Between Two Worlds

The re-release of Jules Dassin’s Rififi (French title: Du Rififi Chez les Hommes) of 1954 comes opportunely to remind the Hollywood epigoni known to these pages as the Taranteenies of what film noir really was. The chief difference between it and that which too often, and too erroneously, goes under the same name today, is…

A harrowing but at the same time politically and morally tendentious retelling of events on board the fourth hijacked plane of 9/11, and the only one not to reach its objective.

A Brazilian reflection on the vanity of human — or at least of masculine — wishes and the permanence of the eternal feminine

The Real Blonde by Tom DiCillo shows as much promise as his first film, Living in Oblivion of 1995. Both are very funny, but both are rather inward looking — obsessed with movie making and acting — and both somehow fail to hold together very well. The Real Blonde, in fact, is like a collection…

Dante’s Peak by Roger Donaldson (written by Leslie Bohem) is a standard-formula disaster movie. The hero, Harry Dalton (Pierce Brosnan) is a ruggedly handsome vulcanologist who (we learn over the opening credits) has lost his fiancée, a colleague, to an erupting volcano. Now he harbors his secret sorrow and treads a lone path through the…

La Vita è Bella or Life is Beautiful was directed and co-written by Roberto Benigni, who stars as Guido Orefice, a Jewish waiter in Arezzo before the war. He woos and wins his wife, Dora (Nicoletta Braschi), whom he calls la principessa — the princess — in memorably comic and romantic style and manages to…