Directed by Manoel de Oliveira • 1981 • Portugal
Starring Teresa Menezes, Diogo Dória, Mário Barroso
A portrait of an obsessive love affair, Manoel de Oliveira’s FRANCISCA is based on a novel by Agustina Bessa-Luís, whose work the legendary director would later adapt twice more. The book’s retelling of a troubled passage in the life of celebrated writer Camilo Castelo Branco (Mário Barroso)—in which his friend José Augusto (Diogo Dória) embarked on a perverse game of marital cat and mouse with Francisca (Teresa Menezes), the woman the novelist loved—led Oliveira to new heights of stylistic imagination. (It helped that Oliveira’s wife, a distant relative of the historical Francisca, gave him access to a cache of the woman’s letters.) With its elaborate title cards, strikingly staged action, evocatively gloomy interiors, and show-stopping gala set pieces, FRANCISCA is an exacting, sumptuous cinematic experience that ranks among Oliveira’s crowning achievements.
Directed by Agnieszka Holland and Kasia Adamik • 2017 • Poland
Starring Agnieszka Mandat, Wiktor Zborowski, Jakub Gierszal
Mysterious, atmospheric, and darkly humorous, Agnieszka Holland’s genre-defying adaptation of Nobel Prize–winning writer Olga Tokarczuk’s novel “Drive Your Plow over the Bon...
Directed by Mike Leigh • 1999 • United Kingdom
Starring Allan Corduner, Jim Broadbent, Timothy Spall
The world of Gilbert and Sullivan comes to vivid life in director Mike Leigh’s extraordinary dramatization of the staging of the duo’s legendary 1885 comic opera THE MIKADO. Jim Broadbent and All...
Directed by Tom Noonan • 1994 • United States
Starring Karen Sillas, Tom Noonan
A lost masterpiece of 1990s independent cinema reemerges in a new restoration. Winner of the Grand Jury Prize and the screenwriting award at the 1994 Sundance Film Festival, WHAT HAPPENED WAS . . . is Tom Noonan’s si...
