Nicolas Rapold

Video-store fetish, Hollywood's shot in the arm, exotic staple of rep houses — Hong Kong action movies became synonymous in the 1990s with vigor and crackerjack invention, praised, as critic Grady Hendrix once put it, with "critical enthusiasm that managed to be refreshing and patronizing at the same time." Their......

Come for the housemaids gone wild, stay for the trenchant sociological commentary. In a double bill spanning Korean history — on-screen and off — this year's fest features the bizarre 1960 classic The Housemaid, and its ripely lurid 2010 reinterpretation by Im Sang-soo. Both tales feature a husband who dallies......

THE TEMPTATION OF ST. TONY Estonian filmmaker Veiko Õunpuu follows the lead of Bosch and other painters in taking St. Anthony's demonic torment as an inspiration to strut his stuff. But a more modern martyr drifts through his movie's meticulous black-and-white panoramas: Tony (Taavi Eelmaa) is a nattily dressed factory......

THE SICILIAN GIRL The facts are more gripping than the filmmaking in Marco Amenta's routine docudrama about tenacious teen informer Rita Atria. The 17-year-old Sicilian spitfire made jaws drop in 1991 by testifying against a homegrown capo — a reliable way of commissioning your own murder. The Palermo-born director sketches......

Moving in just six years from critic-approved discovery (Head-On) to state-of-the-union melodrama (Edge of Heaven), with a fruitful detour into music documentary (Crossing the Bridge), Turkish-German director Fatih Akin now takes a break with a peppy Eurocomedy. Wild-haired young Greek-German Zinos Kazantsakis (Adam Bousdoukos) runs a lumpen-loved schnitzel joint in......

Was any comic as fixated on (mis)perception as Jacques Tati? "Sight gag" doesn't begin to cover the worlds Tati designed: a seaside village, an ultramodernist house, a hall-of-mirrors city, all laced with playful misprision and graceful goofs. A compleat comedian-auteur like Chaplin or Jerry Lewis, Tati played his most famous......

"There really is no difference between nuns with no clothes on and tap dancers in goggles. It is all material," said Ken Russell. For the (now–80-something) filmmaker in his prime, art and history were carnival grounds for exhilarating spectacle and romantic mania. A childhood fan of musicals (and, later, The......

"What are your influences?" the potbellied video-store manager in Noah Baumbach's 1995 Kicking and Screaming asks postgrad applicant Otto. "Samuel Fuller," comes the dutiful reply, followed by vagueness: "All the good ones. All the ... other ones." Seven Criterion DVDs and one landmark reconstruction later (The Big Red One), Fuller......