Giochi di notte

I gave it 3 because the cinematography is really rather good, and Naima Wifstrand, a stalwart of Swedish cinema for decades, is in the cast. Otherwise it's trash, and would have been included in Pauline Kael's wonderful essay The Come-Dressed-As -The-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties if it had been made a few years earlier. This is the kind of movie that is made to shock the bourgeoisie, and I am not the least surprised that Shirley Temple was horrified by it. It fails however on the most fundamental level--that of revealing something important about the hero's psyche. Instead we are given party scenes that go on forever, with grotesque characters you'd never meet outside of a mental hospital.

Criterion channel brought back three of Mai Zetterling's films from the 60's, and on the evidence of Night Games they shouldn't have bothered.