Category: Film

Carol Reed’s careful if passionless adaptation of the musical was mounted handsomely enough to win the best-picture Oscar back in 1969. In retrospect, it seems emblematic of the triviality Reed descended to in the last years of his career. The Third Man it’s not. With Mark Lester, Oliver Reed, and Ron Moody. 153 min.

Eleven animated shorts that up the genre’s usual quotient of sex and violence. Includes work by Gordon Lawson, Jeff Carpenter and Mary Lambert, Dave Bishop, George Griffin, Rick Goldstein, and Geoff Dunbar.

Captured by the Russian army in its 1945 advance across Hungary, a boy is put to work herding cows with a young Russian soldier. The two become friends, but when the boy is released at the end of the war, he is punished for collaboration. A 1964 film by Miklos Jancso (Red Psalm), it’s said […]

Very, very modest whimsy from Scotland, about a gangly teenager’s first crush. The only ambition of writer-director Bill Forsyth is to beguile—he has no insights worth mentioning—and I guess he succeeds, though it’s hard to warm to a film as intentionally slight and safe as this. With Gordon John Sinclair and Dee Hepburn.

An early (1964) film by Hungary’s Miklos Jancso, made between his documentary and experimental phases. A young doctor wanders the white corridors of a hospital, searching for human compassion in what seems to be a wholly impersonal system.

Jack Conway’s lowbrow propensities turn this 1941 William Powell-Myrna Loy comedy into more of a slapsticky affair than usual. Powell pretends to have gone insane in order to lure back his estranged wife Loy, which leads to a lot of falling down elevator shafts, etc. Beer instead of champagne, but still bubbly. With Gail Patrick […]

Shyam Benegal’s Indian film is an update of the Mahabhatata, transposing the story of two warring families to the newly industrialized India of the 1950s. The Puranchads and the Khubchands are the owners of opposing industrial empires, linked by blood and divided by competition for the same markets. With Sashi Kapoor

Portuguese director Manoel de Oliveira made this amazing film in 1981, at the age of 72; as powerful as it is stark, it suggests a blending of the modernist, minimalist techniques of Jean-Marie Straub with the elusive spiritual subject matter of Max Ophuls. In 19th-century Portugal, a rising young novelist falls in love with the […]

The gay theme was placed at the center of the publicity for this Arthur Hiller film, but in the movie it’s off to one side—it occupies, in fact, the same structural position that fatal disease did in Hiller’s Love Story. The film is about the breakdown of a beautiful relationship caused by forces beyond anyone’s […]

Patrick Bokanowski’s experimental animated feature takes as its framework a man ascending an apparently endless flight of stairs toward a zone of light. On each landing, he encounters various characters obsessed with tiny tasks—a man taking a bath, a maid filling a water jug, a group of librarians who jerk through their rounds like robots. […]

John Ford’s 1958 film looks like a family wake, only it isn’t his family that he’s invited. As the familiar faces glide past—Spencer Tracy, Pat O’Brien, Basil Rathbone, Edward Brophy, James Gleason, Ricardo Cortez, Wallace Ford, Frank McHugh—all at or near the end of their careers, it feels as if Ford is holding a funeral […]