Edward Yang's intimate but epic exploration of a crime that happened in the 1960s in Taiwan was released in 1991 and has gone on to become one of the most important Taiwanese films of all time. The English title of the film—A BRIGHTER SUMMER DAY—comes from Elvis Presley's song "Are you Lonesome Tonight," while the Taiwanese title directly translates to mean "Youth Homicide Incident on Guling Street." Chen Cheng, in his first major role, stars as Xiao Si’r, a young…

When he was 22 years old, the Brazilian Mário Peixoto would make his first film, an experimental silent feature film entitled LIMITE (1931). The film was inspired by an André Kertész photograph that Peixoto came across in 1929 while in Paris on the cover of issue 74 of the French weekly magazine "Vu." The image showed a woman looking into the camera with two male hands handcuffed around her neck.

There is little by the way of plot in the…

As director Raoul Walsh tells it, "Jack Warner sat back in his desk chair and gave me the executive eye. 'Cagney wants you to direct him in THE STRAWBERRY BLONDE.'" Walsh was soon on the project and even though he had a great cast lined up—Cagney, Olivia de Havilland, Alan Hale, and Jack Carson—he still had to fill the role of the titular strawberry blonde after Ann Sheridan had refused the part. Walsh's thoughts turned to a dancer he had…

Héctor Babenco's 1980 film PIXOTE came into being after another project ceased to be. He had originally intended to make a long 16mm documentary about abandoned children, around 200, in an actual reformatory in São Paulo, Brazil. But after 12 or so visits to the reform school the authorities shut Babenco out and didn't let him do anything else in the real reformatories. According to Babenco:

"At this point, I very excitedly decided to write a script and do a…

Shot in Rome's famous Cinecittà Studios, with exteriors shot in Sanremo, Portofino, and Tivoli, Joseph L. Mankiewicz's THE BAREFOOT CONTESSA (1954) is a sparkling Technicolor drama, dripping with glamour and tragedy, that Mankiewicz both wrote and directed. The photography on the film was by none other than the great Jack Cardiff, who made his mark shooting the films of Powell and Pressburger.

The story centers on Ava Gardner's fictional Spanish sex symbol Maris Vargas, her ascent in Hollywood, and the…

During Marjorie Keller's tragically short filmmaking career, she died in 1994 at the age of 43, she made 27 films shot on both 16mm and 8mm. Even though her career was short, she was known for many things beyond her filmmaking. Her dissertation, entitled "The Untutored Eye: Childhood in the Films of Cocteau, Cornell and Brakhage" was published in 1986 and she also wrote a children's book called "The Moon on the Porch." She was also very active politically and…

William A. Wellman's STORY OF G.I. JOE (1945) was based on the real-life writings of WWII-correspondent Ernie Pyle. Another real-life aspect of the film was Wellman's hiring of 150 real soldiers—"combat veterans of the campaigns in Africa, Sicily, and Italy”—to not only be in the film and speak their own dialogue but to also train the Hollywood actors. Ernie Pyle is played by Burgess Meredith and Robert Mitchum took on the everyman role of Lt. Walker, a creation based on…