In the first scene a man walks on a tightrope in a vast, featureless, and dark space. Unfortunately he loses his balance and falls – but he lands in a big safety net, no, he does not crash on the ground, well not yet. He sticks around this uncanny world, whose settings get more furnished but also…

Before enjoying the moving images, the audience first discover a film with a still image, the poster displayed in the movie theaters, the streets, and the media. The poster of this political thriller puts close to the center of the image in big red thin letters the names of Montand and Verneuil next to each…

Z, to be pronounced “zei”, means in ancient Greek “he (or she) is alive”. The alive and kicking man the film follows during the first part is a leading politician of a modern country very much like Greece who has traveled to a middle-sized town to speak to his local supporters. But finding a location…

Despite the stern, slightly sullen face, he comes across as a congenial fellow, someone who is well known and liked in this small town of Eastern Anatolia. He makes his way deliberately through the streets or across the court of the junior high school, unfazed by the deep layers of snow left…

This western goes to and lingers south of the border between the United States and Mexico and treads on political territory, alluding to the 1910 Mexican Revolution. The lead character, El Chuncho, is a strong supporter of pro-revolution general Elias, under whose command he used to be a soldier…

The film bears the name of a famous rifle, the gun which supposedly won the West according to its maker, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, but it is not simply a nod to the arm’s quality and fame. A Winchester ’73 rifle is actually the central character of the film. Captured in…

This western movie brings the audience far away, beyond the Frontier in fact: it begins on a paddle steamer leaving Seattle to Alaska and most of the events unfold in the Canadian territory of Yukon. The landscapes may be as diverse and spectacular as they tend to be in the genre but here snow…

There is first the whiteness, an extensive and blinding whiteness, the whiteness of snow piled up high and spread everywhere. Shots, often of the medium and close kind, unflinchingly, harrowingly, show horses floundering in the depth of this snow, even collapsing, unable to move forward…

Unlike the two other movies of director Roberto Rossellini’s so-called “War Trilogy”, “Germania anno zero” does not have wartime events as a background. The plot takes place in the wake of the Nazi defeat, well after the guns stopped shooting, amid the ruins shells and bombs left. The first…

The camera is stuck against the right side of a black limousine which rides up an alley leading to a beautiful estate near Florence. When the driver pulls up, the camera circles around the car, capturing the two men sitting in the back still talking, one of them obviously distraught, the other…

A crowd of kids spreads through the streets, invading the town and crisscrossing it endlessly. The film’s story is not focused on a single fate, like “Les quatre cents coups – The 400 Blows” in 1959 or “L’enfant sauvage” in 1970, but tracks many characters at once. The relations with the adult world…

In 1798, in Aveyron, a rural county in southwestern France, hunters chase down and eventually seize a naked child who behaves like a wild animal and certainly does not talk or react as an ordinary boy. This wild child is sent to Paris, in an institution looking after children born mute…

To the big brother the little kid is a bore, always pestering him, wishing to take part to games only the big one and his fellow kids of a New York neighborhood can truly enjoy. When their mother must rush to pay a visit to her sick mother and orders Lennie to look after Joey for the next 24 hours…

The French phrase “Faire les quatre cents coups” means to behave foolishly, with no consideration whatsoever for rules and decency. And this is plainly the case of Antoine Doinel, a nice Parisian boy who is an unrepentant scalawag intensely disliking his junior high school, especially a French teacher…

There is the house and there is the world. Neither ignores the other, or stands completely cut off from the other: the handmaidens of the house walk to a public fountain where other maids of the wealthy Tehran neighborhood where the action takes place gather to do the laundry, professionals…