Sam Mendes’s Road to Perdition, based on a graphic novel by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner, is a lame film, I suppose, in many ways, but I don’t think it merits the critical derision that it has received point-blank. To be sure, the story is farfetched—unbelievable, really, and the style is both selfconscious […]
Daily Archives: June 12, 2007
Sixty years after winning two consecutive best actress Oscars (as Anna Held in The Great Ziegfeld and O-Lan in The Good Earth), and more than fifty years after retiring following a subsequent string of flops, Luise Rainer takes center-screen in The Gambler (A Játékos), giving a fabulous performance. Rainer, looking ancient except for those signature […]
With an agile mix of situational farce, political cabaret, and various cinematic forms (including the animated cartoon and the black-and-white silent), Ela Troyano’s Carmelita Tropicana: Your Kunst Is Your Waffen amiably tests just how many disparate styles a half-hour film can accommodate—and without breaking into a formal sweat. This daffy, at times deliriously funny film—second […]
The digital feature Every Move You Make turns hackneyed material into something fresh and irresistibly charming. Written and directed by Glenn Andreiev from a story by Paul Kanter, the film, about a young woman who claims she is being stalked, masks a series of subtle inflections beneath an engagingly blunt, rough-hewn style. The film is […]
There are so many faults to be found with The Wizard of Oz (1939) that one scarcely knows where to begin. It’s a klutzy movie. The technicolor is tacky. The Land of Oz is tackily realized, and so literal. Indeed, there’s a lack of imagination throughout. The film is heavy, as though based on something […]
Dennis Grunes 