An exquisite masterpiece, and perhaps the most beautiful film in color ever made, writer-director Manoel de Oliveira’s perfect Singularidades de uma Rapariga Loura is based on a short story by José Maria Eça de Queirós. De Oliveira made this astounding film when he was a hundred years old. Starring his grandson, Ricardo Trêpa, it is […]

Smacking of Buñuel, the brilliant prologue to writer-director Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francês is hilarious. In 1594 Brazil, a young French mercenary, captured by an indigenous tribe, the Tupiniquins, is pushed off a cliff, shackled, to drown in the sea below as a priest, his back toward us, makes a […]