LA STRADA (1954)
Italy brings a strong representative to our Winter Festival in Fellini’s modern fable of an innocent young woman who ends up on the road with a brutish circus performer.
FUNNY GAMES (1997)
Our entry from Austria is a sadistically violent movie that challenges the viewers as to why they like violent movies in the first place.
DR. MABUSE, DER SPIELER (1922)
You might not expect a movie from 1922 to actually work as an action movie with actual suspense and car chases and things, but somehow it does? This is the story of the prototype supervillain.
THE BLUE KITE (1993)
If given the choice, this would not be the entry of the Chinese government, which immediately banned this depiction of one family beaten down by two horrible decades of Chinese history.
UCHO (1970)
Our Winter World Cinema Festival begins with a Czech entry that was banned by the Communist Regime for 20 years because, well, its criticism of Communism ain’t subtle.
CYRANO DE BERGERAC (1950)
With the latest in a long history of “Cyrano” adaptations currently in theaters (somewhere), we revisit perhaps the most faithful adaptation of the original play, for which José Ferrer became the first Hispanic actor to win an Oscar.
LILIES OF THE FIELD (1963)
Sidney Poitier, who passed away earlier this month, became the first Black actor ever to win a Best Actor Oscar for his role as a handyman helping out a bunch of nuns in the desert.
THE MATRIX (1999)
Perhaps the definitive modern action movie, and also maybe the one with the action sequences that I have loved most over the years, which somehow also has literally many treatises’ worth of material going on just below the surface.
TARGETS (1968)
A prescient thriller (sort of) about a mass shooter and also an aging movie star played by Boris Karloff, which happened to be the directorial debut of Peter Bogdanovich.
Movie Valhalla 