Drama

In 1940, during World War II, an officer is sent to investigate rumours of German spies in a sleepy village where various people are the victims of war hysteria.Read More »

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La Pointe Courte: How Agnès Varda “Invented” the New Wave

In September 1997, I saw Agnès Varda introduce a brand-new 35 mm print of her first feature film, La Pointe Courte (made in 1954), to an admiring audience at Yale University. More astonishing than the luminous black-and-white images was Varda’s claim that she had seen virtually no other films before making it (after racking her brain, she could come up with only Citizen Kane). Whether Varda’s assertion was true or the whim of an artist who does not wish to acknowledge any influence, La Pointe Courte is a stunningly beautiful and accomplished first film. It has also, deservedly, achieved a cult status in film history as, in the words of historian Georges Sadoul, “truly the first film of the nouvelle vague.”Read More »

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The Last Picture Show is one of the key films of the American cinema renaissance of the seventies. Set during the early fifties, in the loneliest Texas nowheresville to ever dust up a movie screen, this aching portrait of a dying West, adapted from Larry McMurtry’s novel, focuses on the daily shuffles of three futureless teens—the enigmatic Sonny (Timothy Bottoms), the wayward jock Duane (Jeff Bridges), and the desperate-to-be-adored rich girl Jacy (Cybil Shepherd)—and the aging lost souls who bump up against them in the night like drifting tumbleweeds, including Cloris Leachman’s lonely housewife and Ben Johnson’s grizzled movie-house proprietor. Featuring evocative black-and-white imagery and profoundly felt performances, this hushed depiction of crumbling American values remains the pivotal film in the career of the invaluable director and film historian Peter Bogdanovich.Read More »

Plot: The young teacher Li Mingguang is to be murdered in the north of China because of having taken the virginity from the young girl Li Pingwa. The whole family wants to take revenge on him for that, even the whole village.Read More »

1941. A little town in the Jura is cut in half by a river that forms the border between Nazi-occupied France and the free zone.Read More »

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Freda lives with her family in a popular neighborhood in Haiti. They survive with their little street food shop. The precariousness and violence of their daily life push them to do everything they can to escape their situation.Read More »

This two-part TV movie was, of course, sparked by the November 1978 mass suicide of 913 people at the South American religious “colony” of Jonestown. The catalyst for this tragedy was cult-leader Reverend Jim Jones (played by Powers Boothe, who won an Emmy for his performance), head of the so-called People’s Temple. The film traces the life of Jones from his days as an idealistic 1960s activist. He drifts into penny-ante confidence scams and bed-hops from woman to woman, before electing to pass himself off as a modern messiah–eventually believing his own feverish sermons. The climactic scenes are chillingly staged in a near-documentary fashion, with Puerto Rico and Georgia substituting for Guyana. Ned Beatty plays the ill-fated Representative Leo Ryan, while James Earl Jones has a cameo as 1930s religious-leader Father Divine; most of the other main characters are composites of real people. Originally broadcast April 15 and 16, 1980, The Guyana Tragedy was adapted by Ernest Tidyman from the Washington Post and Charles A. Krause’s Guyana Massacre: An Eyewitness Account.Read More »

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Filmed on location in Northwest Washington, Lake Forest Park (un)winds through a coming-of-age tale of a group of friends dealing with the secret of a classmate’s death. The film explores collective and individual grief tinged with existential confusions.Read More »

A woman recovering from a domestic-violence relationship finds out that her former partner still wants her–even if it means killing her.Read More »