There are two Robert Kleins (one’s a Jew) in WWII Nazi-occupied France in this slow-burning, finely-tuned Kafkaesque wrong identity mystery-thriller, starring a paranoid Alain Delon.
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There are two Robert Kleins (one’s a Jew) in WWII Nazi-occupied France in this slow-burning, finely-tuned Kafkaesque wrong identity mystery-thriller, starring a paranoid Alain Delon.
Bergman fashions a character study as a penetrating psychoanalytic exercise featuring what could be Liv Ullmann’s most intensely vulnerable performance as a psychiatrist suffering from a severe mental breakdown.
A meandering misfire from Chahine, this family conflict drama infused with superfluous sequences of song-and-dance fails to stir the senses in the way that his best works effortlessly do.
One of the most notorious films in the history of cinema—its explicit, unsimulated depiction of sex hides a troubling exploration of social alienation.
An anomaly in Rohmer’s filmography, this beautiful if minimalist period costume drama about a woman who doesn’t know how she got pregnant feels like a stage exercise rather than an embracing, organic work.
A strongly feministic work, albeit a rather cold one, about a young Hungarian woman who must navigate an industrial job, toxic masculinity and social norms of marriage and child-rearing, directed with quiet authenticity by Marta Meszaros.
This banned and long-lost Iranian debut feature, boosted by a stunning restoration, is a genuine eye-opener—subversive, progressive, and a formidable take on how power and greed are symptomatic of patriarchy and nobility.
This is Scorsese at his finest, and is in my opinion probably the greatest American film to come out of the 1970s.
Continue reading →Religion and politics collide in frightening ways in this based-on-a-true-story ‘docu-drama’ that ranks as one of Mexican cinema’s greatest films.
Continue reading →Despite expert staging of mise-en-scene and astute camerawork, Fassbinder’s psychological chamber piece on infidelity and deep-seated hate probably only works as an intellectual exercise.