Because we all already know that war is brutal business, war films constitute a genre peculiarly susceptible to the charge of “gratuitous violence.” For that reason, early on I was moved to quit Dmitri Meskhiyev’s Our Own, which won a quartet of best film prizes, including that from the Russian Guild of Film Critics. The […]
Daily Archives: January 19, 2009
From William Styron’s novel, Sophie’s Choice is probably the most disagreeable film of writer-director Alan J. Pakula’s career. Misguided, it trivializes the Holocaust, as Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) would also do a decade later. It is hysterical melodrama that courts a double suicide in hopes this will signify the countless actual delayed reactions to […]
Dennis Grunes 