The narrative is a long flashback: the titles appear over strikingly grisly, less than sharp, slow-motion, black and white shots describing how a man gets shot on the platform of a railway station and is taking care by medics and wheeled at breakneck speed out to an ambulance. As people are agitating…

Titles as an exercise of calligraphy: one stroke is made, this is the character “yi”, a basic element of the Chinese language that could mean “one”; then just below comes another stroke, the same kind of line, the same character, so the film’s title seems to be “one, one”; but if…

The black and white cinematography smoothly wraps and highlights characters who have however barely the time to make a lasting impression, as the editing goes fast from one odd situation to another – yet faces can be wonderfully shot and mesmerize, the director more…

This is first the story of a couple breaking up, with the man, Paul Godard, and the woman, Denise Rimbaud, shot one after the other dealing with the bitter fact they cannot stay together, as they get busy with their work in different settings: Paul Godard…

She roams gingerly around the house, wary, worried. She puts on her clothes, picks up a few belongings, at one point carefully checks what is going on in the big bedroom of the kids, and eventually, and reluctantly, leaves the place, and gets…

Second attempt to make a movie feature and second cinematic adaptation of a novel: after Nell Dunn two years earlier, Barry Hines, who put Yorkshire on the map of contemporary English novels with his distinct accent, turns one of his most important books into a screenplay…

Two men shout and run through a vast and beautiful rural landscape. They try to catch a sheep, a task they eventually, very clumsily, manage to carry out. The rest of their enterprise, killing it and selling the meat, proves to be as exhausting, frustrating, and laughable as their hunt. Behind…

“Sorry, we missed you”: the sentence has the meaning of failing to reach someone, to get in touch, also to be too late. It is spread on the top of the form drivers delivering parcels for the company PDF must leave in the letterbox in case their clients are not there to receive them. This is the…

The plot is based on two short stories by writer Akutagawa Ryûnosuke, “Rashômon”, which gives the feature its name and the historical and social context, and “In the Grove”, while the film’s final part comes from the imagination of the screenwriters and gives…

A distressing closeup and then a tracking out movement that takes the victim and the killers in a medium shot: the crime story begins in a remarkably savage and precise manner while the attention is drawn on the camera’s motions as means to widen the picture and getting the telling…

The first vision the film delivers is actually a blurred image, caused by fingers spread over eyes. These eyes belong to a young girl playing inside the Scottish mansion that is her home but the voice-over readily played along belongs to her mother, who speaks of her muteness…

Soldiers on a truck chat as they ride to a base in an African colony ravaged by war. It is not the small talk, made up of big complaints, about assignments, routines, flaws and lacks of the military organization. It is not the litany of personal tales and feelings. And it goes beyond the…

This is an adventure of breezy, blunt and brutal private investigator Mike Hammer, created by Mickey Spillane in 1947. It starts with a fast, frenzied and frightening series of nightly, kinetic shots that feel like an instant classic show of noir shock: a barefooted…

She is the first lead character to appear on-screen and the film’s last shot shows her dark silhouette against an orange sky: this overambitious mix between a romance and a period piece, a coming-of-age tale and an epic narrates how a Southern belle, over a period of less than…

If “La dolce vita” (1960) was the film of a world where the lead character’s narrative arc looks like a fall from grace, this feature released three years later is the film of a mind where redemption becomes possible. “8½” begins with a nightmare signposting movie director…