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100 Best Foreign Films (71-80) The Red and the White (1967) Bolsheviks and the counter-revolutionaries battle it out in the hills along the Volga. Abstract and monolithic, and I mean that in a good way. Hungarian Miklos Jancso makes movies without characters but with crowds you can actually identify with. The power struggles of history are played out in mesmerizing, long, uncut tracking shots. A steamroller movie--it's a visceral antidote to the easy homilies and melodrama of most antiwar films. (M.A.) Red Desert (1964) It's Monica Vitti again on the verge of a nervous breakdown in Michelangelo Antonioni's painterly study of social disintegration, Italian-style. Depending on your mind's state, the movie's harrowing evocation and inspection of despair could soak into your bones, promote hilarity or send you scrambling for the nearest bottle of Prozac. (S.R.) Repulsion (1965) Roman Polanski's jittery thriller takes a clinician's delight in documenting the process of a lonely, exquisitely beautiful manicurist (Catherine Deneuve) going nuts in her apartment. Queasiest moments: the dead rabbit, the hands coming out of the walls, and Deneuve slashing a guy to kingdom come. With its cool, crazy Chico Hamilton score, this is first-rate Grand Guignol, tailor-made to watch with someone you love to grab. (S.R.) |
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Rocco and His Brothers (1960) Or, Why I'm Glad to Have Been an Only Child. In Luchino Visconti's sprawling saga (surely an influence on The Godfather), fate uproots and urbanizes a peasant mother and her five sons, most of whom go to hell in a handbasket in the big city. Tragic, wrenching, operatic. (S.R.) La Roue (1922) Napolˇon is Abel Gance's best known film--because it has been restored and given a new musical score. But La Roue is at least as good, a love story about a locomotive driver--it's over-the-top, sentimental, yet it shows the passion of story, imagery and cutting in those early 1920s when the motion picture was the new craze. (D.T.) The Rules of the Game (1939) The working definition of tragicomedy (an un-American form based on the notion that nothing ever means only one thing). Europe in 1939. The edge of disaster as seen through the mishaps of a country house party. Jean Renoir directed and starred, playing the good-natured but bumbling friend to all and the helpless trigger of tragedy. Nearly 60 years later, this movie is years ahead of film today. (D.T.) |
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Sansho Dayu (1954) In 11th-century Japan, an exiled governor's wife gets sold into prostitution, his son and daughter into slavery. Director Kenji Mizoguchi knows no superior in using image and composition to express emotional profundities. If there is anywhere in film a sequence more throat-catching than the one in which the long-suffering son is reunited with his martyred mother, who is too far gone to remember him, bring it on. (S.R.) Senso (1954) Luchino Visconti loved the 19th century--clothes, decor, opera, aristocratic ways, foppish men and doomed women--and all are in the tale of a fatal love between Farley Granger and Alida Valli. (D.T.) Seven Samurai (1954) A Japanese village of the 16th century is threatened by bandits. The villagers hire seven samurai. It starts to rain. Akira Kurosawa filmed it, and battle, swordplay, action and spectacle have never been the same again.(D.T.) Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors (1964) A Ukrainian epic set in the Carpathian Mountains, this landmark movie directed by Sergo Paradjanov feels like it was actually shot deep in the pagan, premovie past. (M.A.) 100 Best Foreign Films, Part 9 (81-90) |