Dmitri Shostakovich and Alexander Preis’s four-act opera, based on Nikolai Leskov’s nineteenth-century novella, has been cut, but Czech-born Petr Weigl’s 100-minute film version, vacuous and unfocused, is too long already. Weigl has nothing to show, nothing to say. His is certainly vastly inferior to Andrzej Wajda’s non-singing 1961 version of the Leskov story, a film […]
Daily Archives: September 25, 2009
A dark reflection of postwar Japanese anguish and demoralization during the U.S. occupation, Kuroi kawa flaunts a no-holds-barred attitude on the part of filmmaker Masaki Kobayashi. Set around Atsugi U.S. Air and Naval Base, in the bars and brothels that have cropped up to accommodate lonely U.S. soldiers, it portrays desperate lives in tenements and […]
Dennis Grunes 