Directed by the Amber Production Team, a Newcastle-based collective exploring the British working class, Eden Valley focuses on a Northumberland horsebreeder and his teenaged son. Following a decade-long estrangement, the two have been reunited as a result of the boy’s having been caught stealing. Gorgeously filmed in somber, misty light and colors, the richly detailed […]
Daily Archives: March 25, 2007
Shakespeare’s play as film noir—medieval, though, not modern—and existential tragedy: a marvel that its studio, Republic, mutilated for no good reason. In its restored form, however, Orson Welles’s first of three Shakespeare films seems to emanate from Macbeth’s own mind (some of Macbeth’s utterances emerge as somber voiceover), as if from his grave, and the […]
Self-directed, Charles Chaplin is deeply moving as Calvero, an aging London music-hall comedian whose audiences no longer laugh at his routines but who is still capable of falling in love. The filmmaker is in an autobiographical mood; for Calvero loses his heart to a girl young enough to be his granddaughter (or, in Chaplin’s case, […]
John Huston’s very funny black-’n’-blue comedy uses the machinations of a syndicate family to observe the absurd application of such notions as obligation and honor. The most shattering moment in the Huston œuvre is, perhaps, the finale sealing Brigid O’Shaughnessy’s fate in The Maltese Falcon (1941); but Prizzi’s Honor has an electrifying moment of its […]
Dennis Grunes 