Category: Film

2 hours 8 min

A brilliant example (1926) of the baroque style by F.W. Murnau. Gösta Ekman is the man who sells his soul, and the buyer is magnificently incarnated by Emil Jannings. As atmospheric and menacing a work as the expressionist movement ever produced.

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

Ingmar Bergman’s 70-minute TV film (1984) is an afterword to Fanny and Alexander, an examination of the impressions and emotions that linger after the story is over, taking the form of three monologues (an elderly director, a young actress, the director’s alcoholic ex-star and ex-lover) and a concluding duet. The film is awful where Bergman […]

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).