Gustav Von Aschenbach is a dapper and distinguished middle-aged German musician. But in the first scenes of the film, he is above all a fussy, cantankerous traveler, a frail, nervous fellow, the kind of upper class man always complaining about service, and bemoaning the weather. He cuts both…

People pace up and down the great rooms and long corridors of the stately castle: a party is going to be thrown, to celebrate the birthday of the patriarch. A few remarks, a woman on tenterhooks, men flushed with anger, each in his room, a strange talk in a car riding a road (it is barely missed by another…

Latin cadences are wafting into the golden air of Sicily from a palazzo’s room the camera approaches with slow sliding motions until it eventually steps in through a French window; it then circles around, capturing all the people attending to this late afternoon prayers the priest fervently reciting the holy text…

Countess Livia Serpieri’s life is at first buffeted by her allegiance to two different men: on the one hand, her husband the Count, older than her and an opportunistic supporter of the Austrian Empire which is ruling Venice, their city, in 1866, while the rest of Italy (save the Papal States) has become a…

This is a small, awkward world. It squeezes people in tiny places, stifles their sentiments, forces them to huddle tight and yet intimacy feels elusive. They struggle to carve up a space for themselves, but have to cope with whatever space society has designed for them. So they are shot walking…

She is in a phase, her mother claims. Clearly the teenager is sullen and cross, she does not feel well and the trouble is that she may have a hunch about the cause. She tentatively goes to a Planned Parenthood center and takes a test. The outcome is unequivocal: she is pregnant, what she obviously did not…

The first title card explains the title, right away putting on a high moral ground the lead character, defined as an embodiment of strong virtuous feelings and acute social problems, a mythic figure amid the harsh and hectic modernity, an ideal incarnate, and so much so that she is known as a concept…

She gingerly steps out of the jail, looks around eagerly, smiles, but then frowns, puts a daunting sulky face, and walks away briskly. In the next scene, she arrives with big, farcical strides in a flea market, throws unkind remarks at a man trying to fill an old tire with air, and starts yelling she is crazy…

“I don’t care what they talk about”. Harry Caul is a wiretapping, surveillance and espionage specialist living in San Francisco. He is highly respected by his peers and it seems that he turns a pretty penny from his secret activities. Delivering high-quality tapes to his clients is the only thing…

The film borrows from “Taxi Driver” (1976) a nocturnal, strange, tough atmosphere, and a peculiar sense of danger and tension but it inverts that movie’s dynamics. A New York on the edge and on the move is not just the perfect background, or the quirky reflection, of the leading character…

As it was the case of his 1967 gangster movie “Le samouraï” director Jean-Pierre Melville begins the titles with a quote reflecting Asian spirituality – an anecdote from the Buddha about men who stand within a red circle the Buddha has drawn on the ground and then move on with their lives, straying from each other…

The inaugural sequence is a long take lasting some four minutes. The camera, using an extreme long shot, captures a huge, sparsely decorated and furnished room in the dark. A barely visible man is lying on the bed, which stands against the right side of the frame; he is smoking a…

The film opens in a railway station where a boy, skinny and dirty, sits listless against a pillar among the moans and gripes of people walking around him; later a sweeper realizes he is dead. How this boy was led to meet such a tragic, early, end, which is a shocking, brutal way…

The title is a bit misleading: this is not a comprehensive adaptation of the book by Jonathan Swift, grappling on-screen with its key themes and events. It is in fact a loose, good-humored take on the adventures of stranded mariner Gulliver in the kingdom of Liliput…

A more literal translation of the original French title signals even more bluntly what is the situation of the lead character, a former butcher: Alone against All. The film tracks the mind of a loser as he vows to shake up and better his life but actually rages against the people around him…