Rome Open City
Director Roberto Rossellini saw his 1945 masterpiece as an antidote to the escapism that had characterized Italian cinema under the …
Category Archives: Foreign
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 …
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 …
Kind Hearts and Coronets
Gosh, is there any role Alec Guinness couldn’t play? From the highly-principled (but tragically misguided) Colonel Nicholson in “Bridge on …
Nights of Cabiria
Sometimes a film performance is so perfect that you take the character home and make her part of your life. …
Le Corbeau
All of France resisted the Nazis, if not actively, at least in their hearts. So argued Jean-Paul Sartre in “The …
Welcome to Sarajevo
I knew about the siege of Sarajevo. I mean, I watched the news, saw the images of the bombed-out and …
Tess
I first read Tess of the d’Ubervilles during a long and lonely train ride through the French countryside. I was …
