It Happened One Night

Besieged, like so many other films by its director, Bernardo Bertolucci, is dramatically simple and visually complex. More than any other director working today, Bertolucci is a story-teller in pictures, which makes for striking and memorable images that are forever bursting out of their contexts and becoming saucily incoherent, at least in any kind of…

An often funny but ultimately pretty trivial movie about the pain of adolescents with absent fathers

Les Demoiselles de Rochefort—which the American distributors are translating as The Young Girls of Rochefort—was directed by the late Jacques Demy in 1967 and now appears recut and restored by Demy’s widow, Agnes Varda. It is a strange—indeed, sometimes hilariously weird—but oddly charming French attempt at a Hollywood musical which stars the young Catherine Deneuve…

A sci-fi comedy that neglects to be funny

Besieged, like so many other films by its director, Bernardo Bertolucci, is dramatically simple and visually complex. More than any other director working today, Bertolucci is a story-teller in pictures, which makes for striking and memorable images that are forever bursting out of their contexts and becoming saucily incoherent, at least in any kind of…

An often funny but ultimately pretty trivial movie about the pain of adolescents with absent fathers

Les Demoiselles de Rochefort—which the American distributors are translating as The Young Girls of Rochefort—was directed by the late Jacques Demy in 1967 and now appears recut and restored by Demy’s widow, Agnes Varda. It is a strange—indeed, sometimes hilariously weird—but oddly charming French attempt at a Hollywood musical which stars the young Catherine Deneuve…

A sci-fi comedy that neglects to be funny

A much too long and incoherent but always watchable journey into the ever-stranger country of the 1970s.