Despite the stern, slightly sullen face, he comes across as a congenial fellow, someone who is well known and liked in this small town of Eastern Anatolia. He makes his way deliberately through the streets or across the court of the junior high school, unfazed by the deep layers of snow left…
Quién sabe? – A Bullet for the General
This western goes to and lingers south of the border between the United States and Mexico and treads on political territory, alluding to the 1910 Mexican Revolution. The lead character, El Chuncho, is a strong supporter of pro-revolution general Elias, under whose command he used to be a soldier…
Winchester ’73
The film bears the name of a famous rifle, the gun which supposedly won the West according to its maker, the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, but it is not simply a nod to the arm’s quality and fame. A Winchester ’73 rifle is actually the central character of the film. Captured in…
The Far Country
This western movie brings the audience far away, beyond the Frontier in fact: it begins on a paddle steamer leaving Seattle to Alaska and most of the events unfold in the Canadian territory of Yukon. The landscapes may be as diverse and spectacular as they tend to be in the genre but here snow…
Il grande silenzio – The Great Silence
There is first the whiteness, an extensive and blinding whiteness, the whiteness of snow piled up high and spread everywhere. Shots, often of the medium and close kind, unflinchingly, harrowingly, show horses floundering in the depth of this snow, even collapsing, unable to move forward…
Germania anno zero – Germany Year Zero
Unlike the two other movies of director Roberto Rossellini’s so-called “War Trilogy”, “Germania anno zero” does not have wartime events as a background. The plot takes place in the wake of the Nazi defeat, well after the guns stopped shooting, amid the ruins shells and bombs left. The first…
Incompreso – Misunderstood
The camera is stuck against the right side of a black limousine which rides up an alley leading to a beautiful estate near Florence. When the driver pulls up, the camera circles around the car, capturing the two men sitting in the back still talking, one of them obviously distraught, the other…
L’argent de poche
A crowd of kids spreads through the streets, invading the town and crisscrossing it endlessly. The film’s story is not focused on a single fate, like “Les quatre cents coups – The 400 Blows” in 1959 or “L’enfant sauvage” in 1970, but tracks many characters at once. The relations with the adult world…
L’enfant sauvage – The Wild Child
In 1798, in Aveyron, a rural county in southwestern France, hunters chase down and eventually seize a naked child who behaves like a wild animal and certainly does not talk or react as an ordinary boy. This wild child is sent to Paris, in an institution looking after children born mute…
Little Fugitive
To the big brother the little kid is a bore, always pestering him, wishing to take part to games only the big one and his fellow kids of a New York neighborhood can truly enjoy. When their mother must rush to pay a visit to her sick mother and orders Lennie to look after Joey for the next 24 hours…
Les quatre cents coups – The 400 Blows
The French phrase “Faire les quatre cents coups” means to behave foolishly, with no consideration whatsoever for rules and decency. And this is plainly the case of Antoine Doinel, a nice Parisian boy who is an unrepentant scalawag intensely disliking his junior high school, especially a French teacher…
Shatranj-e baad – Chess of Wind
There is the house and there is the world. Neither ignores the other, or stands completely cut off from the other: the handmaidens of the house walk to a public fountain where other maids of the wealthy Tehran neighborhood where the action takes place gather to do the laundry, and professionals…
Wanda
She is a nobody: the camera does not catch her readily; instead it pans on a dreary mining landscape till a few, nondescript houses appear; it comes into one of them, glancing at an old woman sitting still despite the kid fussing around her, watching a wearied woman try to calm down a baby…
Fortunella
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…
Le notti di Cabiria – Nights of Cabiria
This is the chronicle of a few nights and many days in the life of a young streetwalker in Rome, built around the social interactions involving the titular character, Maria Ceccarelli, also known as Cabiria, and various persons and groups. A loose, noisy group of fellow prostitutes with a few…