There has been an accident near a cozy country house. The man living in the house rushes to the site of the car crash and finds a young man dead and an unscathed young lady. He clearly knows them, since he calls them by their names. He helps the girl to the house…

“There are curses and curses”, the boy authoritatively claims to the bemused and amused adults sitting at the table. It is kids’ stuff: Leo Colston has been portrayed by his schoolmate Marcus Maudsley, whose family has taken in the boy at their Norfolk estate for part of the summer vacation, as…

The plot could be rightly summed up as the tale of characters quite satisfied with the life they have until they discover out of the blue a hobby that stun and excite them well beyond what they imagined; they get so devoted and mad about it that…

The man roving in an apartment, lightly stroking the hair of a sleeping boy, watching tenderly a woman who is also asleep, takes a chair, sits down, and starts talking to the camera, explaining that he is dead. So he is a ghost, still wandering through real life, yet this is not really a ghost story. The…

A fast-paced, chaotic, tragic collection of pictures welcomes the audience as the film begins, bits of a puzzle hard to understand, maelstrom of memories and emotions. This is not the clearest, more reassuring way to introduce a lead character, but it is through fragments that Witek Dlugoz…

“Police” in 1985 or “Sous le soleil de Satan” in 1987 emphasized that if director Maurice Pialat was willing to tackle movie genres, it was only up to a point – once this point is reached, the film gets another direction and offers unexpected, fierce, moving sentiments, another…

Close-ups and extreme close-ups highlight the tension running through the faces of the people sit around the table, intently listening to a radio broadcast. Shot and reverse shots and medium shots show how this tension explodes into a bitter confrontation between two groups of men…

This commedia all’italiana tackles three decades in the country’s history, from the final months of World War Two up to 1974. It takes the viewpoint of a group of three friends who were part of a group of partisans fighting Fascists and Germans and…

The year is 1938 and this is the Day of the Dead in the small town of Cuernavaca, at the bottom of a couple of volcanoes, deep in the South of Mexico. People are celebrating in their own, traditional, festive, colorful, incredible ways their dead, who are supposed to pay them a visit on that day…

The plot is fiendishly complicated, and revolves around unusual bad guys and stuff. The object causing the deaths of two men and explosive confrontations gives the film its title; it is a gold-made and gem-decorated statuette of a falcon which the Knights of the Sovereign Military Hospitalier…

The story is built around an absence: despite giving it its title, Rebecca’s character is nowhere to be seen. She is dead; and even though some characters are keen on sharing their memories about her, the film never uses flashbacks to illustrate them. On the contrary, the…

Here is a period piece that is shot without teh sets and much of the elaborate reconstruction of the past usually on display in this kind of film. Scenes and sequences are shot in the same, wide-opened space, against a seemingly endless grayish wall, with no visible floor or ceiling and filled…

The first part of the film is built around perversion. It starts innocuously, in a convent where well-dressed children walk in row across the court while nuns and novices briskly tend to whatever is their business. The mother superior then calls out the character who gives the film its title. Viridiana…

A couple of flashbacks, some tense scenes, filled with bumbling gestures, slips of the tongue, sharp words, and a stunning sex performance present in a fast-paced, jerky, blunt manner the elements of the drama. The film revolves around the barely veiled conflict between a young woman…

A train, coming from the right, pulls up in a station. A few passengers go down, including a group of soldiers, walking from the right to the left of the screen. They soon part ways, the bulk of the group moving one way while a lone soldier keeps walking to the left of the screen, closer to…