Superior to Akira Kurosawa’s Hamlet film, Warui Yatsu Hodo Yoku Nemuru (The Bad Sleep Well, 1960), Helmut Käutner’s Der Rest ist Schweigen, from West Germany, was first to move Shakespeare’s play up to the present and out of a royal court and into the world of business. John H. Claudius—note the middle initial— returns home […]
Daily Archives: September 24, 2011
A crowd-pleasing piece of tripe, less from Chad than from France, Abouna is an African film by way of fabricated myth. Two brothers, 15-year-old Tahir and 8-year-old Amine, search for their father, who, their mother discovers one day, has abandoned them. Now the lost mother bears some ancient resonance; the lost brother, Romantic resonance. But […]
Gen. Augusto Pinochet and the military junta he heads have turned Chile into a police state. Homesick, self-exiled Ignaccio Vega (Sylvain Thirolle, marvelous) has slipped back in. A decade earlier, he had been entrusted with memorizing the names of the 15,000 fellow members of the underground resistance; to do this, and to do it in […]
Dennis Grunes 