Anthony Minghella’s Cold Mountain is a vacuous film, with little or no emotional payoff for all our enduring 155 minutes of narrative nonsense. Some of the acting is okay (Nicole Kidman’s, for example), but most of it is god-awful, including Renée Zellweger’s preposterous Oscar-winning turn as a plainspoken mountain woman. As far as I’ve been […]
Daily Archives: April 20, 2007
No matter what impact he has had on history, Jesus Christ has not fared well on film. Discounting symbolic accounts, including those revolving around a Christ figure, only three of heaven knows how many films I have seen have stayed with me. One isn’t even a complete film; it’s an episode in, from Sweden, Danish […]
Trimmed of the profanity and excessive violence that got it an “R” rating, the network version of Proof of Life is probably the best one around. It’s what I saw, and the assurance in the credits that it was all “inspired” by an article (by William Prochnau) and a book (by Thomas Hargrove) seems like […]
Or is the protagonist of the Israeli film that bears her name, a.k.a. My Treasure. As in Gregory LaCava’s wonderful Primrose Path (1940), the mother is a prostitute but, unlike Ellie May, the daughter is active in trying to get her mother to quit. This is the first feature by Keren Yedaya. This is a […]
What I have done here is cull chronologically the 300-word entries for Ritwik Ghatak films included in my 100 Greatest Asian Films list and elsewhere on this site, which you will find elsewhere on this site. 1952 14. THE CITIZEN. Although films from “Bollywood” are quite the fashion, nearly all outstanding films from India have […]
Dennis Grunes 