Remember the Night (1940)

Gekko No Sasayaki or “Moonlight Whispers” is a brilliant little Japanese film, written and directed by Akihiko Shiota, about young love which suddenly spins out of control and becomes sexual perversion. Not a very promising subject, you might think, and the quasi-clinical dimension of the film, though it has a serious point to make, is…

Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl, directed by Joan Chen stars the beautiful young actress Lu Lu as the title character, a girl living with her happy family in Chengdu during the Chinese Cultural Revolution who is ordered, along with eight million other teenagers from the cities during the years 1966-76, to “go down” into…

The German-born Roland Emmerich’s anti-Americanism is ever less subtle, yet Americans are still lapping it up

The Other Sister, directed by Garry Marshall, tells the story of Carla Tate (Juliette Lewis), a young woman of 22 or 23 who, because she is mentally retarded, has spent most of her life in a “special school” and is now coming home, as the picture begins, to live with her well-to-do family in San…

Jane Austen as seen by Whit Stillman — who doesn’t quite see all of her

Panic, written and directed by Henry Bromell, does a fine job of setting up the classic therapeutic paradigm so beloved of the theorists of what they call “patriarchy.” This it does, I take it, for political reasons, since the very existence of “patriarchy” depends on an explicitly political assumption, namely that there is some realizable…