Jonathan Rosenbaum

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Director Maurice Tourneur (father of Jacques) was far more than a cinematic pioneer; his pictorial and painterly genius (including his use of deep focus, his mastery of decor, and his refined feeling for light and shading) make him one of the creative giants of the silent era. Subtitled An Idyll of Old England, this lovely 1914 feature follows the adventures of an earl’s flighty son (Chester Barnett) who gets expelled from college and, pretending to be a gardener, romances a parson’s daughter (Vivian Martin in her screen debut, doing a nice spin on Mary Pickford). Tourneur and Owen Davis adapted this from Davis’s stage comedy, and though the movie runs only 54 minutes, there’s never any sense of rush. (JR) Read more

The title of this 2005 Swedish video is meant literally: directors Pea Holmquist and Suzanne Khardalian spent two years following Indian environmental activist Vandana Shiva on her various travels and learned, among other things, that bullshit has its practical uses. The same lesson applies figuratively to this documentary, which is clumsily assembled but worth seeing for its information about Shiva’s antiglobalization arguments and activities. 73 min. (JR) Read more

Japanese director Hiroshi Teshigahara is best known for his second feature, Woman in the Dunes (1964), a collaboration with novelist-playwright Kobo Abe and modernist composer Toru Takemitsu. But Pitfall (1962), the trio’s first project, is no less arty, allegorical, or bold. Combining elements of agitprop, ghost story, and police procedural, it focuses on the murder of an out-of-work coal miner (identified in subtitles as a deserter, but only from the enslavement of his former job) by an enigmatic killer dressed in white. Teshigahara’s visual flair, evident in his sculptural use of wastelands and remarkable superimpositions, is matched by the singular assault of Takemitsu’s unorthodox score, though the film attempts too many things at once to have the impact of its successor. In Japanese with subtitles. 97 min. (JR) Read more

Director Maurice Tourneur adapted this celebrated 1915 silent from a Paul Armstrong play based on O. Henry’s story A Retrieved Reformation. Robert Warwick plays the title character, a famous safecracker. This must have been commercially successful, because it was remade twice during the silent era. 50 min. (JR) Read more

The rationale behind this unattractive animated comedy, a U.S.-German coproduction, seems to be that since it can’t create a fairy-tale world of its own, it might as well riffle through many of the more familiar ones, with particular emphasis on Cinderella’s, pretending to deconstruct them with postmodernist glosses, adolescent wisecracks, and a few high-tech anachronisms. Prince Charming is a vain doofus and his androgynous pretty-boy valet takes over as hero, while the equally androgynous Ella gets menaced by her curvy stepmother and protected from trolls by the seven dwarfs. Paul J. Bolger directed Robert Moreland’s script, and some of the familiar voices belong to George Carlin, Sigourney Weaver, and Wallace Shawn; I believe I also heard Bob Hoskins, though he’s uncredited. PG, 87 min. (JR) Read more

An animated Japanese feature about good and evil deities whose existence has been hidden by the Japanese government. Read more

A Mexican-Spanish coproduction by the talented Guillermo del Toro (Cronos), this nightmarish fairy tale for grown-ups takes place in Spain after the civil war, when the Republicans were still counting on help from the Allies that would never come. A little girl in the rural north (Ivana Baquero) whose widowed mother has married a sadistic captain of the Guardia Civil (Sergi Lopez) conjures up a faun (Doug Jones), who identifies her as a princess and gives her three tasks to accomplish before she can be returned to her underground kingdom. Unlike most horror movies, this chiller gives equal prominence to reality and fantasy, though the reality is far more frightening. The only precedent that comes to mind in terms of a lyrical treatment of a child’s experience of terror is The Night of the Hunter. In Spanish with subtitles. R, 120 min. (JR) Read more

A mousy druggist (Richard Basehart) married to a two-timing tramp (Audrey Totter) contrives to kill his wife’s lover (Lloyd Gough) in this absorbing 1950 noir directed by the underrated and soon-to-be-blacklisted John Berry (He Ran All the Way). Cyd Charisse is his wholesome neighbor and Barry Sullivan a sleazy cop, who narrates. The married couple predate and likely influenced Elisha Cook and Marie Windsor’s characters in The Killing. 95 min. (JR) Read more

Ever since Zhang Yimou went digital with Hero (2002), his color coding and sense of spectacle have been devalued by a certain dehumanizing process; this historical adventure proves he still has an eye for striking images, but his formalism brings steadily diminishing returns, especially when it involves crowds of insectlike warriors. Adapted from a 1930s play, this stars Gong Li (at her most tremulous and sweaty) and Chow Yun-fat (miscast) as an empress and emperor of the Tung dynasty, but not even they can make much of its tragic story seething with decadent palace intrigues. The movie has plenty to engage one’s interest but little to sustain it. In Mandarin with subtitles. R, 114 min. (JR) Read more

Political incorrectness toward Christmas, Christian charity, and gender-bending informs this lively 1982 farce about workers at a suicide hotline colliding with various desperate eccentrics on Christmas Eve. Director Jean-Marie Poire wrote the script in collaboration with most of the major actorsJosiane Balasko, Marie-Anne Chazel, Christian Clavier, Gerard Jugnot, Thierry Lhermitte, and Bruno Moynotand their desire to be irreverent (the title translates as Santa Claus Is a Bastard) gets a mite monotonous. In French with subtitles. 88 min. (JR) Read more

This absorbing documentary by Colin Keith Gray and Megan Raney Aarons is a classic sports story about the great Hungarian water polo team that stomped the Soviets at the 1956 Olympics, avenging the recent counterrevolutionary crackdown in Hungary. But it’s also an exemplary and multifaceted history of Hungary since the Nazi occupation. The interviews with former Hungarian and Soviet players are pungent, and Nikita Khrushchev’s son Sergei contributes some interesting comments about his father’s ambivalence toward Hungary during this period. In English and subtitled Hungarian and Russian. 90 min. (JR) Read more

A strong performance by Jerzy Stuhr is the main reason to see this 1976 Krzysztof Kieslowski feature, also known as Peace and Quiet. Stuhr plays an ex-con who starts over in a new city with a construction job, finds another fiancee, and eventually must choose between his striking coworkers and the boss who’s blackmailing him. Banned in Poland until 1980, the year Solidarity was founded, this is relatively insular compared with Kieslowski’s later, better-known features, but Stuhr manages to carry it. In Polish with subtitles. 82 min. (JR) Read more

Lewis Jackson directed this offbeat 1980 thriller about a murderer (Brandon Maggart) who dresses as Santa. Watch the DVD instead and you can hear Jackson discussing it at length with John Waters, one of its biggest fans. 100 min. (JR) Read more

There’s no question that Krzysztof Kieslowski’s cowriter Krzysztof Piesiewicz had a decisive impact on The Decalogue and Three Colors, and this 1984 feature, their first collaboration, often seems like a trial run for Blue. A young lawyer (Jerzy Radziwilowicz, known for his work with Wajda, Godard, and Rivette) dies in 1982, when Poland is under martial law, and his death affects not only his widow (Grazyna Szapolowska) but the case against a young strike leader whose defense has been taken up by the lawyer’s mentor (Aleksander Bardini). Despite an awkward and unnecessary narrative frame involving the lawyer’s ghost, this is terse, suggestive, and pungent, with juicy performances by Bardini and Szapolowska. In Polish with subtitles. 107 min. (JR) Read more