F.x. Feeney

Legend has it that in 1933, film director Fritz Lang was ordered to meet with Hitler‘s propaganda minister, Dr. Josef Goebbels. Lang, then 42, was already world-renowned. His masterpiece Metropolis (1927) had not only made his name but had transformed the way people everywhere imagined the future. “The Fuhrer saw......

Photo by Arnaud Borrel Over the course of their 40-year collaboration, producer Ismail Merchant, director James Ivory and writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala have earned what might be called a false reputation as boutique adapters of the world’s great books. False, because in their marrow, Ivory (born in Berkeley, California), Merchant......

An argument can be made that Spain was the America of antiquity, a polyglot of a nation crisscrossed by centuries of adventurers and opportunists. Certainly a deep affinity manifests itself time and again through Spanish movies. Where filmmakers from other countries imitate the American idiom to their detriment, the Spaniards......

Enlarge image “You had a good face,” says an elderly intellectual to the quizzical ghost who’s come to haunt him in his office on a remote Swedish island. “A face ideally suited to both comedy and tragedy.” This woman’s sad mouth and merry eyes are marvels that would indeed repay......

If ever there was a great painter who lived at the pitch great actors do, it was Jackson Pollock. He lived a vision that could only be expressed intuitively, with his whole body. The “action” paintings for which he is best remembered are splattery explosions of pure intention, epics that......

The dynamics of men among men drive more movies than do dramas of women among women. Lawrence of Arabia is the most telling example: The only actual women who appear in it are either dead, veiled or seen from such great distances they become figments of dim memory. Director David......

In 1933, when she was barely out of her teens, the Viennese-born actress Hedy Lamarr (still known in those days as Hedy Kiesler) launched herself to international stardom courtesy of a ”legendary“ nude scene in the Czech film Ecstasy. I say legendary in quotes, because no two accounts of this......

You know something‘s wrong when you see two love stories back-to-back but can’t work up much of a passion about either of them. What‘s troubling in the case of the love stories premiering this week is that both are made by first-time writer-directors of such impressive talent that I’m tempted......

In the Paul Bowles short story ”A Distant Episode,“ a professor of linguistics is lured to a terrible fate by the sound of flute music. A perverse curiosity leads him forward, down an abysmal path into a deep gorge at the edge of the Sahara. This wish to have one‘s......