Slack, shallow, almost bereft of any entertainment value, Yolanda and the Thief is the worst film by Vincente Minnelli that doesn’t star Barbra Streisand. It is a musical romance where most of the “romance” is offscreen (I guess), despite Fred Astaire’s lead role contains only two dances, and—this, the year after Meet Me in St. […]
Daily Archives: September 19, 2012
Smacking of Buñuel, the brilliant prologue to writer-director Nelson Pereira dos Santos’s Como Era Gostoso o Meu Francês is hilarious. In 1594 Brazil, a young French mercenary, captured by an indigenous tribe, the Tupiniquins, is pushed off a cliff, shackled, to drown in the sea below as a priest, his back toward us, makes a […]
An elliptical parable with something of the force and beauty of Ford and Fernández’s The Fugitive (1947), but with more political punch, Rafi Pitts’s Sanam, from Iran, proceeds at a solemn pace, through deceptively quiet, seemingly half-submerged emotional territory, to a haunting, incendiary finish. It won for Pitts best film prizes at Paris, Vesoul, Valencia, […]
Dennis Grunes 