The first feature by François Truffaut has a claim to being the origin of the New Wave (it is not unchallenged in that claim); it is also the first, and by far best, of Jean-Pierre Léaud's appearances in the ongoing Antoine Doinel role. The first part -- the escapades around …
Merely the best courtroom drama ever committed to film, with its lively theatrics tempered by sober and unbudging moral ambiguity. It is hardly less remarkable as perhaps the most mature consideration of rape (least polemical, least hysterical) ever put on film. And in the semi-retired asexual backwoods lawyer who really …
Ryuta and Mineo Komatsu are brothers, both yakuza (gangsters). Mineo, although complicit in crime, even murder, wants out of the gangster life, hoping to become a successful singer instead. Ryuta loves his brother, but Mineo's possible defection presents problems for the gang, and Ryuta realizes he must kill his brother …
A sophisticated French filmmaker relocates an ancient Greek myth in Rio de Janeiro during the fever pitch of that city's annual carnival convulsions. Not a one hundred percent true image of urban slum culture in Brazil. The confetti color, the voluptuous motion, and the incessant music (Luis Bonfa and Antonio …
A modern-day (well, 1959, anyway) retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in Brazil.
Jean-Luc Godard's jazzy, highbrow homage to Monogram gangster movies, which of course it only remotely resembles; in fact it is nearer to being the Citizen Kane of the Sixties, if you measure it by reputation and influence and don't let its improvisational style obscure the comparison. It features Jean-Paul Belmondo …
Sam Fuller, whose eyes are always bigger than his stomach, takes on a murder investigation and East-West race relations at the same time. The after-dark location shooting and the presence of Glenn Corbett in the lead role remind us rather rudely of the budget limitations. With Victoria Shaw, James Shigeta.
For this Irish fantasy from the Disney studio, they've shown the good sense to hire John Ford's cameraman (on The Quiet Man, among others), Winton Hoch; but they've asked him to shoot hardly anything more picturesque than the grizzled mug and decaying lower teeth of Albert Sharpe. The movie is …
Georges Franju's macabre masterpiece, originally released in the U.S. with English dubbing under the title The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus, an elegant, graceful, stately, almost ceremonial variation on the mad-scientist theme. A megalomaniacal plastic surgeon (the stocky, stolid Pierre Brasseur), responsible for his daughter's facial disfigurement, is determined to …
Douglas Sirk's unsettlingly slick and glossy treatment of race relations in America: the old Fannie Hurst chestnut about a lifelong friendship between a white and a black woman. The cast is worse than usual (John Gavin worse than Rock Hudson, Lana Turner worse than practically anyone), and the passage of …
Ashamed of her heritage, Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) — the light-skinned daughter of Annie (Juanita Moore), a live-in housemaid employed by a vainglorious actress (Lana Turner) — tries to pass for white. John Stahl’s magnanimous adaptation of Fannie Hurst’s best-selling sudser had proven successful enough in 1934 for Universal to …
The search for a woman who mysteriously vanishes (suicide?) on a volcanic Mediterranean island, conducted dutifully but somewhat distractedly by her lover and her best friend, produces one of the pace-setting movies of the Sixties (the pace being erratic, lethargic, anti-dramatic). This did more than any other single movie to …
Roger Vadim's modern-dress treatment of the eighteenth-century de Laclos novel, with a jazz score featuring Thelonius Monk and Art Blakey, proves convincingly that things like soullessness and moral rot are timeless. The director's ogling, fondling style helps not only to make the point, but to enlarge it. Jeanne Moreau could …