Category: Film

Not as bright as the best of Gregory La Cava’s improvisational comedies (My Man Godfrey, Stage Door), this 1935 effort still features some memorable moments (in a department store window) and a moving, melancholic subtext. Claudette Colbert, livelier than usual, is an executive secretary who marries her employer (Melvyn Douglas), only to find their relationship […]

A systematic study of animal abuse, ranging from casual cruelties to household pets to inhumane medical experiments. Victor Schonfeld and Myriam Alaux directed; Julie Christie narrates over a score by Robert Wyatt.

Not the best example of director Clarence Brown’s work, this 1943 film is nevertheless faithful to William Saroyan’s achingly sentimental novel about a boy’s awakening maturity in the midst of war. If you can stand a teenage Mickey Rooney for nearly two hours, you’ll find it a solid piece of Americana. With Frank Morgan, Marsha […]

Kurt Maetzig, an assistant in the German film industry, joined the communist underground to fight the Nazis, and after the war became one of the leading filmmakers in the newly created German Democratic Republic. His 1947 debut, a study of a “mixed marriage” under Hitler that becomes an indictment of the German intelligentsia’s refusal to […]

Robert Walker makes a nervous Jerome Kern in this mediocre MGM musical biography, which has a large cameo cast and some uncredited direction by Vincente Minnelli (on wife Judy Garland’s numbers) in its favor. I wouldn’t want to be the MGM lawyer who let the copyright slip on this expensive Technicolor production—it’s now in the […]

An early Indian neorealist film, about a boy abandoned to an orphanage by his impoverished mother. He escapes, falls in with a band of boy thieves, and is eventually rescued by the wife of a wealthy industrialist. K.A. Abbas directed (1954).

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