The eminent German conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler ("as big as Toscanini, maybe even bigger") undergoes a postwar grilling by a hammerheaded American major about his alleged affiliation with the Nazis: "I'm going to get that fuckin' bandleader!" A stagy statement of complex issues (adapted, after all, from a play by Ronald …
The moviemakers, director Martin Scorsese and scriptwriter Paul Schrader, have started with an old-style Warner Brothers working-man premise and tried to cram their learning into it: existentialist philosophy from Sartre and Camus, homages to Bresson's Pickpocket and Diary of a Country Priest, lyrical sketches of New York After Dark styled …
An American foreign film, subtitles and all, shot in Vietnam by first-time director Tony Bui, a Saigon native raised in Sunnyvale, California. The ambitious survey of postwar society -- a cyclo driver and the call girl he has a crush on, a flower girl and the leprous poet she coaxes …
Collaborative effort of George Romero and Dario Argento -- collaborating this time not as director and producer, as they had done in the past, but as co-directors, not literally sharing the workload but splitting it roughly down the middle. More exactly, adapting separate Edgar Allan Poe stories, "The Facts in …
Long-postponed followup to Chinatown, with an awful lot of background info taken for granted after a sixteen-year break, and with a totally different visual style from its forerunner -- a bit like the relationship of The Hustler to The Color of Money, except that in the present case both films …
A leaky old U.S. sardine can ("She's old, but she'll hold") is dispatched on a special-ops mission to swipe the Enigma Code Machine from a disabled U-boat, but the commandos end up with the entire German submarine on their hands, plus a German destroyer on their tails. Old-time WWII adventure …
Theo Angelopoulos, the esoterically esteemed Greek director, blends past and present, history and fiction, Balkan politics and Bazinian aesthetics, in an "epic" quest (i.e., three hours in length) for some legendary lost reels from the dawn of cinema. Sluggish, solemn, deeply felt if not necessarily strongly communicated, it plays almost …
Alan Rudolph appears to be very much the dutiful protégé of Robert Altman, his producer, with this multi-character merry-go-round situated in the "city of the one-night stands." One has the feeling that the characters have been squashed ruthlessly in order to fit them into Rudolph's mosaic style and his reductionist …
Is Akikazu Fujishima (Kôji Yakusho, contributing many a fine George C. Scott–worthy eruption) a dilapidated blackguard guilty of the triple homicide police are questioning him about? Or is he an on-the-ropes former cop about to embark on an ultraviolent journey through hell to save an estranged teenage daughter (and maybe …
Buddy movie, road movie, romance movie, set in a mundane afterlife exclusively for suicides, no smiling allowed: "Everything is the same here; it's just a little worse." A lifeless (literally, but also figuratively) fantasy, difficult to recognize or remember as fantasy. With Patrick Fugit (looking a bit like an undergraduate …
Writer-director Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty) has made something of a crowd pleaser, a gorgeous consideration of the artistic impulse that yields up its fruits without too much of a struggle. (A little patience may be required while the weaver spins out his threads, but they all wind up woven, …