Funny Games writer-director Michael Haneke is a clever guy.
Consider Stephen Chow the true spiritual heir of Jerry Lewis, and consider CJ7 Chow’s The Family Jewels.
I Want to Go Home has a splenetic oddball quality that’s at odds with the evanescent tendencies of Alain Resnais’s later films.
“I much prefer Daffy Duck to Donald Duck.” Finally a pensée I can get behind.
Perennial modernist Alain Resnais enters old-man-cinema territory with grace and style.
At first coming off as a step backward for Resnais, the theatricality of Mélo becomes a different sort of experimentalism.
Maurice Pialat was, by all accounts, a difficult man.
Conrad Veidt is the original innocent with dirty hands in this memorable bit of Germanic arcana.
Like his more famous The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Robert Wiene’s The Hands of Orlac is ponderous but indelible.
This Balzac adaptation is a costume drama that bristles with measured passion.
To say that El Cid is the most intelligent of the elephantine epics of the early ’60s is to damn it with faint praise.
A deluxe DVD package to match the grandeur of Mann’s admirable epic.
A robust overview of Frankenheimer’s most vital years, despite the recycled extras.
An Affair to Remember and a movie to treasure.
Poised as a gritty study in urban loneliness, Lost in Beijing instead becomes lost in clichés.
An Affair to Remember deserves better than to be the receptor of Meg Ryan’s crocodile tears.
The film is at its most affecting in the childlike scenes between the main character and a young native girl he befriends along the way.
Wilde’s directorial career is ripe for rediscovery. This pure, relentless yarn is a great place to start.
Jia Zhang-ke has an uncanny way of grounding his portraits of alienation in settings that are at once allegorical and tangibly lived-in.
Reha Erdem’s poetry at times underlines its own effects when it should let its epiphanies flow like a breeze.