It is difficult to guess where this odd crown, with its main circle ornamented with loops pointing upwards, made of a material that is hard to recognize, but perhaps it is just iron, comes from and has become the cherished property of the titular character. She keeps it carefully within reach in her…

Jeanne d’Arc, or Joan of Arc, is an extraordinary and mythic figure of the last years of the One Hundred Years War. Born in 1412 in a family of rather poor peasants, she claims to hear voices from three saints and on their advice decides to leave her village and the life of an ordinary countryside girl…

The film starts with a long closeup on the puffy and tired face of an old man whose stare is vacant, even lifeless. He is Huzur Biswambhar Roy, a Bengali zamindar, that is an aristocrat owning huge tracts of lands, controlling the people living on his lands and collecting taxes for the government who…

Surging high in their red incandescence in a dark environment the flames seem to devour the screen and it is against the bright menace that the whitish titles appear. A world is burning, the world where the narrator, the aggrieved young woman who first appear in the film, used to live peacefully but…

With a runtime of 83 minutes and little eye-catching effects in its shooting and editing and instead a gracefully straightforward camerawork, which nevertheless is not immune to irony and at the end to lyricism, the last movie directed by veteran American filmmaker John Huston doe not seem…

The film kicks off with a somber note, as lead character Grace Pudel mourns the best friend she had, a feisty and eccentric octogenarian lady, Pinky, whose health has deteriorated fast, falling victim to the Alzheimer’s disease. Sitting on a bench in the small garden of her departed friend, she talks…

It looks like they are eerie though disturbing statues but the more the camera lingers over the bodies and the closer it captures telling details, like a pair of shoes in relative good shape fitting the feet of lifelike legs, the more it rather looks like they are cadavers. The initial images are not a tour in a…

In the outstanding, flamboyant, and audacious prologue to his “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” (1992), director Francis Coppola suggested the titular monster was haunted by a beautiful wife lost to the horror of politics and war and that the prey he would chance upon many centuries later was the…

Nine years after German director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau shot “Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Graunens – Nosferatu, A Symphony of Horror”, which was not officially an adaption of Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula” because of the opposition of the late writer’s family but very much looked like…

Three scientists of a Japanese laboratory, Professor Tora-taroh Shima and his assistants Chiba Atsuko and Kohsaku Tokita, find out that their newest invention, the DC Mini, has been stolen. The DC Mini’s purpose is to record, to explore, and possibly to meddle in the dreams of people suffering…

Starting for many of the characters at 5:30 am, it should have been an ordinary day of work, though taking place in the rarefied world of military and political decision-making. It is true there are small but spectacular signs that all cannot be well in their lives. General Black barely recovers from a bad dream…

A stony and blunt United States Air Force Brigadier General commanding an air base supervising a group of bombers flying above the globe ready to launch an attack, including with atomic bombs single-handedly and with little interest in legality decides it is time to fight and destroy the Communist…

A blindfolded woman is led by a smiling man down a corridor, invited to push open a door, and then gets her sight back to marvel at the room both are now standing, the place where the baby the woman is expecting is to live under the care of the devoted and proud father. But the life of Justin Kemp, and…

This courtroom drama takes place where the public is not usually allowed to go: the room where the jurors gather after the closing arguments of the trial of a criminal case to reach a verdict. Twelve people, in this case all male and white, this is after all the 1950s United States, must…

So melodrama is a vision of the world which is a stark and forceful examination of a prejudiced society shaped by blunt social, racial, and gender delineations locking up the unlucky people targeted by the prejudice even as they yearn for respect and hope. Women are a privileged…