Hal Erickson writes:
Despite an ad campaign wherein RKO Radio congratulated itself for its “guts”, this long-delayed film version of Norman Mailer’s bestselling WW2 novel The Naked and the Dead still had to pull most of its punches (especially when it came to four-letter words). Aldo Ray heads the cast as sadistic sergeant Croft, who’d as soon kill one of his own men as he would the Japanese. Sensitive, moralistic Lieutenant Hearn (Cliff Robertson) tries to put a leash on Croft, but he’s ordered to keep out of the situation by psychotic General Cummings (Raymond Massey), who is convinced that soldiers will fight harder the more they hate their superiors.Read More »

Presentation from the San Francisco Film Festival :
“Johan de Bakker is a first-rate baker, meticulous in his trade and exacting in his recreational pursuits which include balancing eggs, building towers of pebbles by the river and waiting stoically in the town square for the daily bus to arrive. Illiterate and hardly exacting in his social skills, Johan is a 35-year-old child and the enigmatic hero of this charming Dutch comedy. His slightly more worldly friends decide to play Cyrano and their ghostwritten love letters on his behalf provoke a woman’s visit “from foreign climes.” Set in a tiny village in the north of Holland, Egg takes its eccentric characters at face value and Israeli-born writer-director Danniel Danniel’s cheerfully deadpan approach is reminiscent of early Jacques Tati. Skillfully introducing the villagers through their mundane routines, Danniel weaves a whimsical fable based in limited realities where “more than one outcome is possible. With a talented cast, Egg succeeds as an offbeat comedy through understatement and authentic charm.”
—Richard PenaRead More »

A crew is shooting a libertine costume film when Valentin, the director, suddenly disappears. While the local police investigate, the film shoot continues but takes an odd turn. Robin, the cameraman and director’s lover, follows a promise.Read More »

A female university student goes missing one day and later is discovered as a victim of a hit-and-run. Assuming the kidnapper and the driver are the same person, police begin investigating the case and find two witnesses who were at the scene: Soo-ah, a visually impaired woman who was once a very promising student at a national police university, and Gi-seob, a young man who happened to see the hit-and run. The case becomes even more complicated as the two witnesses tell different stories about the accident.Read More »

PLOT: A movie director struggles with his relationship with his family, and with his latest movie, about the impact on the Italian Communist Party of the USSR invasion of Hungary in 1956.Read More »

With his debut Kami’s Party, Ali Ahmadzadeh offered a day in the life of a group of middle-class Iranians, largely from within the confines of a car. Now his latest film takes us on a character study odyssey through the night streets of Tehran as we go along for the ride with drug dealer Mr Amir (Amir Pousti, a non-professional, like all those involved, although you wouldn’t know it). His shaggy beard and hair recall the iconographic look of Christ and, in a way, he is ministering to the “sinners” and the lost souls of the city.Read More »

Criterion” wrote:
Olmi’s 1967 short about a young boy’s first loveRead More »

Quote:
Dr. Wendell Simpson is troubled surgeon with a nagging wife, named Carol, and stressful hospital job, who botches a surgery on an injured young man, named Johnny, who then dies under his care. The man’s dangerously disturbed girlfriend, Jessica, abducts the doctor and holds him captive at her apartment and subjects him to mind games and sexual torture because she holds the doctor responsible for the death of her boyfriend which triggers hidden repressed memories about Jessica and Johnny’s times together, while Dr. Simpson finds himself pervasively drawn to this strange young woman holding him captive.Read More »

F. W. Murnau (John Malkovich) is struggling to create his silent classic “Nosferatu” on location in Eastern Europe. The director is obsessed with making this the most authentic vampire movie ever. To that end, Murnau has employed a real vampire, Max Schreck (Willem Dafoe), explaining to the crew that he is the ultimate of that new breed, the “method actor” — trained by Stanislavsky himself. Schreck will appear only in character and only at night.Read More »