Author: Philippe Vigneres

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, and professionals…

She is a nobody: the camera does not catch her readily; instead it pans on a dreary mining landscape till a few, nondescript houses appear; it comes into one of them, glancing at an old woman sitting still despite the kid fussing around her, watching a wearied woman try to calm down a baby…

This is the chronicle of a few nights and many days in the life of a young streetwalker in Rome, built around the social interactions involving the titular character, Maria Ceccarelli, also known as Cabiria, and various persons and groups. A loose, noisy group of fellow prostitutes with a few…

She simply does what everybody does at home: coming and going through corridors and rooms, attending to all the menial, banal chores that necessities, functions, habits, command, from cooking to bathing, from cleaning to doing the errands. Those are nearly automatic gestures and common sense…

The opening is a nocturnal, brutal, fast-paced, and highly dramatic exposition introducing the lead character, the story’s good people, and what is at stake for them. The powerful series of shots track how Terry Malloy was duped into laying a trap for a friend of his who had been…

Two years after “Ådalen 31” director Bo Widerberg keeps surveying and narrating the history of the working class, its plight as well as its fights, but widens his scope as he sails the Atlantic, leaving the Scandinavian fringe of the capitalist world to shoot in its wealthiest and most…

Kids are playing, in a way that is as thrilling to them as worrying to us, perched on the long roof of a barn or trampling around the big heap of straw they made, trying to fly like birds and then like airplanes, thanks to flimsy frames they assembled from sticks and…

Songs are entertainment, custom, memories. People sing the evenings away, gathered around their local pub’s tables or sitting in their living room. The songs are passed along from one generation to the next, unless they symbolize new times…

Ho Qing-yun is an unlucky young scholar who despite real talent and hard work failed to get a position in the imperial bureaucracy, or to have any serious position at all. To earn more money, and despite his indifference to faith, he accepts an assignment from a monastery: to copy a precious…