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Above: Polish poster for The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, Italy/Algeria, 1965). Designer: Jerzy Flisak.As the 55th New York Film Festival winds down this weekend, I thought I’d look back half a century at the films of the 5th edition. That 1967 festival, programmed by Amos Vogel, Richard Roud, Arthur Knight, Andrew Sarris and Susan Sontag, featured 21 new films, all but three of which were from Europe (six of them from France, 2 and 1/7 of them directed by Godard), all of which showed at Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall. (They also programmed Gance’s Napoleon, Mamoulian’s Applause and King Vidor’s Show People in the retrospective slots). The only director to have a film in both the 1967 festival and the 2017 edition is Agnès Varda, who was one of the directors of the omnibus Far From Vietnam and was then already 12 years into her filmmaking career.It will come as...

The death of a king, the death of cinema: in Albert Serra’s La mort de Louis Xiv we watch French New Wave legend Jean-Pierre Léaud embody the Sun King as a living body sinking into the shadows, slipping away while his attendants, doctors and sycophants carefully tend to him as if all will be fine. But will it? An actor synonymous with the 1960s re-invention of cinema, made in close collaboration with such epoch-defining directors as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Jacques Rivette, Léaud is now 71, five years younger than the age the most ambitious, powerful, and famous of French kings died of gangrene. The title spoils the fun on purpose: Albert Serra’s film is not about what happens; rather, it’s paying homage a king among men, the fading into the dark of a man inseparable from modern cinema.Those familiar with this Catalan director’s radical...

The death of a king, the death of cinema: in Albert Serra’s La mort de Louis Xiv we watch French New Wave legend Jean-Pierre Léaud embody the Sun King as a living body sinking into the shadows, slipping away while his attendants, doctors and sycophants carefully tend to him as if all will be fine. But will it? An actor synonymous with the 1960s re-invention of cinema, made in close collaboration with such epoch-defining directors as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Jacques Rivette, Léaud is now 71, five years younger than the age the most ambitious, powerful, and famous of French kings died of gangrene. The title spoils the fun on purpose: Albert Serra’s film is not about what happens; rather, it’s paying homage a king among men, the fading into the dark of a man inseparable from modern cinema.Those familiar with this Catalan director’s radical...

Adela Quested (Judy Davis) finishes A Passage to India in the same manner she started the movie: her face is deformed by a window full of drops of rain. In both cases, she is looking at something more or less out of frame, blurred or uncertain, imaginary or physical. The placement of the camera, in the beginning and in the end, is at a different location. When the film starts, we are inside of a traveling agency and Adela is walking past the panoramic window. She stops for a second and stares at a large-sized model of a ship. We can’t see the ship entirely: just some chimneys, masts and ropes. We only know this is a ship because the previous shot—the first shot of the picture, actually—showed us this model.In the end of the movie, Adela is reading a letter concerning events that we have seen.

Jean Gruault, who wrote 25 screenplays between 1960 and 1995, has His screenplay for Alain Renais's Mon oncle d'Amérique (1980) was nominated for an Oscar and a César and won a David di Donatello Award. Other notable works include Jacques Rivette's debut feature, Paris Belongs to Us (1960), and Rivette's The Nun (1966); Roberto Rossellini's Vanina Vanini (1961) and The Taking of Power by Louis Xiv (1966); Jules and Jim (1962), co-written with François Truffaut, as well as Truffaut's The Wild Child (1970), Two English Girls (1971) and The Green Room (1978); Jean-Luc Godard's Les carabiniers (1963); Chantal Akerman's The Eighties (1983) and Golden Eighties (1986); the scenario for Resnais's Love Unto Death (1984); and he worked with Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne on You're on My Mind (1992). » - David Hudson...

Jean Gruault, who wrote 25 screenplays between 1960 and 1995, has His screenplay for Alain Renais's Mon oncle d'Amérique (1980) was nominated for an Oscar and a César and won a David di Donatello Award. Other notable works include Jacques Rivette's debut feature, Paris Belongs to Us (1960), and Rivette's The Nun (1966); Roberto Rossellini's Vanina Vanini (1961) and The Taking of Power by Louis Xiv (1966); Jules and Jim (1962), co-written with François Truffaut, as well as Truffaut's The Wild Child (1970), Two English Girls (1971) and The Green Room (1978); Jean-Luc Godard's Les carabiniers (1963); Chantal Akerman's The Eighties (1983) and Golden Eighties (1986); the scenario for Resnais's Love Unto Death (1984); and he worked with Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne on You're on My Mind (1992). » - David Hudson...

Macbeth

Written by Roman Polanski and Kenneth Tynan

Directed by Roman Polanski

UK, 1971

Following the success of Rosemary’s Baby in 1968, and prior to what is arguably still his greatest film, Chinatown (1974), Roman Polanski made three curious filmmaking choices. One was the international coproduction and rarely discussed What? (1972), one was the racing documentary Weekend of a Champion (1972), and the third, which actually came before these two, was Macbeth (1971). It is obviously not that a Shakespearean adaptation in itself is unusual, but rather that it so seemingly diverted from the films that were garnering the young Polanski his worldwide acclaim: taut thrillers like The Knife in the Water (1962), Repulsion (1965), Cul-De-Sac (1966), and Rosemary’s Baby. Yet in Macbeth, there are a number of characteristic Polanski touches — in story and style — harkening back to these previous works and in many ways pointing toward those to come.

Don’t be fooled by the Playboy...

No surprise here: Wes Anderson has fabulous -- and fairly esoteric -- taste in movies. Check out the "Moonrise Kingdom" director's top 10 (well, top 12) picks from the Criterion Collection below, in a list that spans directors as diverse as Robert Bresson, Luis Bunuel and Max Ophuls. With the exception of Paul Schrader's "Mishima," all of Anderson's picks were made within the same 20-year period. Wes Anderson Top Ten Criterion Films: 1. "The Earrings of Madame de..." (dir. Max Ophuls, 1953) 2. "Au hasard Balthasar" (dir. Robert Bresson, 1966) 3. Three-way tie, all directed by Shohei Imamura: "Pigs and Battleships" (1961), "The Insect Woman," (1963), "Intentions of Murder" (1964) 4. "The Taking of Power by Louis Xiv" (dir. Roberto Rossellini, 1966) 5. "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" (dir. Martin Ritt, 1965) 6. "The Friends of Eddie...

First the history, then the list:

In 1969, Jerome Hill, P. Adams Sitney, Peter Kubelka, Stan Brakhage, and Jonas Mekas decided to open the world’s first museum devoted to film. Of course, a typical museum hangs its collections of artwork on the wall for visitors to walk up to and study. However, a film museum needs special considerations on how — and what, of course — to present its collection to the public.

Thus, for this film museum, first a film selection committee was formed that included James Broughton, Ken Kelman, Peter Kubelka, Jonas Mekas and P. Adams Sitney, plus, for a time, Stan Brakhage. This committee met over the course of several months to decide exactly what films would be collected and how they would be shown. The final selection of films would come to be called the The Essential Cinema Repertory.

The Essential Cinema Collection that the committee came up with consisted of about 330 films.

This week the Criterion Collection releases the Roberto Rossellini War Trilogy on DVD, filling an important gap in DVD libraries everywhere. The first and third movies in the trilogy, Open City (1945) and Germany Year Zero (1948), were available in shoddy editions that did not do justice to the films, and the second, Paisan (1946), has been on the hard-to-find list for some time. These movies are notable for establishing the "Italian Neorealism" movement that cropped up just after WWII. Italy was devastated, and several young filmmakers realized that making glossy entertainments felt false under the circumstances. So they grabbed some cameras, some short ends and some inexperienced actors and hit the streets.

The odd thing about Open City is how much of it takes place indoors, and how much it resembles a standard-issue melodrama. But it still contains moments of genuine invention and power -- especially the performance of Anna Magnani --...