Before making her vows, a would be nun (Silvia Pinal) visits her rich, old uncle (Fernando Rey) who takes his own life after she refuses his advances. Leaving the convent entirely after inheriting her estate, she transforms it into a commune for vagrants for eventually run amok. Luis Bunuel's return home to his native land is confounding, challenging, cynical, and shocking like most of the director's work, while made with vivid imagery and memorable performances from Pinal and Rey.

*** out of ****

Through a Glass Darkly (1961)

 A young woman (Harriet Andersson), just released from the hospital following treatment for schizophrenia, retreats to a remote island and frolics with her bookish brother (Lars Passgard) while her sullen husband (Max von Sydow) attempts to repair their marriage and she learns the devastating news that her author father (Gunnar Bjornstrand) has been exploiting her sickness for his work. Immaculately shot by Bergman's longtime cinematographer Sven Nykvist, Through a Glass Darkly is cerebral, shocking, and sorrowful with a possessed, otherworldly performance from Andersson.

*** 1/2 out of ****

Winter Light (1963)

A Lutheran minister (Bjornstrand) practices mass without feeling, offers his own feelings of helplessness to a suicidal man (von Sydow) who reaches out to him, and treats his loving mistress (Gunnel Lindblom) with nothing but disdain as the only true believer in his clergy is the hunchback Sexton. Striking, succinct, penetrating, and humorless, Bjornstrand's performance and Lindblom breaking the fourth wall during the letter reading scene stand atop an austere Winter Light.

*** out of ****

The Silence (1963)

A sensual woman (Lindblom) and her child stop for a layover in a bizarre, unnamed and virtually inaudible European town when her cold and distant sister (Ingrid Thulin) takes ill during a journey by train. Oblique, extremely minimalist, and starkly filmed The Silence is ultimately a shocking and viscerally moving experience.

*** out of ****

A closeted, successful London barrister (Dick Bogarde) decides to fight back against the blackmail ring terrorizing local gays. Victim had to have been incredibly daring for its time, but is so much more than an issues movie and, at its core, simply a remarkably well crafted thriller. Bogarde's performance is controlled and impressive and even when the picture veers into melodrama, it veers effectively so.

*** 1/2 out of ****

In feudal Japan, a devious samurai (Toshiro Mifune) without a clan or a cause is recruited by the townspeople of a village overrun by two criminal syndicates and decides to play them off of each other. Kurosawa's Yojimbo is humorous, relevant, beautifully composed, not to mention immensely influential, with another wild though composed, prodigious Mifune performance at its center.

**** out of ****

At a party at a French chateau, a woman referred to only as A is approached by a man known only as X who tries to convince her they met a year ago at another gathering, while another man, M, who may or may not be her husband, looms in the shadows. Alan Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, from a screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet, is a hypnotic, jigsaw puzzle of a movie which achieves the incredible feat of suspending disbelief entirely in a work completely devoid of plot.

Judgement at Nuremberg dramatizes the series of American tribunals following World War II which tried several Nazi officials for war atrocities, and condenses them into a single trial. Socially conscious filmmaker Stanley Kramer's film was one I'd seen awhile back and one which held a firm place in my memory as a biting and powerful work. Watching it again, I found the material overly hypothetical and pretentious with Kramer's constantly zooming courtroom scene cameras creating a distraction. Still, there is much to appreciate on the acting front and from a highly regarded cast standouts include Burt Lancaster as a defendant, Montgomery Clift and Judy Garland as key witnesses, Richard Widmark and Maximilian Schell (excellent, also an Oscar winner for the part) as opposing attorneys, and Spencer Tracy as the presiding judge.

A governess (Deborah Kerr) arrives at a countryside manor to take charge of two young children under strict instructions from their uncaring guardian uncle (Michael Redgrave) never to contact him, no matter how dire the circumstances become. Quickly she becomes convinced that her wards have been corrupted by two recently deceased overseers, and are now possessed by their spirits. From the classic novella The Turn of the Screw, Jack Clayton's The Innocents is the definitive and a relatively simple haunted house movie, a genre that has been fumbled by filmmakers so often over the years. Screenwriters Truman Capote and William Archibald fill in the blanks of Henry James' story to great effect and superb black and white photography and a few camera tricks lend to some genuinely spooky moments. Kerr and Megs Jenkins, playing a long term maid, both turn in terrific performances.

La Notte, the middle film in Michelangelo Antonioni's unnoffically titled Malaise trilogy, follows a discontented writer (Marcello Mastroianni) and his wife (Jeanne Moreau) as they make preparations to attend a party. Like L'Avventura which preceded it and L'eclisse which followed, La Notte follows vacuous, upper class sorts to indeterminable destinations but unlike those films it fails to enthrall and tedium quickly takes over. Despite a memorable concluding sequence, La Notte is a mostly dreadful bore and the kind of picture that gives art house films a bad name.

Holly Golightly (Audrey Hepburn), a free-spirited, chic, high end call girl, leads men on while never remotely attached, in the hopes of scoring a rich husband with the aims of reuniting with her beloved, enlisted brother. When a handsome, part-time writer, part-time gigolo (George Peppard) befriends, than falls for her, the truth is soon revealed behind her haughty facade. Based on Truman Capote's 1958 bestseller, "Breakfast at Tiffany's" is a delightful picture from Blake Edwards and a welcome change of pace from his later slapstick. Audrey Hepburn is positively luminous in her iconic role and I thought George Peppard was quite could as her foil (just what was the deal with the casting of Mickey Rooney as the vexed, Japanese neighbor though?). Franz Planer's cinematography is excellent, especially on the Blu-ray print of the film I watched. It also must be said, despite how tired the notion has become, that the film's nuanced screenplay is so much more interesting than today's leave nothing to the imagination approach.

In the days before the erection of the Wall, a Coca-Cola man in West Berlin is jockeying for a job in the London office when his boss back home in Atlanta asks him to look after his teenage daughter as she passes through on her tour of Europe. Seeing this as a way to score points, things go from bad to worse after the girl disappears for the night and returns with a firebreathing, East Berlin communist radical! Now he must come up with a plan to annul the marriage and ditch the red, but things just keep getting more and more out of hand for the controlling executive. Like its title would indicate, "One, Two, Three" is a flat out assault, made at a breakneck pace, and featuring an endless barrage of gags and one-liners-the kind of film The Marx Brothers would have appreciated. Made by legendary auteur Billy Wilder and scripted with oft collaborator I.A.L Diamond, the film features his inimitable brand of humor. In a whirlwind performance, which would prove to be his penultimate one, James Cagney barely comes up for air in a spectacular turn. His supporters, all perfectly cast, are uniformly wonderful most notably the young Horst Buchholz as the unfortunately named commie beau Otto Ludwig Piffl. Wilder and Cagney is a fortuitous match, one that should have happened sooner and more often, and both live up to their deservedly high reputations.

"Fast Eddie" Felson and his backer Charlie tour the seedy pool halls around the country, scrounging up a few dollars from the locals. One day, they happen into an all night match with legendary shark Minnesota Fats and after having him on the ropes, Eddie gets drunk and cocky and loses all of his money. Severing ties with Charlie, he forges a partnership with the shrewd gambler Bert as well as a tragic one with a depressive drunk college girl, while he again sets his sights on Minnesota Fats. Robert Rossen's "The Hustler" is a stark and gritty black and white film that perfectly inhabits its pool room settings. Following the anti-hero leading men of the 1950s such as James Dean and Marlon Brando, Paul Newman creates a spot-on performance of an erred hero. Additionally, he is backed up by a wonderful supporting cast including Piper Laurie as the despondent college girl/prostitute, George C. Scott as the ruthless gambler, and Jackie Gleason in a fine dramatic turn as Minnesota Fats.

In a reimagining of Romeo and Juliet transplanted to Manhattan, the Jets and the Sharks, two rival street gangs battle for a piece of small but hallowed turf. As Riff, the leader of the Euro bred Jets calls in his best friend/ex-gang member Tony to broker a war council with the Puerto Rican Sharks, Tony falls in love with the rival gang members sister Maria, and the two act out the brief and tragic love affair. Only a scarce few movies can capture that special place in your heart, ones which you adored as a child, and for which the admiration only grows with each successive revisit. "West Side Story", which turns 50 this year, is the film which I have admired the longest and my fondest for it grew once more watching it recently in its theatrical reissue. Like the greatest films, "WSS" works on many different levels: it opens with the street gangs, the Jets comprised of 50s greaser types and the Sharks made up of Hispanic stereotypes. While I don't think these units are to be taken as literal gangs, their interactions amongst each other are of great enjoyment. Then there is the universally acclaimed Jerome Robbins cinematography, with its gracefully wild and synchronized movement. The Leonard Bernstein songs, with lyrics from Stephen Sondheim, are as memorable as any musicals. The romance between Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer is touching as well (though some claim it lacks allure). The supporting performances are wonderful as well including Russ Tamblyn as Riff and the Academy Award winning work of George Chakiris as the fiery Bernarnrdo and Rita Moreno as his equally conflagrant girlfriend Anita. The direction of Robert Wise, who shared the credit with Robbins, is superb as is the Ernest Lehman script based on Arthur Laurents's stage play. "West Side Story" is a glorious cinematic achievement that is waiting to be discovered by a new generation of film goers.

An Englishman travels to the castle of Don Nicholas Medina, the son of a notorious Spanish Inquisitor, to investigate the mysterious death of his sister who was married to Medina. During his investigation, he encounters tale upon tale as to the happenings surrounding her death and the history of the castle, until the actual sinister truth is revealed. Roger Corman's adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's "Pit and the Pendulum" is a sumptuous, wonderfully set film featuring a humorously diabolical performance from Vincent Price as Don Nicholas. I liked the way the film unfolded with "yes, but did you know" and "why besides myself, you are the only person to know this" revelations, and the climax in the titular torture chamber is absolutely phenomenal. "Pit and the Pendulum" is a horror film that is funny, beautiful, and scary all at once.