War, love and life are all a damn pain: this is the message of Vittorio De Sica’s I girasoli, an opulent and very dreary melodrama that misapplies sweeping camera gestures, and lush color, to what ought to have been an intimate story about ordinary people. From Italy, the U.S.S.R. and France, the film also seems […]
Daily Archives: March 21, 2010
Christopher Miles, brother of Sarah, has garnered only sporadic directorial assignments, but he made an exceptionally fine film of D. H. Lawrence’s posthumously published 1926 novella The Virgin and the Gypsy. Miles, apparently, was inspired to bring a work by Lawrence to the British screen by the success of Ken Russell’s bold, sexually charged Women […]
Dennis Grunes 