Akira Kurosawa's sortie into the chilly white-collar world of corporate corruption is an uneven mixture of muckraking journalism and hysterical revenge tragedy. But the opening segment at least -- twenty minutes on a talk-of-the-town wedding celebration -- is unbeatable in its use of wide-screen space, as it jumps between dense, …
Early and incontestably minor work by Claude Sautet, a good, solid, serious, straightforward, fatalistic crime thriller that gives little hint of the glories of his peak period in the Seventies. All the same, it can lay claim to some fine qualities: a fast-start robbery in broad daylight, open air, and …
A hidebound Hindu persuades himself that his new daughter-in-law is the reincarnation of the goddess Kali -- a rare grapple with local mythology on the part of the cosmopolitan Satyajit Ray. Not his happiest material, in fact probably his preachiest, and it provoked some protest within the confines of his …
Sir Laurence Olivier as the seedy, lecherous, loathsome, pathetic, and touching music-hall emcee, Archie Rice, from the John Osborne play -- his lordship's best showing on film. With Joan Plowright, Alan Bates, Albert Finney, Brenda De Banzie, and Shirley Anne Field; directed by Tony Richardson.
A Birth of a Nation for the nation of Israel, three and a half hours in labor. Otto Preminger's adaptation of the Leon Uris novel is visually majestic, with some memorable sequences (and of course memorable theme music by Ernest Gold), but also some grinding dialogue and strained performances that …
Jacques Demy's contemporary fairy tale about a French cabaret dancer and unwed mother (Anouk Aimée) who optimistically awaits the return of her American Prince Charming. The almost overwhelming bittersweetness comes from its deliberate soft-pedaling of palpable realities, its policy of little white lies. (In the more bitter, less sweet sequel …
It’s a chance to ring-a-ding-ding in the New Year in style with the Rat Pack when Frank Sinatra and a group of Korean war buddies regroup to knock over the five major Las Vegas casinos at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve. That's style as in sartorial nuance …
One of the ultimate cult films, overrated by some and underrated by others, and for a lot of the wrong reasons on both sides. Michael Powell's lurid little shocker about a sex killer who photographs his victims at the moment of their death (with a custom-designed camera-cum-mirror-cum-harpoon) seems to have …
The barrenness of the television-play production and black-and-white image works rather nicely in the early scenes of bleak urban existence — the comfortless hotel room, Janet Leigh's comfortless bra — but Hitchcock seems to be pushing and pleading, later on, to extract thrills from a nosy highway patrolman, a slimy …
Visconti's chronicle of a Sicilian family's disintegration after its uprooting and resettling in industrial Milan equals the scale and sweep and social minutiae of very fat novels. It originates in the realist tradition, but its shriekingly operatic stylization, on justifiable occasions, carries it along Visconti's own private tributary. With Alain …
Big, brassy, vulgar, and -- above all -- entertaining historical piece about a slaves' revolt in the Roman Empire (First Century B.C.). The plebes tend to be played by American actors, and the patricians by British (including the movie-stealing Peter Ustinov as dean of a gladiator school). The casting concept …
Federico Fellini's diagnosis of what ails the modern world. It is not a short list. It is, rather, a long-winded discourse that sooner or later touches on nearly everyone's favorite vice. At least one of the subjects covered — the Roman paparazzi — is pinned down definitively. For the rest, …
The relevance of H.G. Wells's satiric vision of the future to his own time and place gives way, on screen, to the more timeless, universal appeals of George Pal's special effects and the Tarzan-like production values. These effects are almost always better in conception (well done, Wells) than in execution …
One of the greatest gangster films ever made — in France, or anywhere. The Frenchman most associated with the genre is of course Jean-Pierre Melville, whose earliest effort in that vein, Bob le Flambeur, followed a year after this Jacques Becker trailblazer, and while there is a strong family resemblance …
Rape, reprisal, renewal. Ingmar Bergman's farewell to the Dark Ages, with all the brutal physicality you could want from such a dedicated doubter. The physicality, while in one way almost unbearable, in another way makes the movie easier to bear than the more celebrated (and snickered-at) Seventh Seal: mental to …