Rome Open City
Director Roberto Rossellini saw his 1945 masterpiece as an antidote to the escapism that had characterized Italian cinema under the …
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Stagecoach
Forget the Apaches. Geronimo and his gang are just noise in this picture. Okay, noise and a few well-aimed arrows. …
The Maltese Falcon
In appreciation of Roger Ebert (1942-2013) Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre: I love those guys! Bogey playing the kind of …
The Battle of Algiers
Franco Solinas, who wrote the screenplay for “The Battle of Algiers,” set out to demystify colonial war. Honor, glory, maintaining …
Les Enfants du paradis
The screenwriter of “Enfants du paradis,” poet Jacques Prévert, claimed that cinema and poetry were the same thing. After last …
A Touch of Evil
When I heard that today is Zsa Zsa Gabor’s 96th birthday, I was motivated to finish my review of “A …
Love (Szerelem)
“Love” is such a quiet, private film, you’d never guess it was a political statement — and a dangerous one …
The Witness (A tanú)
Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish poet and Cold War dissident, explored the writer’s dilemma under Stalinism in The Captive Mind. In …
