 |
|
|
100 Best Foreign Films (81-90) Shame (1968) The Bergman movie for people who hate Bergman movies--no symbolism, no spiritual agony, just a very real husband and wife (Max von Sydow and Liv Ullmann) trying to stay alive when war suddenly explodes right into their front yard (the country this takes place in is unspecified). What happens when you find a dead paratrooper hanging from a tree, and the woods near your house are in flames? A great war film for people whose country has never been invaded. (M.A.) Shoah (1985) Yes, you've been told this before--the concentration camps were a wicked thing. Still, Claude Lanzmann's documentary is only 8 1/2 hours--so you've got the time. So many lost theirs. (D.T.) Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) Ingmar Bergman, in an uncharacteristically Mozartian mood, sends in the clowns as pairs of mismatched lovers spark, misfire, scheme, wreak emotional havoc and, in the end, reconfigure. An elegantly witty, deeply moving work of tragicomic art, it inspired Stephen Sondheim's A Little Night Music. You may finds its scalpel-like Scandinavian irony preferable to the self-satisfied Gallic schematics of La Ronde. (S.R.) |
 |
|
|
Solaris (1972) A forgotten space station's crew is haunted by their dead loved ones. In making this film, which includes the most heartrending antigravity scene in film history, Andrei Tarkovsky reinvented science fiction. (M.A.) The Spider's Stratagem (1970) The atmosphere is so cryptic and the behaviors so furtive in Bernardo Bertolucci's take on a Jorge Luis Borges short story that you find yourself as baffled as the hero investigating the 30-year-old slaying of his antifascist father. The star is a cipher, but Alida Valli supplies more than presence, even if she seems startled to realize she is no longer the sleek enchantress of The Third Man or The Paradine Case. The whole thing is so gorgeously color-drenched you may want to paint your walls in homage. (S.R.) The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) Why aren't there more great movies about kids? Kid actors, for starters. This wonderfully insular movie about the power of imagination, a companion to Forbidden Games, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Night of the Hunter, presents dolefully radiant, poised Ana Torrent as a young girl who runs away from her village home in search of the Frankenstein monster after seeing the Boris Karloff movie for the first time. Torrent's resemblance to the little actress drowned by Karloff in the original only adds to the weirdness. (S.R.) |
|
|
|
|
Strike (1924) Sergei Eisenstein was a graphic artist on a par with Picasso, and a member of experimental theater groups in the new Soviet Union. All these talents led him to film, the new means of reaching the public through image, montage and symbol. And so for a few years Soviet cinema was on fire with its enthusiasm for an art of all the people. The epically titled film is about a strike. (D.T.) Throne of Blood (1957) Noh meets Shakespeare. Akira Kurosawa's samurai take on Macbeth is spooky, elemental, visceral. The bloodcurdling finale features Toshiro Mifune pierced, St. Sebastian-like, by arrows. (S.R.) Through a Glass Darkly (1961) A family vacations on a Swedish island--but the grown daughter (the astonishing Harriet Andersson) is a borderline schizo who has visions of God as a giant spider. Bergman goes for the throat. (M.A.) Tokyo Story (1953) Ozu's quietest, most devastating left hook, in which an elderly couple discover there's no room for them in their self-involved children's busy lives. Where other directors babble like brats, Ozu whispers like a wise man. (M.A.) 100 Best Foreign Films, Part 10 (91-100) |