Customary pictures of a penal colony, in this case in French Guyana, with prisoners doing their chores and answering a roll call under a scorching sun, taken in medium long shots or medium shots, quickly give way to an unexpected sequence showing…

“Amarcord” is a crowd. From the start, people are teeming the streets and rushing through the squares of the Romagna’s village where the film takes place, celebrating events and attending shows, sowing mayhem in a classroom or turning into a shouting match a family lunch, an ensemble cast…

A hand moving around even as it is attached to no arm: with the strange beginning capturing this hand getting out of the fridge where it was kept along with other human body parts, especially eyeballs, looking for an escape as keenly as a prisoner, the film seems…

Exoticism and Orientalism shape the five-act narrative and the narration of what is the oldest animated feature still available and certainly one of the very first animated movie lasting more than 60 minutes. The story of the titular prince…

Galicia is a Spanish territory standing against the Atlantic Ocean and bordering on the South Portugal. A rather poor rural region with a distinct culture, it is not often surveyed by the arts and the books. It has been able to make sometimes the news outlets’ headlines…

The production started while the screenplay wasn’t ready. Costs quickly overran. Montage turned into a nightmare. The final cut was shorter than the director’s project. Success was tepid. It is not a well-liked movie. Is it worth another look?

On the face of it the feature looks like a lengthened short, a stretched observational effort that is carefully depicting the most mundane elements of the day in the life of a sales assistant in a big shop of clothes and fabrics in the big city of Coimbatore in Tamil Nadu…

“Nothing in the world can be compared to the human face. It is a land one can never tire of exploring”, Carl Theodor Dreyer once said about the importance of the human face in cinema. “Vivre sa vie” seems built and shaped around this artistic principle…

A young man walks across a field. He stops by a river to drink; when he lifts his face from the water, he sees a dead body is floating downstream. Shot in long shot and medium close shot, the opening sequence captures the tragic position of Heron de Foix. He has left Paris where he studied in order to…

The meeting occurs in the most unexpected circumstances. Bruno Winter pulled off his jalopy of a truck on a drab riverbank to spend the night between two stops in his never-ending tour of small towns to do his job: he is an itinerant projectionist…

Overcoming his spleen and following the advice of his mother, Wilhelm decides to travel around in the hope to kick-start a career as a writer. He intends to go to Bonn, then West Germany’s political capital; but his travel becomes unwieldy and unexpected under the influence…

Even if the title brings to mind the novel of Lewis Carroll this is not a tour in a parallel, fantastic world but in the urban places of the Western modernity while embracing an even wider scope: the film begins with the image of an airliner scudding through the sky…

The background of the narrative is the widespread fighting between warlords that wreaked havoc on Japan over the 16th century, before one of them overrode his enemies, heralding the long period of political stability and iron-clad, moralistic military rule known as the Tokugawa era. The events occur…

After starting a career as painter and then moving to cinema to create abstract films, Walter Ruttmann decides to shoot a new kind of film that would be a visual symphony composed with the millions of energy comprising the life of the German metropolis. “Berlin: the Symphony of a…

Adam Cramer is a professional troublemaker sent by a far-right organization based in Washington, DC, to a little town of the Deep South, to marshal the local population in a fresh attempt to prevent the enforcement of the landmark ruling of the US Supreme Court on desegregation in…