The final images show the lead character running away, his lanky body limping badly, his face bruised and with a black eye. He has his usual stubborn and forbidding looks but there is now a faint smile on his lips. And for the first time in this thoroughly bleak movie, the sun breaks the…

This is not a cradle-to-grave biopic: the Joseph Mallord William Turner painter the audience meets is in his early 50s and sits firmly at the firmament of the British arts, a lauded and influential master even though in this 1820s decade eyebrows start to raise and criticism to get vocal. Both his…

Fuming, pacing his studio, kicking his tools, and above all yelling, raving, insulting, the old, sick painter cuts a terrifying embittered figure. When he eventually sits and calms down, he angrily considers what failed and disappointed in his life, haunted…

Between conventional scenes of family routine, with their small talks and fussy gestures to sort out the mail or to serve port, so expressive of the bourgeois’s stilted and self-conscious manners, the tension bubbles up on the surface of the supposedly loving relationship and then bursts out, though…

A few scenes are enough to set out the tragic intensity of the melodramatic plot starting the first American venture of director Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau: the forbidding, feisty flapper from faraway shocking the quiet fishing village and tormenting the unnamed man who looks like the…

A white-dressed, white-faced clown hoots with laughter as he makes a huge ball spinning on his right hand: is this film a comedy? Such a funny image as an establishing shot suggests it but the narrative proves to be instead disquieting and tragic. Tragic it is, as a typical melodrama…

The titular touristic itinerary used to be made in Asia by well-off travelers from the British Empire, taking them through a string of great cities of the continent’s southeastern and eastern parts, a costly, fashionable, and dazzling adventure experienced in posh grand hotels and thanks…

The title is a bold association: on the one hand Greek mythology and on the other a famous occult tale, which the film tinkers with. As the Encyclopedia Britannica explains, “the Flying Dutchman, in European maritime legend is a specter ship doomed to sail forever; its…

He writes, she reads. “Sans Soleil” aims to record the experience of a cameraman traveling around the world and imparting his ideas and sentiments to a woman he loves living in France. But from the beginning the narration appears more complex than a simple reading of texts over edited…

In a definitely counter-intuitive and baffling way this adaptation of the “Ramayana”, the famous Indian epic and religious poem, starts in San Francisco in the bedroom of an American couple with their cat waking up and right away demanding food before they start their morning their routine…

Quietly sitting in the lush grass, a young black cat stares in the river – is it wondering if the image is his, or is it reckoning to catch a fish, or is it engrossed by the flow, unless it is the sparkle and the reflections? The establishing shot of “Flow” is mirrored in part by…

A tall and strong man, looking definitely unswerving and forbidding, walks down a hill briskly and reaches a fence made up of barbed wire. He tries hard to pass through the wires without scratching already shabby clothes. The camera lingers on his bumbling effort which makes his face scrawling…

The hands are what matters. Lead character Martin LaSalle is introduced while he is writing his memoirs, the camera pointedly focused on the hand holding the fountain pen rushing through the blank page. His life has depended on how deft and nimble and just audacious his hands could be: his is…

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…