Closeups of hands at work—hands weaving, bundling logs, making bricks, harvesting: hard work—work done by children, some as young as four or five, sometimes helping their elders, sometimes laboring off on their own. Los herederos, Eugenio Polgovsky’s most recent Mexican documentary, which Polgovsky directed, digitally videographed and edited, all brilliantly, vindicates what I wrote about […]
Monthly Archives: February 2010
My taste does not normally run to what Michael Mann does, which he always does superficially. I suppose the film of his I have liked the most is the Hannibal Lecter one, Manhunter (1986)—that is, until today. Public Enemies is as superficial as everything else Mann has done; for instance, we do not learn much […]
We glean from Georges Palet’s thoughts, which we hear as voiceover (intermixed with some omniscent voiceover), that he has a problem: he has killed, has been incarcerated for it, and must work steadily at suppressing an urge to kill again. The shot of a multitude of working timepieces at the jeweler’s to which he has […]
A Pirandellan air permeates Vincere, which means to win, to overcome, written (along with Daniela Ceselli) and directed by the maker of Enrico IV (1984), Marco Bellocchio. Mockingly aping his father, dictator Benito Mussolini, after one of Mussolini’s exaggerated speeches, Mussolini’s son, also named Benito (Filippo Timi plays both characters), goes insane under a combinate […]
Written by Robert E. Sherwood from MacKinlay Kantor’s blank-verse novella, Glory for Me, The Best Years of Our Lives is William Wyler’s finest, most moving film, the one most infused with his humane sensibility and least compromised by melodrama. It essays the civilian readjustment of three soldiers upon their return home to Boone City somewhere […]
Dennis Grunes 