Six years after Marco Bellocchio’s La balia (The Nanny, 1999) comes another period study of class centering on a hired wet-nurse: writer-director Antoine Santana’s La ravisseuse, which for some peculiar reason has been given the title A Song of Innocence in the States. In their different ways, the impoverished illiterate, Angèle-Marie, and her mistress, Charlotte, […]
Daily Archives: November 12, 2009
This afternoon, in descending order of preference, here are my selections for the ten best films of the 1990s, beginning with one of the ten best films of all time. — Dennis 1. D’EST (Chantal Äkerman, Belgium, France, Portugal, 1993). Like Dziga Vertov’s lyrical Three Songs of Lenin (1934), From the East is a photographic […]
Dispensing with the Rashomon-like flashbacks of Howard Fast’s novel, each attuned to a different character’s view of Spartacus, executive producer Kirk Douglas’s film is a blunt, thin “big movie,” a collection of boring, silly, gory scenes that puts the best possible face on the Roman obliteration of the actual Spartacus’s slave rebellion in the first […]
Dennis Grunes 