Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Near the end of Black Orpheus (Orfeu Negro), Marcel Camus’s masterpiece of 1959, there comes what can only be described as an authorial disclaimer that strikes the film’s one seriously false note. “The happiness of the poor is the great illusion of Carnival,” we are told, more or less out of the blue. Up until…

Rachel Leigh Cook is not only beautiful but she must be the greatest actress of her generation. How else to explain the fact that she can submit to being told in the patented denasal tones of Sylvester Stallone that she is “a special girl” —and that if she forgets it she’s going to have “a…

A very great film by the Danish director Susanna Bier which is also a parable for our utopian times

The very funny if not quite morally serious tale of a modern day Candide.

Character by Mike Van Diem, the Dutch winner of the Academy Award for best foreign film, is an astonishingly old fashioned picture, of a sort (here is a sobering thought) that simply could not be made in America today. Some representative of the feminist thought police would have got to it long before it was…

Nature documentaries have never been so gorgeous — but Jacques Perrin’s film would have been no less so with some added documentary-style touches