A fantastic storybook odyssey ranging from the sea floor to the citadel of the moon, The Thief of Bagdad weaves Arabian Nights magic around the hero’s road to redemption. Douglas Fairbanks Sr. plays a carefree street thief, a cheerful infidel who believes only in taking Read More …
While visiting Naples to close the estate of a deceased relative, two middle-aged sophisticates are forced to acknowledge the tenuous condition of their marriage. Roberto Rossellini moved his camera outside of the studio and into natural light, using documentary techniques to turn the rubble-strewn, post-war Read More …
Apitchatpong Weerasethakul’s first feature-length film was conceived as a cinematic version of the Surrealist’s game, Exquisite Corpse, in which a work of literature or painting would be assembled from the efforts of several artists, each working independently but inspired by the others. Mysterious Object at Read More …
One of the most famous and most watched movies ever made, The Wizard of Oz is inarguably a classic, but it’s rarely thought of as a film of profound spiritual yearning. True, there’s no existential anguish in it like you’d find in an Ingmar Bergman Read More …
A baton-twirling teen falls for the James Dean of garbage men, and they’re off on a romantic cross-country killing spree, inspired by the famous 50s criminal pair Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate. To this day, the pair’s apparent detachment from the gravity of their Read More …
A teenage city-girl and her young brother, stranded in the Australian outback, are rescued by an adolescent Aborigine boy on a “walkabout” (a survival ritual leading to his transition into manhood). A visually stunning work about the tenuous bond formed between these three characters, Walkabout Read More …
In the first installment of what director Luis Buñuel would later call a trilogy about “the search for truth,” The Milky Way is a deconstruction of the Catholic Church via Her heresies. Two French beggars attempt to panhandle along The Way of St. James (nicknamed Read More …
As young filmmaker Anna leaves Germany, where she has just shown her latest work, she embarks on a series of train rides, and several extended conversations with friends and strangers, as she makes her return to Paris. Director Akerman, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, Read More …
In The Holy Mountain, Alejandro Jodorowsky adapted Ascent of Mount Carmel (St. John of the Cross) and Mount Analogue (Rene Daumal) to film by combining them with attributes of various religions in a whirlwind eclecticism of the esoteric. An alchemist takes under his tutelage the Read More …
The title character of Fitzcarraldo is an opera fan with a dream bringing an opera house to the Peruvian jungle, but first, he has to transport a three-story, 300-ton steamer ship over a mountain. Director Werner Herzog filmed this story without computerized special effects, and Read More …