One of the finest U.S. films of the 1960s, Pressure Point addresses America’s racial problems through the confrontations between a prison psychiatrist, who is black, and a Nazi-sympathizing patient who gets under his doctor’s skin by making salient points pertaining to the good doctor’s questionable allegiance to a nation that restricts him to second-class citizenship. […]
Daily Archives: May 25, 2007
A family—Odile, a widowed schoolteacher, and her two children—fleeing from Paris as the Germans advance in June 1940 and meeting in a forest a stranger, a 17-year-old boy with a shaved head, with whose life their own fates become intertwined: this is the premise of a lovely and fascinating 2003 film, Les égarés (called here, […]
Despite what we’ve been told, the film of Christopher Buckley’s Thank You for Smoking is painfully tedious and unfunny, forced, witless, sophomoric, very SNL. It’s exasperating. Is there any point to it? Perhaps there’s a point to the book; the film has no point, no motive, no reach. It is basically inert matter. The acting […]
The Captivating Star of Happiness (Zvezda plenitelnogo schastya), by Vladimir Motyl, runs a healthy 2¾ hours. It is excellent and is available on DVD. It is about Decembrists—the failed movement among elements of the tsarist military to bring constitutional government to tsarist Russia in 1825. The occasion was the ascendency of a new tsar, Nikolai […]
István Szabó’s Mephisto is based on Klaus Mann’s grudge novel against someone who had been married to his sister and who became the manager/lead actor of Nazi Germany’s national theater in Berlin. (Another part of the grudge came from the fact that this Mann, Thomas’s son, was Jewish, from his mother.) To get through it, […]
