot or structure to speak of, and people run around and scream a lot […]

Jack Benny made this 1945 box office dud into something of a legend over the years by constantly citing it as the film that sank his movie career. It’s one of those morbid 40s fantasies, like Here Comes Mr. Jordan, about a trumpet player who dreams he’s Gabriel, sent to earth to announce the apocalypse. […]

1 hour 37 min

The Emily Bronte novel was a favorite among the surrealists for its treatment of obsessive love, and Luis Buñuel originally planned to film it in the 30s (from a screenplay by poet Pierre Unik). Those plans fell through, but Buñuel returned to the project in 1953, during his sojourn in the Mexican commercial cinema. It’s […]

G.W. Pabst’s 1929 follow-up to his notorious Pandora’s Box, again with the American starlet Louise Brooks, though this time as sexual victim rather than predator. The daughter of a pharmacist, she is seduced by a shop assistant and launched on a series of humiliations, which include bearing a baby out of wedlock, a term in […]