As an actress, Austrian-born Hedy Lamarr (1914-2000) is largely forgotten. Though strikingly beautiful, her career didn't reach the heights of other European imports like Marlene Dietrich or Greta Garbo. She made only a small handful of movies remembered today, notably the Czech-made Ecstasy (1933), infamous for Lamarr's scandalous nude scene; and in Hollywood Algiers (1938), Boom Town (1940), Samson and Delilah (1949) and a few others.

Her main claim to fame for most of the past 40 years has been as a joke: a running gag in Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles (1974), in which Harvey Korman's character, "Hedley Lamarr," continually corrects those who mispronounce his first name. Hedy was not amused, suing distributor Warner Bros. for $10 million. (The case was settled out of court.)

However, as chronicled in Alexandra Dean's documentary Bombshell (2017), Lamarr's...Read the entire review

The Film:

THE MOVIE:

Love stories can be sappy regardless of the language, so just because your actors are speaking in French doesn't mean you can get away with pretentious, ironic commentary. Writer/director Julie Lopes-Curval would have us believe that because she knows the contrivances of her 2006 Toi & Moi are totally predictable, the playing field is clear for her to toy with them until her romantic heart is content. Not so, Julie! Not so!

Julie Depardieu stars as Ariane, the author of cloying photo comics in the romance magazine Toi & Moi. Her scripts tell the twisty tales of lovers in peril, of heartbreak and the easy soothing of class division that comes with unexpected, but apparently all-too regular, financial inheritance. The implicatio...Read the entire review

Oh, what beautiful music they make.

"Rumba" is the latest film from the creative team of Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon, and Bruno Romy. All three share writing and directing credit; Abel and Gordon also take the leading roles. The Belgian trio previously gave us "L'Iceberg," a near-silent comedy filled with huggable quirksters, inventive slapstick, and meticulous visual peculiarities, a sort of Buster Keaton by way of Jacques Tati by way of Wes Anderson.

Abel/Gordon/Romy's works rely on episodic comedy with a human touch. "L'Iceberg" and "Rumba" come balanced with a sense of fairy tale glee, as wondrous exaggerations enhance a sort of innocent romantic charm. These are oddball outsiders whose escapades extend into a sort of Looney Tunes madness, yet their emotions remain grounded...Read the entire review

"Give up the monkey. Your freedom will be gone forever. Forget the dictates of your heart."

Italian surrealist Marco Ferreri's was a well-established provocateur for decades before his first English language feature 1977's Bye Bye Monkey, the Italian title Ciao Maschio more aptly translating to "Goodbye Masculinity." With lead Gérard Depardieu and frequent Ferreri actor Marcello Mastroianni, Ferreri headed to New York and made a film about a man, his baby monkey, and the ruination of time on mankind.

Gerard Lafayette (Gérard Depardieu) is a young man living in a post-apocalyptic New York where the human occupation is sparse. People are outnumbered by rats so much that poison is being sprayed on streets. Lafayette has two jobs, wiring electronic rigging in a museum dedicated to the rise and fall of Imperial Rome and doing lighting for a feminist theater troupe. He also frequently h...Read the entire review

Bertrand Blier's 1986 comedy Menage (the original title was Tenue de soiree, which translates literally to "Evening Dress") is a strange, contrived, uncomfortable film that raises interesting questions about gender roles and sexuality, but does so in a tasteless, unfunny way.

Antoine and his wife Monique are having an argument in public, when they are set upon by Bob, a charismatic burglar. Bob tells Antoine to take charge of Monique - to be a man. With the promise of wealth ahead (Antoine and Monique are penniless), Bob takes the couple under his wing, training them to burglarize mansions of the extremely rich. Along the way, things become complicated. Bob turns out to be homosexual, and falls in love with Antoine, who has no interest. He loves Monique although she is indifferent towards him at best. Finally, thinking that it will please Monique, who has an ana...Read the entire review

Narrative films that take on a historical subject typically fall into one of two camps: those that amplify dramatic tension at the price of factual fidelity, and those that wind up dry or disjointed because they focus on nothing but the historic record. Katyn, by the Polish filmmaker Andrzej Wajda, is an important and even ingenious mosaic narrative that explores the repercussions of an infamous Soviet atrocity from World War II.

In September 1939, just after the outset of the war, while the Poles were busy fighting the German invasion in the west, the USSR took advantage of the weakness in the east and launched their own invasion. The Germans and Russians ended up dividing Poland between them. The Russians imprisoned the Polish military units remaining in their territory. They wound up releasing many of them, but held onto many thousands of officers. Along wit...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

I think the next time Marco Ferreri and I pass in the DVD aisles, the best thing for us to do is give each other a civil nod and keep walking. It's becoming pretty clear that his movies are not for me. I was pretty dismissive of his "savage masterpiece" La Grande Bouffe when I reviewed it earlier this year, but I thought I'd give the Italian director another shot with his 1974 absurdist satire Don't Touch the White Woman. Though, if I'm being honest, I mainly wanted to watch it for Catherine Deneuve. I like Catherine Deneuve. I also like Marcello Mastroianni. Neither of them are enough to save this movie.

Don't Touch the White Woman is Ferreri and co-writer Rafael ...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Jean-Luc Godard was one of the most prolific filmmakers of the early 1960s, producing a string of exciting, creative films that, as Susan Sontag once wrote, work as one long piece of cinema, an evolving, ever-expanding movie from a singular artistic source. Of those early movies, one of the least talked about seems to be Une Femme Mariée (A Married Woman), his 1964 study of one woman's emotional dilemma. Perhaps it's just that the movie fell between the more popular Band of Outsiders and the sci-fi detective film Alphaville, and so the less flashy feature got lost behind the spotlight. Regardless, it's an unfair development. Une Femme Mariée is a worthy companion piece to Godard's divisive 1963 masterpiece, Contempt<...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

"Beautiful girls and a mystery. Isn't that how all film noirs begin?"

Neither as immediately compelling as the classic film noir its dialogue invokes, nor as far afield from the Hollywood-style thrillers some later narration will jokingly disparage, Ole Bornedal's 2007 crime picture, Just Another Love Story, lies somewhere in the middle, a decent picture that could have been better had it maybe had a clearer idea of what it was pretending to be.

The Danish film builds its plot from lives randomly intersecting. Jonas (Anders W. Berthelsen) is a family man with a morbid job: he's a crime scene photographer. He's seen his share of dead bodies, and though a colleague, Frank (Dejan Cukic), will try to warn him how bad choices are usually the...Read the entire review

The Film:
The work of writer Charles Bukowski can, most assuredly, be an acquired taste. Bukowski was best know for his raw, often brutal, largely autobiographical narratives involving alcoholism and womanizing, written with such uncompromising honesty that some people often mistake it for misogynistic nihilism. The truth, however, is that Bukowski was an incredible writer haunted by personal demons and addictions, who seemed more comfortable fraternizing with society's underbelly and never straying too far from the working class. This is what he largely wrote about, and he wrote about it exceptionally well, beautifully crafting words to describe the grime and decay that can eat away at a person's soul. And while Bukowski's work makes for some of my favorite reading, his work has yet to be adequately captured on film.

Adapted from Buskowski's collection of short stories Erections, Ejacu...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

If one man's trash is another man's treasure, then so too can one man's feast be merely a unfulfilling snack for another. Likewise, what may be a biting and shocking satire to you might turn out to induce merely a shrug from me.

Such is the case with Marco Ferreri's 1973 film La Grande Bouffe (The Big Feast), a semi-notorious shockfest that plays like a cross between Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and Pasolini's Salo. The latter comparison is even made on the DVD box, in a quote from our very own DVD Talk, no less. Again, one reviewer's shocking and disturbing is another reviewer's interesting but underwhelming.

La Grande Bouffe (also known as Blow-Out) is the story of four friends who are...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

For his final film, famed Italian director Luchino Visconti turned to the work of influential and controversial novelist Gabrielle d'Annunzio. The author came to fame at the turn of the 20th Century, and in addition to his literary works, he wrote the scenario for the classic Italian silent film Cabiria. His literary legacy, however, has long been overshadowed by his involvement in the early stages of the Fascist party, and this has prevented his books from ever fully coming back into fashion. I'll admit to not being familiar with his work, but I also can't claim to be any kind of expert on Italian literature. With just a very basic amount of research, though, it became quickly evident that in terms of thematic concerns, Visconti and d'Annunzio a...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

I wonder, has anyone ever asked Eric Rohmer what he thinks of the oft-quoted Gene Hackman line from Night Moves, "I saw a Rohmer film once. It was kind of like watching paint dry"? Does he laugh it off, or does it dog him around like a childhood nickname that his old schoolmates will never let him forget, regardless of how he grows up or what he does with the rest of his life? I'll admit, I had not seen an Eric Rohmer film before The Romance of Astrea and Celadon, his 2007 picture, popped up for review. I inquired with a film buddy, writer Christopher McQuain, whom I knew had more knowledge of the director and asked him if he had seen it, because I thought it looked boring. Christopher said, "T...Read the entire review

Most movies go stale almost as quickly as theater popcorn. This isn't really surprising since they're mostly just trivial entertainments merely meant to fill ninety mindless minutes, but even critically-acclaimed, prize-winning films are not immune from lacking the essential qualities needed to remain engaging years later. The critically-acclaimed, highest-grossing documentary in box office history Fahrenheit 9/11, which won the Palme d´Or at Cannes in 2004, long ago grew stale. Alas, the same fate's befallen Taxi Blues (Taksi-Blyuz) which earned Russian filmmaker Pavel Lungin the Best Director prize at Cannes in 1990.

Much as it's impossible to understand the success Fahrenheit 9/11 enjoyed in 2004/2005 without considering the historic context, it's impossible to understand the appeal of Taxi Blues without putting the film in the context of 1990. The Cold Wa...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Hollywood is, of course, Ground Zero for glamour, glitz and artificiality. All of which makes for inconceivable incompatibility when thrust up against the unimaginable horrors of that most real evil of the 20th century, the Holocaust. Imaginary Witness is an unusually intelligent examination of Hollywood's sometimes not so noble relationship with portraying the terrors of the Nazi regime from the earliest films of the 1930s which haltingly acknowledged the growing threat of Hitler's order to what I guess you could call the halcyon days of such films as Schindler's List, some sixty years later.

Originally produced for and aired on American Movie Classics, Imaginary Witness takes a more or less chronological look at the way the Holocaust has been portrayed by Hollywood, not only in feature films, but also in such associated fare as newsreels. In fact in one ...Read the entire review

The 2007 Hungarian film Diary of a Madwoman takes place in the early 1900's. It begins with Dr. Josef Brenner (Ulrich Thomsen), a fairly well-known psychiatrist and writer and secret dope addict, starting his employment at an asylum where he is less concerned with treating patients and more concerned with scoring his next fix and overcoming a serious case of emotional and writers block. When it comes to his journal entries, which consist mainly of Brenner's dry dope routine and hollow accounts of empty sex with homely women, Brenner is no Bukowski or Burroughs. Benner does eventually become fixated on one patient, Gizella Klein (Kirsti Stubø), a young, malnourished, virgin, who is convinced that evil is trying to posses her through her, shall we say, lower half. Gizella also scrawls in journals or on walls nearly every chance she gets. Benner becomes at odds with his colleges because he finds G...Read the entire review

The Movie:
Gustave Flaubert's infamous novel "Madame Bovary" was the "Lady Chatterley's Lover" of its day, causing infuriated public reactions and obscenity trials that probably only helped inflame passionate readership for the book, which first found life as a serial in The Paris Revue. Though the book received a typically luminous, if subdued and after its initial release very badly truncated, filming by Jean Renoir in 1933. Both German and, believe it or not, Argentinian film adaptations followed in subsequent years, but it is probably Vincente Minnelli's glossy 1949 film with Jennifer Jones in the title role that brought the book to its largest cinema audience. That adaptation was curiously chaste, considering the source novel's emphasis on adultery and the rather lusty pursuits of the good doctor Bovary's wife, but it did have an unusually fierce performance by Jones, if too mu...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

Luchino Visconti's 1972 film Ludwig is an example of a biopic done as an epic, a grand and opulent study of the life of the 19th-century "mad kind of Bavaria," Ludwig II. A member of the Italian aristocracy himself, Visconti stood apart from his filmmaking contemporaries and their embracing of Neorealism, instead crafting meticulous studies of the various classes that were almost more realistic in their painstaking attention to detail but at the same time created a feeling of another world. This feeling of disconnection went hand in hand with the themes of many of the director's pictures, where his characters were often at odds with the world around them and seemed to walk rarefied streets that had little in common with the spaces they connected...Read the entire review

The Films:

Marco Ferreri, arguably the greatest Italian satirist to ever step behind the camera, has received a lavish treatment through North American distribs Koch Lorber Films who have put together an elaborate 8DVD set containing some of the director's best works. A majority of these works are making their first ever appearance on DVD in an English-friendly form.

El Cochecito (1960) - Don Anselmo, an aging scoundrel with a razor-sharp mind, desires a brand new motorized wheelchair. He is the only kid on the block without one. Can he trick his son, an affluent lawyer, to buy him one? (Starring José Isbert, Pedro Porcel, and José Luis López Vázquez).

Il Seme dell'uomo a.k.a The Seed of Man (1969) - The end of World War III, the world is devastated. A young couple must determine whether or not having a child would be considered an...Read the entire review

The Film:

Sex and friendship are the key ingredients in Gallic helmer Celine Sciamma's directorial debut Naissance des pieuvres a.k.a Water Lilies (2007). Stripped of political correctness, honest, and superbly-acted pic follows the deeds of three teenagers whose desire to overcome socially-restrictive clichés while experimenting with their bodies creates and breaks friendships with long-term consequences.

Floriane (Adele Haenel), a beautiful swimmer, is liked by boys and men. She flirts with them and occasionally goes out with those who are brave enough to approach her. Floriane likes the attention but not the risks that come with it.

Marie (Pauline Acquart) is not a swimmer and she never gets approached by the boys. But she likes watching Floriane's swimming team practice. Marie asks Floriane if she could come along and swim with the team.

Anne (Louise BlachÃ...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

The 1964 French thriller Joy House is a strange little movie. Directed by Rene Clement and starring Alain Delon, who had hit paydirt together with Purple Noon four years prior, it's an English-language suspense picture without much suspense that is both buoyed and dragged down by its persistent weirdness.

Delon stars as Marc, an American thug who has been tomcatting around with a gangster boss' wife. Though he gets out of the States before the cuckold discovers the affair, a bunch of the crook's goons are sent to Paris to fetch Marc and bring back his head for his lover to see. Narrowly escaping execution in a cliffside shootout, Marc holes up in a nearby monastery. There, he is discovered by a widow, Barbara (Lola Albright), and her c...Read the entire review

The great French comedy star Fernandel (1903-71) is one of those iconic characters beloved in his own country (and in this case, Italy also) but who for one reason or another remains virtually unknown in the United States. The Marseille-born comic actor and singer was recruited for a cameo role in the star-studded Around the World in 80 Days (1956) and had a substantial part in Paris Holiday (1958), a Bob Hope comedy, but that was about it as far as his English-language appearances, much like the similarly iconic Mexican star Cantinflas, who flirted with a Hollywood career at the same time.

In a welcome move, Koch Lorber Films is releasing officially restored versions of Don Camillo (1952) and The Return of Don Camillo (1953), two of Fernandel's most popular films, both directed by Julien Duvivier no less. The films are quite charming, stylistically reminiscent of Ealing's...Read the entire review

The Movie:

The movies have so thoroughly explored the nooks and crannies of New York City that one might think there's nothing more the Big Apple has to offer filmgoers. Chop Shop, however, takes audiences to a New York far removed from the stomping grounds of Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese or Spike Lee. Writer-director Ramin Bahrani introduces us to Willets Point, a 20-block section of Queens in the shadow of Shea Stadium, a ramshackle expanse of auto repair shops, scrap yards and people struggling to eke out a living.

Chop Shop's hero is a scrappy 12-year-old boy named Alejandro (Alejandro Polanco). He lives in the backroom of an auto repair shop and spends his days scraping together a few bucks any way he can -- selling candy on the subway, hawking DVDs, stealing hubcaps. He is saving what he can to buy a broken-down mobile kitchen that he and his 16-year-old sister,...Read the entire review

Chop Shop (2007), the second film by Iranian-American director Ramin Bahrani, is set in Willets Point, Queens. Known locally as the Iron Triangle, Willets Point is an industrial zone of some twenty sewerless and sidewalk-free blocks of broken streets fronting auto-repair shops and junkyards, nestled between the backside of Shea Stadium and the runways of La Guardia Airport. It's a place Mayor Bloomberg has called "the bleakest part of Queens," and which F. Scott Fitzgerald described as "the Valley of Ashes." Willets Point looks more like the bad side of Tijuana, than a business district ten miles' drive from Manhattan.

Twelve-year-old Alejandro ...Read the entire review

The Film:

Disturbing and incredibly revealing Tunisian director Nouri Bouzid's Making Of attempts to understand suicide terrorism, those who choose to become martyrs using religion as an excuse for their criminal actions. Pic's stripped of political correctness narrative goes as far as possible without becoming a nihilistic exercise of propagandizing religious fundamentalism.

Twenty-five-year-old Bahta (Lotti Abdelli) is fascinated with break dance. He spends most of his time dancing on the streets where his friends admire his talent. But the local police authorities aren't happy with Bahta's performances. They often harass the young man even though he never breaks the law. Fed up Bahta decides to leave his country. He steals his grandfather's savings hoping to purchase proper documents for his trip. Unfortunately he is cheated and forced to run away from his family. A gr...Read the entire review

The Film:

Miriam (Martina Gedeck, Mostly Martha), Andre (Peter Davor), their son Niels (Lucas Kotaranin) and his girlfriend Livia (Svea Lohde) head to the Baltic Sea for a relaxing vacation. There the family encounters Bill (Robert Seeliger), an attractive but lonely man, who has recently returned to Germany after many years of living abroad. They quickly become friends and even sail together when the weather allows it.

Attracted by Livia and her wit Bill invites the young girl to spend more time with him. Miriam, who has assumed responsibility for Livia while she is away from her parents, becomes concerned that a friendship between a 12-year old girl and a man in his upper 30s can only produce trouble. Especially given Livia's sexually immature behavior!

In the meantime Niels who has been hoping to solidify his relationship with Livia becomes increasingly hostile to hi...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

"We need to confront vague ideas with clear images." - slogan painted on the wall in La Chinoise

"In any case, you need sincerity and violence." - Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Leaud)

1967's Jean-Luc Godard feature La Chinoise (The Chinese) makes no bones about the director's emulation of agitprop pioneer Bertold Brecht. Not only does one of the main revolutionaries, Guillaume (Jean-Pierre Leaud, The 400 Blows), espouse the benefits of the playwright's political theatre as handily as he praises Chairman Mao, but in one scene, standing before a blackboard filled with names of philosophers, politicians, and other figures of the world stage, Guillaume erases them all except Brecht. La Chinoise is Goda...Read the entire review

THE MOVIE:

In the late '60s, Jean Luc-Godard was at his most politically strident. Discontent with representational cinema, he was moving away from his pop-culture retreads into something more confrontational and less reliant on narrative. From his feature film Weekend to his short segments in anthology films like Far From Vietnam and Love and Anger, and even in his Rolling Stones documentary, Sympathy for the Devil (a.k.a. One Plus One), with its perplexingly didactic skits, he was breaking down the notion of cinema frame by frame. By 1969, he was ready to issue a new manifesto, and he did so in the film Le Gai Savoir.

Explaining Le Gai Savoir is a daunting task, almost as daunting as watching it. With the 16t...Read the entire review

The Film:

The third Tavianis film to be released this month by Koch Lorber Films is Fiorile (1993), a tale about love and revenge set amidst the green hills of Tuscany. Arriving to US shores for the first time ever pic reconfirms the Tavianis reputation as one of Italy's most gifted directors.

A young family drives through the Italian countryside. The father tells his children a story about a tragedy that has been haunting their family for years. The Benedettis, who once greeted the Napoleon army, are apparently responsible for the death of a French soldier who lost a precious cargo while helping a beautiful girl. 200 years later the Benedettis are still looking for peace.

Told as a collage of flashbacks Fiorile tackles familiar themes - true love, forgiveness, the subversive power of money, etc - closely intertwined in what some regard as one of the Tavianis most...Read the entire review

The Film:

Arriving to US shores for the first time ever Kaos (1984), the Tavianis homage to Luigi Pirandello's "Novelle per un anno" (Short Stories for a Year), offers a deeply poetic look at the folklore legacy of Sicily. Commissioned by RAI, the Italian national broadcaster, pic boasts impressive panoramic vistas, literary references, as well as beautifully arranged melodies blending perfectly with the poetic spirit of its five stories.

"The Other Son", "Moonsickness", "The Jar", "Requiem", and "The Crow of Mizzaro" tell stories about struggling Sicilians battered by poverty. All of the five pieces are linked by the presence of a black crow which the audience is given a quick glimpse at during the opening scene of "The Other Son". The bird is largely used to enhance the film's visual referencing to traditional Sicilian customs and rules.

In the first story an old wo...Read the entire review

The Film:

Winner of the Grand Prize of the Jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 1982 and five David di Donatello Awards, including Best Film and Best Director, The Night of the Shooting Stars is undoubtedly Paolo and Vittorio Taviani's most accomplished work. Replacing the discontinued disc by MGM this new presentation by Koch Lorber Films attempts to get right what previous releases couldn't.

Before I get to talking about The Night of the Shooting Stars I would like to tell you a bit about the Taviani Brothers. One of the few remaining transitional directors whose work never succumbed to the fashionable trends that ravaged through Italian cinema from the mid 70s to the mid-late 80s, resulting in a number of questionable productions leaving the industry lingering well-behind France and Spain, Paolo and Vittorio managed to preserve their style and continue to shoot...Read the entire review

The Film:

Winner of four awards at the Havana Film Festival, including Best Screenplay, Chilean director Matias Bize's En La Cama a.k.a In Bed (2005) relies only on two actors to tell a magnificent story of love, betrayal, and everything else that divides the two sexes. Funded by FONDART (Chille) and NRW (Germany) pic goes a long way in proving that great cinema does not have to be expensive.

Daniela (Lewin) and Bruno (Valenzuela) don't event remember their first names. They met in a bar, had a drink, and headed straight to the closest hotel. Now havving made love for hours the two begin to question each other, starting with who the other person is.Past relationships, untold secrets, even the most intimate of desires are quickly shared. After all this is a one-night stand, nothing will ever leave the hotel room. But in the wee hours of the night the two strangers begin to doub...Read the entire review

The Film:

An 82-year old man who has never known love is the focus of attention in Danish director Pernille Rose Grønkjær's "The Monastery: Mr. Vig & the Nun" (2006). A crowd and critics pleaser at top international festivals pic does entertain as much as it actually disturbs with its fresh look at faith and those who commit their lives to it.

Mr. Vig, a long-bearded man with unfashionably thick glasses, is on a mission to transform an old castle into a Russian monastery. He invites a group of Russian nuns and soon after the place assumes its new role.

But as time goes by more and more often the new occupants begin to disagree with Mr.Vig. Amvrosya, the new master of the monastery, is determined to have everything done and run her way, much to the displeasure of Mr. Vig. Is the monastery approaching its end?

A low-budget "documentary" shot over the span of ...Read the entire review

Filmmaker Gary Burns and journalist Jim Brown provide a fresh and darkly-funny critique of suburban sprawl in the Canadian documentary Radiant City. Burns and Brown spice up the standard mix of interviews with experts by adding candid documentary footage of one nuclear family struggling with the trade-offs of suburban living.

The experts enlisted include urban planners Marc Boutin, Andrés Duany, Ken Greenberg, and Bev Sandalack, philosophers Joseph Heath and Mark Kingwell, and iconoclast James Howard Kunstler, the author of The Geography of Nowwhere. These experts and a series of animated graphics paint a dreary portrait of suburbia. Kunstler notes "eighty percent of everything ever built in North America has been built in the last fifty years. Most of it is brutal, depressing, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading." The experts also provide frightening prognostications re...Read the entire review