Alternative Film Guide

The Penalty (1920)
Direction: Wallace Worsley. Screenplay: Charles Kenyon and Philip Lonergan; from Gouverneur Morris’ novel. Cast: Lon Chaney, Kenneth Harlan, Ethel Grey Terry, Doris Pawn, Charles Clary, Jim Mason, Milton Ross, Claire Adams
 

 
Lon Chaney was more than just an actor. He was a magician. Like a chameleon, he could morph into a character.
In the gruesome [...]

La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc / The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)
Direction: Carl Theodor Dreyer. Screenplay: Carl Theodor Dreyer and Joseph Delteil. Cast: Maria Falconetti, Eugene Silvain, André Berley, Maurice Schutz, Antonin Artaud, Michel Simon, Jean d’Yd
 

 
Carl Theodor Dreyer’s late silent film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc / The Passion of Joan of Arc [...]

Salò o le 120 giornate di Sodoma / Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)
Direction: Pier Paolo Pasolini. Screenplay: Pier Paolo Pasolini and Sergio Citti; inspired by the Marquis de Sade’s book. Cast: Paolo Bonacelli, Giorgio Cataldi, Umberto Paolo Quintavalle, Aldo Valletti, Caterina Boratto, Elsa De Giorgi, Hélène Surgère, Sergio Fascetti, Bruno Musso, Antonio [...]

"There is cinema before and after La Roue as there is painting before and after Picasso."
That’s none other than Jean Cocteau, referring to the mammoth 1923 drama (original running time: nearly 8 hours) directed and written by Abel Gance — he of Napoleon.
Gance worked for three years on La Roue / The Wheel, which revolves [...]

Idioterne / The Idiots (1998)
Direction and Screenplay: Lars von Trier. Cast: Bodil Jørgensen, Jens Albinus, Anne Louise Hassing, Troels Lyby, Nikolaj Lie Kaas, Louise Mieritz, Henrik Prip, Luis Mesonero, Knud Romer Jørgensen
 

 
The tenth and final "Vow of Chastity" from the Dogme ‘95 manifesto states that "the director must not be credited." That is because the [...]

Careful (1992)
Direction: Guy Maddin. Screenplay: Guy Maddin and George Toles; from a story by Toles. Cast: Kyle McCulloch, Gosia Dobrowolska, Sarah Neville, Paul Cox, Brent Neale
 

In 1992, Winnipeg’s Guy Maddin and crew assembled for their third feature film — Careful, co-written by George Toles (and Maddin) and starring Kyle McCulloch, Gosia Dobrowolska, Sarah Neville, Paul [...]

Sanshô Dayû / Sansho the Bailiff (1954)
Direction: Kenji Mizoguchi. Screenplay: Fuji Yahiro; from the old legend and Ogai Mori’s 1915 short story “Sansho the Steward.” Cast: Shindô Eitarô, Kyoko Kagawa, Yoshiaki Hanayagi
 
By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
One of the nostra about Japanese film director Kenji Mizoguchi is that he is ‘the most Japanese of all filmmakers.’ [...]

The Bette Davis Collection Vol. 3, a DVD box set consisting of six Davis vehicles, will be released on April 1.
The six films are The Old Maid (1939), All This, and Heaven Too (1940), The Great Lie (1941), In This Our Life (1942), Watch on the Rhine (1943), and Deception (1946). A couple of [...]

The new documentary Thou Shalt Not: Sex, Sin and Censorship in Pre-Code Hollywood and five Pre-Code films will be shown on Turner Classic Movies on Monday, March 3 (more details below).
The five racy Pre-Coders are: The Divorcee (1930), A Free Soul (1931), Night Nurse (right, 1931), Three on a Match (1932), and Female (1933). [...]

To Vlemma tou Odyssea / Ulysses’ Gaze (1995)
Direction: Theo Angelopoulos. Screenplay: Theo Angelopoulos, Tonino Guerra, Petros Markaris, Giorgio Silvagni. Cast: Harvey Keitel, Erland Josephson, Maia Morgenstern
 
By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos‘ 1995 effort To Vlemma tou Odyssea / Ulysses’ Gaze is the first of that director’s four films that I have seen that [...]

The Fallen Idol (1948)
Direction: Carol Reed. Screenplay: Graham Greene; additional dialogue by Lesley Storm and William Templeton. Cast: Ralph Richardson, Bobby Henrey, Michèle Morgan, Sonia Dresdel, Denis O’Dea, Jack Hawkins, Walter Fitzgerald
 

 
By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
The 1948 drama The Fallen Idol is the third film that I’ve seen by British filmmaker Carol Reed. I’d previously [...]

Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern’s Darfur documentary The Devil Came on Horseback is currently available via Netflix.
In the documentary, former American Marine Capt. Brian Steidle attempts to spread the word to the U.S. government and public about the atrocities he witnessed in Sudan’s Darfur region. Estimates about the number of dead — black Africans [...]

Woyzeck (1979)
Direction: Werner Herzog. Screenplay: Werner Herzog; from a play by Georg Büchner. Cast: Klaus Kinski, Eva Mattes, Wolfgang Reichmann, Willy Semmelrogge, Josef Bierbichler
 
By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
One of the signs of a great artist is that even when not at the top of his game said artist is still capable of flashes of utter [...]

Major Dundee (1965)
Direction: Sam Peckinpah. Screenplay: Harry Julian Fink, Oscar Saul, Sam Peckinpah; from a story by Fink. Cast: Charlton Heston, Richard Harris, Jim Hutton, Senta Berger, James Coburn, Michael Anderson, Jr., Mario Adorf, Brock Peters, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, Slim Pickens, R.G. Armstrong, L. Q. Jones
 
By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
Sam Peckinpah’s 1965 Western Major [...]

Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936)
Direction: Frank Capra. Screenplay: Robert Riskin. Cast: Gary Cooper, Jean Arthur, George Bancroft, Douglas Dumbrille, Lionel Stander, H.B. Warner, Ruth Donnelly, Raymond Walburn
 

Gary Cooper, Jean Arthur, Frank Capra
 
By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
There is a tendency among some to think that all the art produced by a great artist is great. [...]

En Passion / A Passion / The Passion of Anna (1969)
Direction and screenplay: Ingmar Bergman. Cast: Max von Sydow, Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson, Erland Josephson, Erik Hell
 

By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
Ingmar Bergman’s 1969 drama En Passion / A Passion (in the U.S., mistitled as The Passion of Anna) is a great film — in fact, [...]

Il Grido / The Cry (1957)
Direction: Michelangelo Antonioni. Screenplay: Michelangelo Antonioni, Elio Bartolini, Ennio de Concini. Cast: Steve Cochran, Alida Valli, Dorian Gray, Betsy Blair, Lyn Shaw, Gabriella Pallotti
 
By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
So much attention has been paid to Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni’s later New Wave films that his earlier Neo-Realist efforts has been overlooked, [...]

Kelly Reichardt’s Old Joy, a minimalist micro-budget psychological drama about two friends who go hiking and hot-spring-bathing together (along with a canine named Lucy) in Oregon’s Cascade Mountains, was one of the pleasures of the 2006 Los Angeles Film Festival.
The Kino DVD release of this touching study about the things that bring human beings together [...]

Pokolenie / A Generation (1955)
Direction: Andrzej Wajda. Screenplay: Bohdan Czeszko, from his novel. Cast: Tadeusz Lomnicki, Urszula Modrzynska, Tadeusz Janczar, Janusz Paluszkiewicz, Ryszard Kotys, Roman Polanski, Zbigniew Cybulski
 

By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
Sometimes films get reputations way out of proportion with their artistic merit simply because they expound a point of view with which the public [...]

Michael Walford in Kinoeye, in reference to the September 2007 DVD release of Luchino Visconti’s dramatic-comedy Bellissima, about a very devoted (sound)stage mother (Anna Magnani, as her usually Vesuvian self) and her young film-extra daughter, in the British DVD distributor Eureka’s "Masters of Cinema" series:
"It is a film which is sadly underwritten in English. [...]

Kino’s "Reel Baseball - 1899-1926" two-disc set has become one of that DVD distributor’s biggest sellers in their silent-film division.
Produced for video by Jessica Rosner, "Reel Baseball" includes the following:
On Disc 1: Headin’ Home a 73-minute feature starring baseball legend Babe Ruth (who himself was the subject of a 1949 biopic starring William Bendix) and [...]

Minnie and Moskowitz (1971)
Direction and screenplay: John Cassavetes. Cast: Gena Rowlands, Seymour Cassel, Val Avery, Timothy Carey, Lady Rowlands, Katherine Cassavetes
 
By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
All choice entails risk, therefore John Cassavetes’s artistic choice to structure his films based mostly on improvisation rather than hard scripted dialogue is a decision that can result in great [...]

War-Gods of the Deep / The City Under the Sea (1965)
Director: Jacques Tourneur Screenplay: Louis M. Heyward and Charles Bennett; additional dialogue by David Whitaker. Cast: Vincent Price, Tab Hunter, Susan Hart, David Tomlinson
 
By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:
War-Gods of the Deep is one of those films whose title makes no sense, but is [...]

Last month, Kino International released the Josephine Baker Collection, a DVD set consisting of three must-see feature films starring Josephine Baker, the frenetic American entertainer (from St. Louis) who found fame at the Folies Bergères in the Paris of the 1920s. The three films are La Sirène des tropiques / Siren of the Tropics (1927), [...]

In the last few months Kino International — one of the essential DVD distributors — has released numerous quality DVDs of movies that until fairly recently were just about impossible to find.
Among the rarities I’ve had the pleasure of getting my hands on is "Lubitsch in Berlin," which includes two Ernst Lubitsch comedies of [...]