Category: Film

A turn-of-the-century musical with Betty Grable as a sideshow thrush. Walter Lang, the forgotten stalwart of 20th Century-Fox, directs in his patient, anonymous style. It’s a typical Grable vehicle, and mainly for her fans, but the allure of 40s Technicolor is always irresistible. With George Montgomery, Cesar Romero, and Phil Silvers (1943). (DK).

PG • 1 hour 22 min

1 hour 11 min

Claude Chabrol’s humor and irony aren’t much in evidence in this 1968 work, his first “art film” after five years of genre work. The title (less racy in translation—“The Does”) refers to Stephane Audran and Jacqueline Sassard, two women living out an enigmatic relationship in the south of France. Sex enters with the appearance of […]

A 1981 film by Berlin-based feminist Helke Sander (The All-Around Reduced Personality), centered on a middle-aged artist who begins to question and analyze the influence of men in her life. Sander will be present for the screening.

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 […]

An early (1956) CinemaScope epic by Robert Rossen, more intelligent and more personal than most of the entries in that silly cycle, though hardly feather light. Rossen’s Alexander is an extension of his Huey Long in All the King’s Men, a demagogue riding a shaky wave of power. Richard Burton stars, golden-tressed in his first […]

If you have any tolerance for soap opera, this is one of the classics, a film that does nothing more than what comes naturally to the genre (unlike, say, the melodramas of Borzage and Minnelli), but does it with such patience and responsibility that the cliches really come alive and become partly valid. It’s the […]

An ethnological parable by Susumu Hani, in which a Japanese builder, sent to Africa to construct a settlement for a university group, discovers a new way of life among the natives. With Kiyoshi Atsumi (1965).

John Cleese stars as a stiff-backed major in charge of “SADUSEA”—“Song and Dance Unit, Southeast Asia”—sent to entertain the British troops fighting in Singapore in 1948. Michael Blakemore (Noises Off) directed this farce, which was adapted from a 1977 Royal Shakespeare Company production. With Denis Quilley, Michael Elphick, and Nicola Pagett.