The opening is a nocturnal, brutal, fast-paced, and highly dramatic exposition introducing the lead character, the story’s good people, and what is at stake for them. The powerful series of shots track how Terry Malloy was duped into laying a trap for a friend of his who had been…

Two years after “Ådalen 31” director Bo Widerberg keeps surveying and narrating the history of the working class, its plight as well as its fights, but widens his scope as he sails the Atlantic, leaving the Scandinavian fringe of the capitalist world to shoot in its wealthiest and most…

Kids are playing, in a way that is as thrilling to them as worrying to us, perched on the long roof of a barn or trampling around the big heap of straw they made, trying to fly like birds and then like airplanes, thanks to flimsy frames they assembled from sticks and…

Songs are entertainment, custom, memories. People sing the evenings away, gathered around their local pub’s tables or sitting in their living room. The songs are passed along from one generation to the next, unless they symbolize new times…

Ho Qing-yun is an unlucky young scholar who despite real talent and hard work failed to get a position in the imperial bureaucracy, or to have any serious position at all. To earn more money, and despite his indifference to faith, he accepts an assignment from a monastery: to copy a precious…

This is the evening: Gu Sheng-tsai comes to the huge, dilapidated house adjoining the house where he lives with his mother, at the time set by the mysterious, nice-looking but stern young woman who has chosen to live in there. He gingerly walks through the sprawling place, guided…

The film opens with a wide shot capturing an impressive parade of warriors and officials streaming from the long wall of a palace, which makes up a thin line marking the horizon in the background. The people are arrayed in a couple of parallel, long, neat lines; between the lines moves…

The plot is based on the momentous technical and artistic change in the film world brought on by the advent of the synchronized sound and voice recording in 1927 with the release of “The Jazz Singer”. Overnight the possibilities available to filmmakers were expanded and…

Rick Dalton has long been viewed as a great and bankable television star, thanks to his lead role in a popular western series, playing a self-confident and ruthless bounty hunter. But now his career is floundering and he realizes his success could be something of the past. Nevertheless…

A young American, Kansas, who has settled down in a village in a lush corner of Peru gets hired as a horse wrangler in a movie set built nearby for a low-cost western production. The experience leaves him dissatisfied and instead of dreaming about filmmaking, he resumes a life that seems…

This is nighttime and the weather is rainy. A distant figure is shot stepping stealthily, hurriedly, into a movie theater. And so begins a strange journey.
Entering a movie theater means anyway exploring a new world, designed by a crew, enlivened…

Cinema is a gift of life, given out of love.
It was not eagerly sought after: the first scene shows a boy stridently reluctant to go to the movies, with his parents trying their best to convince him he should give it a try. Subtly, their…

The film was shot soon after Robert Wiene shot “Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari – The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” but there has been no trace of any public release of that other egregious example of Expressionism in Germany and for a long time copies were hard to get. That is…

As she lies dying a young Salvation Army worker asks to meet a man she tried to help. Two of her colleagues scour the city right away, but quite unenthusiastic: David Holm seems to have been a hell of a problem, even a nuisance – as she wakes her daughter, Edit’s mother has begged…

Still images lie at the core of the moving picture – at least according to a title card shown at the beginning: it is the very existence of old photographs of the landscape and folks of the South-West of Iceland that prompted director Hylnur Pálmason to imagine what has been the…