Writer-director Robert Kramer’s futuristic Orwellian Ice refers to the present. Its fascistic U.S. is Richard Nixon’s. (Surprise.) The “Old Left” was bugabooed by the disastrous Spanish Civil War and buoyed by the example of the Soviet Union—until Czechoslovakia 1968, the final straw that eliminated Stalin as the explanation of all things bad there. The “New […]
Daily Archives: September 9, 2007
A strong, atmospheric Hollywood remake of a classic British silent by Alfred Hitchcock (1926), John Brahm’s The Lodger is shadowed and shaped into a phantom of the night by its paranoid twist. In the Hitchcock film a perfectly innocent stranger is suspected of being Jack the Ripper at the height of the Ripper’s ripping in […]
What does the fate of one individual matter when one is dealing with the vast and lofty issues of the whole of humanity? Filmmaker Helmut Käutner gives a bone-deep performance as Karl May, the nineteenth-century German author of cowboy stories and exotic adventures, whose extreme popularity came under attack by his insistence on their basis […]
Dennis Grunes 