The following is one of the entries from my list of the 100 greatest films (through 2006) from Africa, Latin America & the Caribbean, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis Hugo Chávez was elected Venezuela’s president in 1998, his support largely coming from the […]
Monthly Archives: November 2007
“Solitude will destroy you,” the doctor tells his patient; but, without his knowing it, solitude is destroying the doctor, much as the divide between classes, playing out in clashes between demonstrators and the military in the streets, threatens to undo Italy. Into his posh home, Mori, this psychiatrist, brings Annetta, a peasant, separating her from […]
Robert Browning penned the greatest Victorian poem, The Ring and the Book. Spouse Elizabeth’s The Cry of the Children, for all its social import, is maudlin. The worst part of the same-titled independent U.S. film consists of title cards excerpting it. A couple and their three daughters, except for Alice, the youngest, work in a […]
Concluding a trilogy begun with Drifting Clouds (1996) and The Man Without a Past (2002), but in this case characterized by only ontological humor, Aki Kaurismäki’s quietly lovely, intense Laitakaupungin valot essays a nighttime security guard whose location sums up his existence: the nearby harbor, his loneliness and aspiration; the patch of businesses he guards, […]
A colorful and telling canvas about slum life in Rio de Janeiro, City of God (Cidade de Deus) has wasted little time in becoming an authentic classic of Brazilian cinema. The film admits numerous young characters, most of them distributed among different gangs over time, and a convoluted plot admitting elements of drug dealing, vicious […]
Dennis Grunes 