Films that we have loved since childhood we do not let go of easily. From a story by Graham Greene (who was also one of the film’s producers), La mano dello straniero (The Stranger’s Hand) was meant to be another The Third Man (1949), Carol Reed’s darkly fascinating piece of intrigue about postwar Europe. Apart […]

Some films we more than love; some films we cherish. René Clément’s Forbidden Games—Jeux interdits—is one of the most beloved films, in addition to being one of the most highly regarded antiwar films, ever made. In a previous piece (about Anthony Minghella’s misbegotten Ripley film), perverse I, though, dismissed the film that had won the […]

Peter Sehr’s Kaspar Hauser (1993), like Sergei M. Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible (1944-46) and Roberto Rossellini’s The Rise to Power of Louis XIV (1966), is one of the great films about political power. Love the Hard Way therefore comes as something of a surprise. For one thing, it isn’t in German; in English, it was […]

It would be easy to dismiss, at least in part, Wang Xiaoshuais’s Beijing Bicycle (Shiqi sui de dan che—I do not have a translation) for failing to match the power of Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (1948), one of the seminal works of Italian neorealism. Wang’s social canvas seems much smaller, and Wang may also […]