The film known in Britain as Confidential Report is among Orson Welles’s lamest films. It is intriguing and visually dazzling nevertheless. It is as intricate as a dense spiderweb—in some ways, a Trial run for his end-of-Europe, end-of-the-world masterpiece (1962) from Kafka. The protagonist is Guy van Stratten—it turns out, a false identity in a […]
Daily Archives: June 25, 2007
Based on a stage play by George Emerson Brewer, Jr., and Bertram Bloch that starred, I believe, Tallulah Bankhead, Dark Victory is perhaps the finest of the Warner Brothers “weepies” that helped establish Bette Davis as America’s premier film actress. One can debate the realism of its premise all one wants, that a person can […]
Although it progressively loses force until pulling together for a sharp finish, Robert Guédiguian’s La ville est tranquille is ambitious and provocative. Its survey of an Altmanian host of individual lives, primarily working-class, many of them intersecting, is contained within a single city: Guédiguian’s own Marseilles. Its dense drama allows us to see how globalization […]
Dennis Grunes 