Five

Jan 10, 2000 — The Night Porter is a provocative and problematic film. Made in 1974 by Italian director Liliana Cavani, it can be seen as an exercise in perversion and exploitation of the Holocaust for the sake of sensationalism. On the other hand,...

Nov 15, 1999 — Great comedy cannot be confined within normally accepted boundaries of taste and sensitivity. The essence of the Pythons was that they were always ready to take on formidable, daunting subjects that others might find too dangerous to contemplate. The idea...

Jun 21, 1999 — Laurence Olivier’s Henry V today seems like nothing less than a miracle in answer to the Chorus’s call for “a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention.” It’s a dazzling adaptation of a Shakespeare play, made...

Jun 21, 1999 — Despite what you may have heard, Armageddon is a work of art by a cutting-edge artist who is a master of movement, light, color, and shape—and also of chaos, razzle-dazzle, and explosion. (It was no surprise to me to learn...

May 24, 1999 — Before The Red Shoes, there were films with dance numbers. After it, there was a new medium which combined dance, design, and music in a dreamlike spectacle. Hollywood musicals were quick to pay tribute—An American in Paris was the most...

Feb 22, 1999 — To experience a film by Japanese B-movie visionary Seijun Suzuki is to experience Japanese cinema in all its frenzied, voluptuous excess. Born in Tokyo in 1923, Seijun Suzuki is best known for a cycle of extraordinary yakuza (gangster) movies he...

Jul 21, 1998 — Samurai III, Duel at Ganryu Island, is the last and best part of Hiroshi Inagaki’s Trilogy. In contrast to the earlier, more action-oriented Samurai I and II, this final section shows its hero Musashi (Toshiro Mifune) struggling with questions as...

Jun 27, 1995 — Orson Welles’s Shakespeare adaptation was his first first fully independent feature, made without the resources of Hollywood.

Nov 15, 1994 — Andrzej Wajda’s third full-length film established the director as a leader of the new Polish cinema.

May 10, 1993 — Green for Danger is a welcome twist on that most venerable of English concoctions, the drawing-room thriller. In this instance, the drawing room is instead a hospital not far from London, where surgery is conducted under a cascade of German...