If….
June 25, 2007
Before Malcolm McDowell became the poster child for juvenile delinquency with his iconic performance in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971), he laid the groundwork in Lindsay Anderson’s ode to youthful rebellion and revolution with If…....
Overlord
April 13, 2007
Stuart Cooper’s Overlord (1975) is proof that you can make an epic movie about World War II with very little money. His film depicts one man’s journey from basic training to D-Day. He did this by blending archival war footage from the Imperial War...
The Double Life of Veronique
November 30, 2006
When The Double Life of Veronique (1991) was screened at the Cannes Film Festival it not only brought international acclaim and attention to its director Krzysztof Kieslowski but also to the film’s star, Irene Jacob. At the time, the 24-year-old Swiss...
Sweetie
November 22, 2006
New Zealand filmmaker Jane Campion has had a fascinating career with a varied body of work including a period drama (The Piano), a literary adaptation (The Portrait of a Lady) and a crime thriller (In the Cut). A common trait among all of the films in...
The Spirit of the Beehive
October 17, 2006
The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) begins with the words, “Once upon a time…” and we are transported to a small village in the Castilian Plain in Spain, 1940 on the tail end of a horrible civil war that has ravished the country. The village seems...
Amarcord: Criterion Collection
September 21, 2006
For those of us who have watched washed out, faded prints of Federico Fellini’s Amarcord (1973) on public television, this new transfer, by the folks at the Criterion Collection, is a revelation. The colours have never looked more vibrant and Nino Rota’s...
Amarcord
September 19, 2006
For those of us who have watched washed out, faded prints of Federico Fellini’s Amarcord (1973) on public television, this new transfer, by the folks at the Criterion Collection, is a revelation. The colours have never looked more vibrant and Nino Rota’s...
Seduced and Abandoned
August 18, 2006
The impetus for Pietro Germi’s 1964 film Seduced and Abandoned came from his outrage at an old Italian civil code that allowed a man to avoid prison for raping a woman if he married her. The woman is effectively punished twice: she’s been violated...
Yi Yi: Criterion Collection
July 27, 2006
Edward Yang is part of the New Taiwan Cinema movement, a group of filmmakers that depict the effects of living in urban environments in post-World War II Taiwan. Among his contemporaries are Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Tsai Ming-Liang. They are all interested...
Viridiana
May 19, 2006
The making of Viridiana (1961) not only saw a return to Spain for filmmaker Luis Bunuel (he left in 1939 when fascism took over) but a return to international notoriety. He made some great films in Mexico, including Los olvidados (1951) and El (1952)...
