Rainer Werner Fassbinder

Pine forests must shudder at Ilan Stavans' very name. A scholar, fiction writer, literary critic, lexicographer, graphic novelist, public television host and all-around intellectual go-to guy on matters Judaic and Latino, the Amherst College professor...

Disembodied shadows dance on a wall. Invisible assailants attack a man. Barks are heard, but there are no dogs. A vampire, and the vampire's assistant, lurk in the shadows. Carl Theodor Dreyer's legendary "Vampyr" could be the closest any movie has...

In terms of home entertainment, viewers had an embarrassment of riches to choose from this year. Among 2007's best releases were restored old favorites and newly discovered rarities, television classics past and present, and at the top of the heap, the...

There must be something in the water in Philadelphia. It's where David Lynch conceived his astonishing debut film, "Eraserhead," and it's where the Quay brothers (who are identical twins) came of age as artists. All three filmmakers seem to have a...

  (PG-13). An understated but weirdly grabbing portrait of a man who loses his memory after being mugged and cobbles together an alternative existence with minimal means. It's a comedy, by the way, but Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki doesn't let you in on...

Judging by the number of audience members crammed into every nook and cranny of the Trap Door Theatre the other night, the avant-garde works of the Spanish-Moroccan emigre Fernando Arrabal have more appeal in modern-day Chicago than one might first think....

The perverse life and nasty jottings of the sexual libertine known as the Marquis de Sade are an excellent match for the Trap Door Theatre, an on-the-edge little Chicago troupe that never seems completely at ease unless its shows contain nudity,...

In Fernando Arrabal's rarely seen 1968 drama, "The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria," two diverse but desperate men on a desert island act out a series of ritualized relationships as they fight for supremacy. They play master and slave, judge and...

'Automobile Graveyard' at the Trapdoor Theatre "Automobile Graveyard," a post-apocalyptic tragi-farce from 1958 in which the principal character ends up beaten and crucified on a bicycle, is not your typical summer fare. But some folks are clearly still...

"Buena Vista Social Club" will very likely surprise fans of German filmmaker Wim Wenders, the only active member of the German New Wave of the '70s which also included such luminaries as Werner Herzog and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In "Buena Vista Social...