Steven Spielberg has purged his Cast of Characters for this film of their family names. I have therefore assigned willy-nilly family names of my own invention to those characters in the film that aren’t given family names in the Cast of Characters that appears at the end of the film. I am sorry for any […]
Daily Archives: September 10, 2007
Leaving Las Vegas is a sentimental, occasionally lugubrious melodrama about two intensely lonely persons, a man and a woman, a jobless, suicidal alcoholic whose wife and family have abandoned him and a prostitute, who move into each other’s lives in Las Vegas and form a bond of mutual acceptance and something akin to unconditional love. […]
Claude Chabrol’s Ten Days’ Wonder, or La décade prodigieuse, from the “creepiest” of the Ellery Queen (Frederic Dannay, Manfred Lee) novels, Marty Cohen tells me, has only recently been taken seriously. At the time of its original release it was widely regarded as Chabrol’s lamest film from his greatest period, and it indeed may still […]
A horror film, Ingmar Bergman’s black-and-white Hour of the Wolf is creepy and terrifying. It draws on stories by E.T.A. Hoffmann and, like Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, it purportedly and playfully derives from its fictitious protagonist’s diary. Its store of anxieties is perversely comical. Johan (Max von Sydow, excellent), a painter, and his pregnant wife, […]
Dennis Grunes 