 |
|
|
100 Best Foreign Films (61-70) Nosferatu (1922) F.W. Murnau's film of the Dracula tale was the first of its kind and is still the scariest, moodiest vampire film ever made. The original surrealists loved the famous title card that read, "When he crossed the bridge, the phantoms came to meet him." The bald, rat-faced Count Orlock is played by an actor named "Max Schreck," which in German translates as "maximum terror"; who this man really was is still a mystery. (M.A.) La Notte (1961) Antonioni's examination of the pathology of modern marriage, lust and alienation, all beheld in the space of a day. Jeanne Moreau and Marcello Mastroianni are the couple--and here is moviemaking as layered and complex as the best modern fiction. (D.T.) Pandora's Box (1928) Minor Hollywood actress went to Germany and became the supreme femme fatale, Lulu, in an adaptation of two of Fritz Wedekind's plays. G.W. Pabst directed. Who she? She Louise Brooks--still undefeated champion of the lethal look. (D.T.) The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) Danish giant Carl Dreyer recreates a medieval tug-of-war between ignorant orthodoxy and human grace, almost entirely in close-ups. As Joan, Maria Falconetti will never be forgotten; look out for Antonin Artaud again as a sympathetic priest. (M.A.) |
 |
|
|
Persona (1966) An actress (Liv Ullmann) stops speaking, on stage. In her breakdown, she is cared for by a nurse (Bibi Andersson). The nurse talks, acting up for the actress. Slowly, their characters become intertwined, dependent, in love and full of enmity. This is Ingmar Bergman's most lucid analysis of the psyche that has to be actor or audience, and both. (D.T.) Pierrot le Fou (1965) Jean-Luc Godard's bitter homage to Hollywood, to painting, to the novel, to the South of France, and to his own wife, Anna Karina, who was leaving him when he made this film. This is Godard's adventure film--film noir in the blaze of noon. Godard deconstructed film in the '60s, and in ignoring him now we have all agreed to be blind, stupid and uneducated. (D.T.) Playtime (1967) Jacques Tati's Monsieur Hulot finds himself in the ultimate modern city. No one ever conceived or built sight gags with more care, and so these wondrous comic spectacles clash intriguingly with the determined, organized and humorless insanity of the city. (D.T.) |
|
|
|
|
Raise the Red Lantern (1991) This color-drenched melodrama of a young concubine serves as a lesson in social order, love, resignation and the kinship of women. Zhang Yimou's film is part of the recent flowering of Chinese cinema, and Gong Li, his actress, is established here as one of the great stars. (D.T.) Ran (1985) Akira Kurosawa should have retired after this awesome transcription of King Lear (mixed with a little Macbeth), which, thank God, jettisons the texts and just tells a helluva story. The battle scenes will unhinge your jaw. (M.A.) Rashomon (1950) Four strange people in feudal Japan tell self-serving versions of the same incident: the rape of a nobleman's bride by a lusty outlaw and the subsequent death of the nobleman. A classic about no less a subject than the slipperiness of truth. Hollywood's remake was titled, aptly, The Outrage. (S.R.) 100 Best Foreign Films, Part 8 (71-80) |