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…

Volver is Spanish for to come back. In this case, the characters, in particular the female lead, come back to their roots and to deal at long last with a painful past. The first scene, featuring also the film’s titles, makes the point clear: two sisters, Raimunda and Sole (short for Soledad), with Raimunda’s…

The titles are displayed in a remarkably unusual way: only a few roll on the screen as the film is off with a visually arresting, fascinating start; then the narrative unfolds till a climax of sorts takes place; and lo and behold here come the titles rolling in full, with most of the film’s credits…

The usual throngs of the bustling New York streets fill the screen, shot by a camera standing still as it takes the medium and long shots, but always moved from one corner to another, hence the swift jumble of pictures opening the film. Some faces may catch the attention, often because…

To enter the film is to come into what is a different country, just like the past is, according to Leslie Poles Hartley. The images are a long series of old photographs, portraits of folks from various ages but clearly from a lower class backgrounds. The camera zooms or glides as faces follow each…

Michel Poiccard is a small gangster from Paris, a young man who is obstreperous, obstinate, childish, cavalier. After stealing a car in a seaside town he rashly fires on a patrolman – the crime makes the headlines over the few days the narrative takes place and sets in motion a big police operation…

Five nuns from the Kolkata-based mission of a Catholic religious order, the Convent of the Order of the Servants of Mary, are tasked with opening a dispensary and a school in a distant district in the Himalayas, Mopu, whose local Hindu leader, an old general, has decided to grant an old palace…