There isn’t much to say about Good Night, and Good Luck, an insubstantial film that takes its title from radio and television commentator Edward R. Murrow’s sign-off. The film’s focus consists of a few TV broadcasts, for CBS, in which Murrow “took on” Wisconsin’s Joseph McCarthy, an opportunistic U.S. senator who rode the nation’s postwar […]
Daily Archives: February 3, 2007
This version of my piece on A bout de souffle is the most recent and supercedes any other version elsewhere on the Internet. With Sergei M. Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) the most celebrated film ever made, and probably the more influential of the two, Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de souffle—literally, “out of breath”; in the […]
In black and white, plainly influenced by the cinema of Bengal film artist Satyajit Ray, especially Aparajito (The Unvanquished, 1957), Neem Annapurna—Bitter Morsel—is a trenchant study of an impoverished family that has moved to Calcutta in hopes that Brojo, the husband and father, would find a job after famine wiped out his small village, closing […]
One hopes for the best. “Even at 2½ hours,” I wrote, “Boogie Nights [(1997)] is so nimbly entertaining it breezes by.” The same cannot be said, however, about Magnolia, which returns writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson to the San Fernando Valley, but this time, dispensing wretched excess with a heavier hand. Anderson again borrows his style […]
A couple of my grandparents were Ukrainian, so I come to the first film by Vadim Perelman, a U.S. immigrant from the Ukraine, with a predisposition in its favor. Perelman, along with Shawn Lawrence Otto (beware of authors who can’t correctly spell their own names), adapted the novel with the same title by Andre Dubus […]
Dennis Grunes 