Fritz Lang: Circle of Destiny

Long recognized in the international film community as an influential and groundbreaking director, Fritz Lang's career began during the silent era, with early films such as The Spider (1919) laying the groundwork for his more critically acclaimed Metropolis (1927) and M (1931). Emigrating to the United States in 1934, the Viennese-born German director would go on to make a string of notable Hollywood films during the 1940s and '50s, including The Big Heat, Rancho Notorious, The Woman in the Window and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, among others, before trailing off with a trio of poorly received German-language films shot at the end of the '50s. Jorge Dana's Fritz Lang: Circle of Destiny benefits not only from the informed commentary of directors such as Claude Chabrol and Volker Schlöndorff, and that of Lang biographer Patrick McGilligan, but also from a pair of Lang interviews and numerous film clips. What emerges is an informative, though hardly exhaustive, retrospective on Lang's career, leavened with some provocative information about his personal life. Recommended. Aud: H, C, P. (P. Van Vleck)