Cukor breathes new life into Alexandre Dumas’s nineteenth-century Paris, where an elegant courtesan (Garbo, in an exquisite performance) inhabits a lush and sensual world but is denied “perfect love.”
Antonioni’s first feature is loosely based on The Postman Always Rings Twice, but turns a torrid love story into a tale of corruption and betrayal in postwar industrial society.
Venturing from Venice Beach to Watts, the great Agnès Varda looks at the murals of Los Angeles as backdrop to and mirror of the city’s many cultures circa 1980.
Antonioni’s first color film draws images of alarming beauty from environmental apocalypse as an industrialist’s wife (Monica Vitti) suffers a nervous breakdown. “Never has so bleak a vision of contemporary life been projected with more intensity” (Time).
This naturalistic city film about a young working-class girl presents the closest thing to overt social critique in Bergman’s oeuvre. An early collaboration with Gunnar Fischer, the great cinematographer who would work with Bergman throughout the 1950s.
A Syrian refugee adrift in Helsinki finds an unlikely ally in a sullen restaurateur in Kaurismäki’s delightfully humanizing take on immigration. “At once honest and artful, a touching and clear-sighted declaration of faith in people and in movies” (New York Times).
A Milanese shopgirl becomes a movie actress, but not a great one, in this expressive early melodrama. “Antonioni transcends the traditional hypocrisies of the soap-opera genre, [yet] never loses touch with the throbbing feelings of his characters” (Village Voice).
Severe Soviet commissar Garbo has her head turned by dashing capitalist Melvyn Douglas, and cynicism gives way to about as warm a Cold War comedy as ever there was. The ads proclaimed, “Garbo laughs!” So will you.