The hat, dirty, battered and with a hole, is the first thing shot, in close-up, filling the screen. Then the head wearing it sticks out, a round face with a beard and the wrinkles of combat fatigue. This is Sergeant Zack, the only survivor of an attack by the Communist forces he and other soldiers sent by the UN…

Henri-Georges Clouzot claimed he didn’t want to shoot a detective story but a narrative based on criminal law and analysis. Yet his film does describe a convoluted and intriguing police investigation which concludes with an unexpected twist – after all, film producer Georges Brignon…

An unemployed samurai arrives in a village where people hide inside their houses and business is disrupted because of the endless fighting between two rival gangs. Each is led by men claiming they have the right to rule the place after the death of the previous village chief…

On May 4, 1954, a French army platoon leaves the outpost it has been holding on the frontier between Cambodia and Laos, then parts of the Indochinese colonial system, to reach a distant, bigger, base. It is made up in large parts of indigenous recruits and is led by Lieutenant Torrens, a rookie…

“Dodes’kaden” is not a noun but an onomatopoeia; “clickety-clack” could be a rough translation; this is the sound Roku-chan makes to imitate the engine of the tram chugging across the slum he lives in. Each day, the young man drives it, after checking the mechanics at dawn. He is proud of his job and…

Russell leaves a party at his best friend’s home to spend the end of a Friday evening in a gay nightclub. The next morning, in his flat, he makes the coffee for the man he has picked up, Glen. They start talking – and will keep talking and walking in their city of Nottingham…

The key information about Zacarias is given when his voice reads the letter he is writing to his parents, well after the film started on the coast of Mozambique he has reached with other soldiers after a long, harsh sea voyage. The very young, thin, and frail…

This is about quiet lives it seems: in a slightly grainy black and white, with the light of sky remarkably bright, a family is pictured moving around the countryside in a truck and then attending a kind of ceremony at a vast house, with the somehow…

This is not an ordinary film. In a move that had been surely unusual in the Japanese cinema it was not produced within the studios system. Funds had been gathered by a trade union, a left-leaning group of teachers precisely, and support was provided by the…

It takes some time to grasp the astonishing audacity of the movie’s first part. The editing blends abstract, stylistic images of torsos hugging each other, with their arms endlessly grappling, extending, folding, with images of Hiroshima and of the victims of the…

The film’s Chinese title is the name of the first female star in the history of Chinese cinema (“Center Stage” is a convenient title for foreign audiences reluctant to memorize Chinese pronunciation). Her life was short but her career was brilliant: Ruan Ling-yu…

When she was a girl, Esther Khan was plainly unattractive and awkward. She lived in a poor London neighborhood with her large Jewish family: her father Ytzhok, who is a tailor barely eking out a living and makes all his family work in a big apartment…

After losing her beloved son Esteban in a car accident on the evening of his birthday, as he was turning 17 only, Manuela gives up her job as a hospital nurse and runs away from Madrid to go to Barcelona, where she reckons to meet with Esteban’s father. She never talked about him…

A young white boy playing in the schoolyard, a teenage white girl learning to sing in a choir, a middle-aged man walking and wandering in the streets, a housewife cooking: snapshots of a day in Sidney before these members of an upper middle-class family gather at home…

The film’s prologue relies on a virtuoso use of cross cutting editing. It starts quietly as the camera follows a little happy girl walking in the woods surrounding a countryside mansion. Her red plastic mac gives her the looks of the Little Red Riding Hood cavorting on a pleasant autumn day. There is…