Movie Movie

Jul 26, 2011 — To a secular eye, Jean-Pierre Melville’s sixth feature film, Léon Morin, Priest (1961), is about almost anything except religion: the deleterious effects of sexual repression, the moral bleariness of wartime and life under occupation, the harsh inflections of history in...

Jul 25, 2011 — A fearless tragicomedy about hope, dread, longing, and forgiveness, Life During Wartime (2010) is Todd Solondz’s boldest and most haunting movie to date, carrying his exploration of Middle American malaise into new territory. As before, he probes the dreams, dissatisfactions,...

Jul 19, 2011 — In May 1956, an Indian film was screened at the Cannes Film Festival. It wasn’t well attended. The Indian delegation had done little to promote it, arranging only a single midnight screening that clashed with a party in honor of...

Jul 18, 2011 — Out of the extravagant variety of Jean Cocteau’s work—the paintings and drawings, the poems, the plays and novels and memoirs, the opera librettos and ballet scenarios—it is likely his films that will have the most enduring influence, and among those,...

Jul 8, 2011 — Marcel Carné’s rich backstage drama about the theater world of nineteenth-century Paris, Children of Paradise, is back—in a new form. Based on Jacques Prevert’s original scenario, a ballet version of the classic film, choreographed by José Carlos Martinez and scored...

Jul 8, 2011 — I was scared to death about The Lady Eve. I happen to love pratfalls, but as almost everything I like, other people dislike, and vice versa, my dearest friends and severest critics constantly urged me to cut the pratfalls down...

Jul 6, 2011 — Cinephilia was the buzzword at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival. There’s nothing out of the ordinary about that, of course, but the 2011 edition (the festival’s sixty-fifth—it’s the oldest continuously running film festival in the world), which ran from...

Jun 27, 2011 — A rogue’s gallery of vituperative 1950s vixens and night-world tough-guy gargoyles all coalescing in a constellation of twinkling cold war lights, Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly is a film of a thousand stars. Stars of every sort, size, and description:...

Jun 27, 2011 — Shot in Berlin on the eve of the Great Depression with almost no budget, an equally modest cast of amateur actors, a relatively untested, unknown crew, and no major studio backing, the late silent film People on Sunday (1930) has...

With themes of love, suffering, betrayal, sacrifice, and redemption, melodrama puts its audiences through the emotional wringer.