“I’m alone most of the time. All of the time, really,” confesses Emmi (Brigitte Mira), a German widow, to Ali (El Hedi Ben Salem), a much younger Moroccan she’s just met. “Ali much alone, too,” he confides. “Always working, drinking. Nothing else.” So begins a cross-cultural, Read More …
What is unexpressed is just as important as what is expressed in the exquisitely sad Le Mépris, in which unspoken words, lost moments, and failed connections lead to the collapse of a marriage. Paul Javal (Michel Piccoli), a screenwriter hired to adapt Homer’s Odyssey, uses his beautiful Read More …
One of David Lean’s few forays into comedy tells the story of an alcoholic boot-shop owner (Charles Laughton) whose business suffers a blow when his bookkeeping daughter (Brenda de Banzie) leaves to set up her own shop and takes his gifted but underappreciated bootmaker (John Read More …
Vows to “forsake all others” are all well and good, but how does that settle the longing for the thrill of new romance, particularly for a married fortyish lawyer in Paris, walking the same streets and frequenting the same cafes as the miniskirted footsoldiers of Read More …
In Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now, adapted from a Daphne du Maurier short story, an English couple (Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie) grieves over the accidental drowning death of their daughter. At their new home in Venice, a series of uncanny and portentous circumstances unfolds as Read More …
In the days preceding Christmas, Paul must choose between his stable ten-year marriage to Adriana or his passionate affair with their daughter’s young dentist, Raluca, in a film replete with duplicity, double entendre, and relational boundary intrusions. Every scene in Tuesday, After Christmas is marked by gestures, Read More …
The canal barge L’Atalante is both livelihood and romantic getaway for its captain and his new small-town bride as they set out with cargo for Paris, but the romance of travel is lost as the tight quarters of the ship intensify marital strife and the Read More …
After the death of their close friend, three middle-aged New Yorkers spend a lost weekend in London, drinking, gambling, womanizing, and struggling to make sense of their places in the world. John Cassavetes had a preternatural talent for scratching at the scabs of our lives—evoking Read More …
William Wyler’s worldly drama charts the dissolution of a 20-year union between an aging automobile magnate and his vain, discontented wife during a long European excursion. Walter Huston carries himself with princely dignity as the titular tycoon whose instinctive loyalty is strained to the breaking Read More …
Originally a five-hour miniseries, Bergman’s episodic film gives us Johan (Erland Josephson) and Marianne (Liv Ullman), a successful middle-class couple who find themselves torn between irreconcilable differences and habitual affection. Scenes is spare, unadorned, and unflinching in its depiction of the small jealousies and unspoken resentments which Read More …