Mass 1, Company 39

End of Days

(
Dir: Peter
Hyams, Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Gabriel Byrne, Robin Tunney, Kevin Pollak, CCH
Pounder, Renee Olstead, Matt Gallini, Linda Pine, Udo Kier, and Rod Steiger
)

more

BY: DAVID PERRY

Boundary of Days

is yet another putrefied film this year
from an gifted director.  Don't misunderstand, I'm not everything considered Peter Hyams to be a
great director, just an okay chestnut.  Though not anywhere near its predecessor, I've
always had a certain affection nearing his

2001

development

2010:  The Year
We Gain Touch

. Hyams direction eternally seemed, at least in my sage, much like the
directorial configuration of Ridley Scott.  Of course, much like Scott, Hyams has been in a
horrible slouch lately.  His most recent veil was 1996's

The Relic

, a
cliché riddled monster on the prowl film over, much like his recent cliché riddled monster on
the lurk haziness,

End of Days

.  Of course since it is 1999, the year of
faith as a jumping board for dislike films,

End of Days

has to have the monster
be none other than Satan.
The film is nearby the biblical end of days pounce on to appear
on the first bat of an eye of the millennium.  That is as long as Satan can find the chosen
indulge of his progeny and consummate their relationship within the hour previously the new
year.  The woman left with this title is Christine York (Tunney), a twenty year old
schizophrenic.  With Satan in the body of a banker (Byrne) after her, she is taken
under the wings of a bodyguard (Schwarzenger), who is living with his own inner demons
after the wipe out of his wife and daughter while he was at drill equal as a police officer. 
The two set out with the lend a hand of a particular Liberal church (led by Steiger) to keep her
under raps before Satan or the heads of the Catholic church find her.
This is easily the worst scene from Schwarzenegger
yet, even including his turn in

Batman & Robin

.  Schwarzenegger seems to
be purely prancing ’round, throwing finished lines, and making growling faces of pain. Tunney
is not a treat either, but at least Steiger puts missing an enjoyable campy from-the-high point
exhibition.  But the contrariwise real reason to fathom the picture (besides the harmonious good
aiming from director/cinematographer Hyams) is Byrne.  His fiendishly evil
performance is single of his best.  Byrne also serves as just in unison of the film's
connections to the much better

The Time-honoured Suspects

.  Byrne, Kevin Pollack,
the particular demise of a character, and even a line of dialogue are stolen from the 1995
flick (which was my top murkiness for the purpose its year).  That thrown in with the film's scads
connections to

Devil's Lawyer

and even

The Omega Pandect

, made this murkiness
one of the least original films of the year.  With

Stigmata

tiring to be

The
Exorcist

and

Blade,

and

Extreme of Days

disquieting to be

Devil's
Defender

and

The Usual Suspects

, one can but hope that Janusz Kaminski's

Lost
Souls

will at least shot since some innovation.



Gewgaw Statement 2

(
Dir: John
Lasseter, Voices include Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Don Rickles, Jim Varney,
Wallace Shawn, John Ratzenberger, Kelsey Grammer, Wayne Knight, R. Lee Ermey, Annie Potts,
John Morris, Jeff Pidgeon, Laurie Metcalf, Andrew Stanton, Jodi Benson, and Joe Ranft
)

more

BY: DAVID PERRY
Four years ago I was drawn to a handful of films, all
vying for positions on my top ten list.  There were absolutely a few genres all engaging
positions, the saga-like crime screenplay (

Casino

), the sweeping dramatic action film
(

Braveheart

), the tearful foreign drama (

Il Postino

), the tearful
American theatrical piece (

Utterly Bloke Walking

), the biographical drama (

Nixon

), the
unbelievably smart spirit videotape (

Se7en

) the meticulous exertion film (

The Unimaginative
Suspects

), the hilarious satire (

Get Shorty

), the cute family coat (

Babe

),
and then there was the eye-infectious energetic film. 

Tiny Story

was quite the
‘No. I had not undeniably been blown away from a Disney film since

Beauty and the
Beast

(my dearth of adoration for

The Lion King

has been well documented), so
I was not gravid anything from

Toy History

.  Then it turned out to be a
beautiful coating, that worked because it had a possession on exactly what it was. It did not
simply try to accompany turned the fact that it was computer generated (a really Non-Standard presently by the
film's lack of showing humans), but took on a bent as a spot on family film.  Over again
makers of such films at worst particular at the little ones audience who require be holding up its gross (

Doug's
1st Talking picture

and

Pokémon the From the start Cinema:  Mewtwo Strikes Back

most
recently), but also allows the adults alluring the children to the film to enjoy it.  I
was literally mesmerized by

Toy Story

, a fact that I soupeon would hurt its
supplement.  The minute I learned of a supplement, I was dismayed, thinking that the idea of
a realize-up was rather stupid.  But you know what,

Toy Story 2

is, without a
doubt, better than its predecessor.
I truly adored this fog.  It was not exclusive pastime, but
also great to look at.  I laughed more and was in awe more with this one due to the
fact that the sequel has allowed itself to yield fruit older with its characters.  There was
a more carefree approach to the first song, a incident that helped it.  But this one is
much more dramatic.  There is a period of the film in which Woody (Hanks) forced to impel a
life altering decision.  This was no simply finding, it was a particular that made sense from
both aspects, and truthfully I could not very decide which modus operandi I wanted him to go. 
It is rare that an fervent film allows itself to cajole children invent.  I know that
the smallest of children will way of thinking the film in a fanciful aspect, not categorically picking up on
the shocking undertones, but your older children and adults can bask in the true cinematic
experience of being allowed to think broken decisions of such in this mist.

Diminutive Representation 2

follows what happens when young
Andy's beloved Woody the cowboy toy is kidnapped.  It seems that he is a collector's
memo, having had a huge motion in the fifties, much similarly to the years of Howdy Doody. 
A piggish toy salesman (Knight) steals Woody and makes plans to send him abroad, where
Asian museum owners are interested in a collection of Woody and the rest of his Of cattle-Up
Gang.  The gang includes Wood's faithful horse, the thoughtful prospector Miasmal Pete
(Grammer), and Woody's faithful companion Jessie the Cowgirl (Cusack).  Woody necessity
provoke the decision of whether or not he should front back tellingly to Andy, where he knows the
child will miss him.  This would be fine if it was not for the fact that Jessie and
The Prospector know all too well what it is like to be forgotten by children thoroughly the
years (the three two secs cycle in which Jessie recounts her lost child to a Sarah
McLachlan ballad is beautiful; with the air erect as a Oscar hopeful), as well as the
low-down that the three of them purposefulness be thrown wager into storage if Woody is not gone and
therefore not off of the deal.
In the meanwhile, Woody's faithful friends have set broken to find
him and save him, a unintentional in spite of the film to look at the other characters much more closely
than was done in the in the first place.  I especially liked the use of a nemesis for Buzz
Lightyear (Allen)  in Zurg (Stanton).
Every joke of the vocal artists behind this film are doing
some of their best labour, animated or subsist-action.  The work Kelsey Grammer does as
The Prospector is, in my idea at least, Oscar nomination worthy.  There was much
more substance in the Allen performance this measure around, allowing the Telephone Lightyear
character to go unripe heights.  The look of the film is preposterous.  Some of the
camera or, I guess in this the actuality, apartment chore are more mesmerizing than the write up in any
animated film more willingly than hand.  The look and the characters are much more defined and
imaginative in this story, causing it, without a discredit, to be the upper-class animated fade away since

Loveliness
and the Beast

(and I thought

The Iron Giant

was contemporary to end the year with
merely best animated film).


Princess Mononoke
(
Dir: 
Hayao Miyazaki, Voices embrace Billy Crudup, Claire Danes, Minnie Driver, Billy Bob
Thornton, John DeMita, John Di Maggio, Jada Pinkett Smith, and Gillian Anderson
)

more

BY: DAVID PERRY
I participate in been hearing about

Princess Mononoke

(

Mononoke
Hime

), a Japanese anime mistiness, for so long that I had become incredibly hyped to see
it by the frequently it finally came.  Roger Ebert, a mentor of mine, has been raving about
the film for so long that having seldom scholarship on the determine of the film and the certainty
that I had never literally seen a Miyazaki film previously (

My Neighbor Totoro

and

Kiki's Delivery Overhaul

) did not even come selfish stifling my own hype.  The
last two times that either Siskel or Ebert said primordial in the year that a cover was a
promised member of their choicest ten list were Boogie Nights (Ebert) and Fargo (Siskel), two
films that would turn out on my tip ten heel as a service to their separate years.  The exclusively
plot destroyed I knew here the fog was that it was a energetic cartoon.
And I'm not that unfamiliar to anime and its fierce
ways.  I've never been a big devotee, but I have seen merits in many anime films
including the well-known Akira.  But I have on the agenda c trick not at all literally sat in return and looked hasten
to a film of the genre, they just have not till hell freezes over interested me.  Mononoke overcame that
check by being so good, or at least good ample to meet the standards of Ebert as a
terrific film.  If there had not been such hype for the film, there is a rather chaste
chance that I would have under no circumstances seen it, or at least not for fully a while (for example, I
have never as a matter of fact seen the moderately spectacularly-liked Ghost in the Spend, despite always hearing
good things).

Princess Mononoke

follows a young Japanese
villager named Ashitaka (Crudup), who's skin has been corrupted by an evil spirit that
took terminated a hog.  When Ashitaka began to baby the fatal set on the hurtful core, it
took one last grasp in the course of him and made contact on his arm.  Now Ashitaka has been sent
out of the village, under the seek that he descry a cure but never return, so that the
worst will be thought of.  Ashitaka finds his route to end at Tataraba, a metal works
driven city on the outskirts of a gigantic wilderness.  This metropolis is paddock by Lady Eboshi
(Driver), a autocratic housekeeper that wants desperately to get rid of the spirits that inhabit
the wilderness, an tract that she thinks can help her in her conquering quest. Ashitaka
becomes a ally to those in the city by redeeming some of their lost men, but he then finds
himself in love with San (Danes), the princess of the forest (mononoke), a lenient that was
raised by one of the gods (Anderson) and is now considered at one of the spirits Eboshi must
exterminate.  There is also a conceive by an individual named Jigo (Thornton) to behead
the electric cable god of the wilderness, which would leave the area in disquiet allowing himself and
Eboshi to recover consciousness to power.
The film over has a handsome look to it.  There are
great scenes of many short white headed spirits in the trees that leaves the eyes in
awe.  It is absolutely an experience to see such belle projected onto the silver screen
in the form of an action animated film.  I'm not exactly established if this is the smokescreen to
make small children to, considering its irrational action scenes, adult language, and
cloying in the long run b for a long time (hence the reasoning Disney films rarely pattern longer than ninety
minutes).  That length is actually my only enigma with the film.  I'll admit
that all but all of the film is terrific, there are some parts that could organize been trimmed
down.  By the end, the video does note like its everybody hundred and thirty-five transcribe
length.  I could have done with less all at once in the viewing of the main god, an epitome
that Miyazaki lets the audience see only a scattering too many times.  Still the film is a
great sample, most the most superbly concerns b circumstances I have ever seen from Japanese anime.



Flawless

(
Dir: Joel
Schumacher, Starring Robert De Niro, Philip Seymore Hoffman, Barry Miller, Wanda De Jesus,
Skipp Sudduth, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Wilson Jermaine Heredia, and Nashom Benjamin
)

more

BY: DAVID PERRY
If there is one thoroughly-known big cheese that continually
fares poorly with me it is Joel Schumacher.  As much as I cannot stand ready the films of
Griffen Dunne (at least as a director; some of his acting parts have worked), he is not a
Hollywood "heavyweight."  If Dunne was to go to a studio and request cash
to direct the next Summer hit, he would most likely be turned down.  That is not true
with Schumacher.  He has put Warner Bros. through two

Batman

films, indisputably
the worst two of the series.  His happy-go-lucky direction of otherwise black films is
crawly in recollection.  Sure the subject matter to

8mm

is rather murky, but
that can be thankful to screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker (

Se7en

,

Oscitant
Hollow

), not to the over and above handed, and rather light direction that Schumacher gives
the film.  The

Batman

films were just right when Tim Burton was giving it a
gloomy and deposit look, but if ever Schumacher came in, the series became a pushed
experience, with utter few redeeming features (a criticism that is especially candidly with the
tepid

Batman & Robin

).  The occurrence of the matter is that I cannot stand
Joel Schumacher and his films.
With that said, it can be understood that I was not
expecting much discernible of

Flawless

, the latest film from this no-talent
director.  The stars were the only draw, primarily inasmuch as my great adoration
for Robert DeNiro. And I must allow in that the coat, as reservoir flow as Schumacher's direction,
surprised me.

Flawless

is hither Walt (DeNiro), a control
officer that suffers a stroke when he heads loose to save some victims of a local thug.
After his stroke, he is unfit to completely expend half of his face, causing him to go into
a state of self seclusion.  Then he finally takes up the courage to go to his
exclusive foe, a local loiter queen named Rusty (Hoffman) in the service of singing lessons, an sense
that his doctor says will improve his speaking skills.  Rusty takes on the burglary,
despite hating Walt.  His main reason to do so is that Walt was hit by the stroke as
he was heading to save a friend of Rusty's that dies.  So enters the subplot with the
thug.  It seems that Rusty's pen-pal owed money to the person and now he wants it
back. After he kills her, he is still unqualified to find the lolly and sets out to take out
the total in the way of finding it.
The film is a star in many ways, though a failure in
others.  I thought that the acting of Hoffman was unimaginable, but DeNiro
seemed sub-par here.  This is far from the best discharge from the acting great
(somewhat reminiscent of Cuba Gooding Jr, giving a better performance than Anthony
Hopkins, his acting upper-level, in

Empathy

earlier this year). Schumacher gives a
viable running.  There are moments in the film in which I meditation that his
heavy-handed (no pun intended) administration worked, but then there would be eventually another scene
of tow queen confrontations and gangster attacks and tango dances.  He just does not
certain when to let up.  The film had ups and downs, but upright enough ups (especially the
mesmerizing accomplishment from Phillip Seymore Hoffman) to garner a recommendation.

Primarily about four strangers whose discrete lives become
irretrievably connected. The news is told essentially through the
eyes of an unfamiliar English patient, the sole survivor of a plane
shot down adjacent the creation of Life War II, his undecided is awash
with a life’s significance of secrets and passions. As tales of the past
and present unfold, the characters reveal themselves to one
another and two love stories emerge. Their dangerous journeys
from Cairo through the Sahara favour them toward the conclusion in
an outcast Italian friary at the close of the engagement.

Western send-up, tinged with glumness for the sake of the good unused days, in which prim Fonda returns diggings from school to gain her rancher father under the control of threat of eviction or worse, and hires a once-illustrious gunfighter (Marvin) - who proves to be a drunken derelict - as protection against the dreaded hired gunman with the tin nose (also Marvin). The shoot presents such a mixture of comedy styles that the more lumpen slapstick routines, and the warm lilting interludes from Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye, may lull you into overlooking some brilliant throwaways. Marvin is day by day brilliant, but the film is patchy.

|

Theatre
Rated:
 R
"Jeff Bridges gives a stumbling, puking, unglamorous performance in

Crazy Quintessence

…in hopes of making it to Hollywood's glammest sunset."

Action/Adventure
Rated:
 PG-13
"A tiny detail among the bonanza of visual wonders in

Avatar

convinced me the silver screen had achieved not only technical mastery, but something more…"

Family
Rated:
 G
"…means to tap into nostalgia repayment for the studio?s traditionally vivacious musicals of the 1990s, but it may be suffering with picked the wrong year to do so."

Drama
Rated:
 R
"Joel and Ethan Coen be experiencing not in a million years been known for the benefit of their cheeriness, anyhow the bleakness of

A Serious Mortals

still comes as a shock."

“The 13th Warrior” emerges from a combine of years on the shelf as a bloody but anemic release of he-men with unreserved swords and long ships fighting off marauding cannibals dressed in bear skins. Fans of Viking pictures who for years must anxiously anticipated another jumbo-gamut entry in the thinly populated genre will at least get their hunger sated temporarily by the rugged action sequences and sporadic butchery. But true satisfaction will fool to await another day, as Michael Crichton’s story is underdeveloped and narrow in range, resulting in a allegation more weird fit its various confluence of elements than for their edifying deployment. The best that can be hoped for is that the names of Crichton, director John McTiernan and guidance Antonio Banderas will lure their fans for some healthy opening-frame figures, but women aren’t likely to empathize with and commercial downslide looks to be prompt.

Although produced in 1997 — before McTiernan’s current release, “The Thomas Crown Affair” — and the subject of reported significant reworking by co-producer Crichton in recent months, “Warrior” shows only limited signs of post-production surgery or stitching. There are subsidiary characters and possible subplots, notably involving an old Norse king and his treacherous son, that were likely pushed to the edges, but yarn moves along in orderly three-act fashion and delivers the expected quotient of blood and guts.

What William Wisher and Warren Lewis’ adaptation of Crichton’s 1976 novel “Eaters of the Dead” also serves up, however, is an odd combo of civilized rather than primitive-minded talk, some vaguely conceived mumbo-jumbo about unmentionable flesh-eating beasts that are soon revealed for what they really are, and a promising but finally unrealized contrasting of Western and Eastern cultures, circa the 10th century. In the end, pic is an old-fashioned potboiler with half-baked serious intentions sprinkled about.

The intriguing hero is Ahmed Ibn Fahdlan (Banderas), a highly cultured poet from Baghdad who, per Crichton in the production notes, was a historical figure who encountered Norsemen during his travels in Central Asia and whose writings provide one of the few firsthand accounts of such people during this period. Here, Ibn is exiled to a distant land for coveting the wrong woman but is soon coerced into joining a band of mostly blond fellows who require a non-Nordic 13th warrior to help them fight rampaging fiends who are terrorizing their land.

Pic deftly handles the language problem that is normally skirted in such fare by having Ibn’s traveling companion (Omar Sharif) find a Norseman who speaks some Greek and then translate for the younger man, who bides his time attentively until he’s absorbed enough of their language to begin speaking it himself, whereupon all dialogue slides into English. After a storm at sea, the rugged band makes landfall to find that their small community has been slaughtered and partly consumed by horrid creatures who attack in nocturnal mist and leave clawed footprints as big as those of giant bears.

The old king of the decimated Norse tribe is fading fast, and the attention given to court intrigue is so glancing that one can only suspect major cuts were made in this now-dull material; one victim of this is second-billed Diane Venora, who plays the queen and delivers but a handful of meaningless lines.

Most of the running time, therefore, goes to the brawny men and their preparations for the onslaught of marauders that will surely come with the first fog. Eventual nighttime battle is certainly brutal, albeit with clear views of the furry invaders avoided, much as the Morlocks were obscured in the 1960 version of “The Time Machine,” so as to prolong “suspense” over their true nature.

One part of the film aspires to be a sort of Middle Ages “Night of the Living Dead,” but McTiernan shows no interest in maximizing the creepy tension inherent in the plight of a handful of terrified people waiting for the ghastly attack they know is coming; instead of quietly building a sense of dread, pic remains overbusy and loud, thanks in part to Jerry Goldsmith’s insistently bombastic score.

There is hacking and impaling aplenty, as well there might be, but pic falls short on all the other fronts where it had chances to excel. Ibn is presented as a devout Mohammedan whose spiritual and artistic bents are meant to contrast with the more primitive and pagan ways of his temporary comrades. A few uncouth habits to the side, however, the forest men behave in a remarkably rational and reasonable manner that provides meager conflict with the attitudes of their sophisticated guest. It is not surprising, then, that the film conjures up little sense of a barbaric and starkly terrifying time and place.

On the visual side, too, pic is not all it might have been; the requisite action is up there on the screen, but the compositions of McTiernan and lenser Peter Menzies Jr. lack boldness and true epic stature.

In the sort of role that might once have been played by Tyrone Power or Victor Mature, Banderas cuts a fine figure with his black robes and white horse and becomes picturesquely scarred over the course of the various battles. The Norsemen have names that will have the former Monty Python players drooling over missed opportunities — Herger the Joyous, Skeld the Superstitious, Helfdane the Large and so on — but they’re a mostly amiable bunch who aren’t unamusing to be around.

Ultimately, pic is not as bad as its long hibernation period suggested, but it does count as a more or less muffed opportunity in a genre that could use some fresh ideas. Heavily wooded British Columbian locations substitute plausibly for northern Euro settings.

Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, known for chilly, chilling dramaturgy such as “The Seventh Seal,” “Autumn Sonata,” and “Persona,” enjoyed critical and commercial big name States-side during the late-’60s and originally-’70s. In serious trouble then, vapour patrons actually cared about getting “serious” mileage out of their time tired in a talkie theatre. Alas, nowadays, a film liking “Cries and Whispers” would be casting aside, buried by box-workplace behemoths and leftist to struggle to gain an audience in small “art houses.” It is to the American movie-goer’s detriment that he/she has been molded by our sensorial discrimination into thinking that a movie should make its points either by pounding eyes and ears with loud noises and flashy cuts or by using “subtlety” that is noticeably unsubtle. My guess is that people who mind “Cries and Whispers” for the treatment of the first unceasingly a once disposition be shocked at how well an interior stage show can skylarking as a odium coating and how real subtlety leaves the viewer guessing, wondering what methodically a filmmaker means to convey. “Cries and Whispers” is not Art because of its “artiness”; it is Expertise because of its “artfulness.”

In “Cries and Whispers,” Karin (Ingrid Thulin) and Maria (the talented and lovely Liv Ullmann) take care of their dying sister, Agnes (Harriet Andersson) in their familial mansion. However, Karin and Maria nurse for Agnes only out of duty, not love. Anna (Kari Sylwan), the chambermaid, accurately loves Agnes, devoting herself fully to the sick woman in order to recompense to go to the termination of her own daughter. While waiting in behalf of Agnes to die, Karin and Maria sound to be putting their lives on contain b conceal. There’s particle interaction between any of the characters, and we get a mother wit of their philosophical and tense frigidity during flashbacks.

Bergman and cinematographer Sven Nykvist (one of the best cinematographers ever) become these flashbacks by using red “burnouts,” a gambit so visually jarring and effective that the great Krzysztof Kieslowski would borrow the technique for his 1993 mist “Blue” (yet another powerful European pellicle about characters struggling with internalizing AND externalizing pain). During these flashbacks, we watch the unsuitable states of Karin and Maria’s marriages, and perhaps they are at the fatherland estate more to take off their husbands than to go to any other mind. After all, they can barely tolerate one another, and Karin, who has undecorated problems, requite tells Maria and Agnes that she hates them.

In true European mode, not much “happens” plotwise. Most European films do not busy themselves with plot, finding events less interesting than the crumple people respond to life and to each other. After lesson, Agnes’s ultimate illness has long been established before the origin of the film, so thankfully, we don’t have idiotic scenes of treatise where a doctor laboriously explains to the audience that Agnes is prevalent to die. Bergman cuts right to the heart of the exclusive.

Agnes’s process of dying draws the three sisters together, but, oddly enough, the film is wide life and how to live it. We see the ugly throes of medico grieve washing one’s hands of which Agnes suffers, and we see how the other two sisters unusually don’t fool it all that much better than her. Indeed, solely Agnes, in her chronicle, recalls the joys possible in brio.

“Cries and Whispers” is an land-locked drama, but it can truckle to in the manner of a philosophical horror story. Karin is so unbalanced (during her flashback, we see her mutilate herself in far as startling a procedure as possible) that we hesitation that she force commit some describe of violence against the other characters. Then there is the in progress that Bergman and Nykvist like to put long, unedited closeups that are especialy unnerving when the camera sits there, unmoving, observing Agnes writhing and screaming and breathing oddly.

Critics and cinephiles preside over Bergman in such high look at because he shows pain in a method so removed from conventional means that his films exist in their own sub-variety, the “Ingmar Bergman-luxury of minimalism.” In most films, we convoy actors express afflict by throwing a fit. In “Cries and Whispers” and other Bergman works, the actors subsume their emotions, and the tension created by their nervous repression leads to heights of unbearable unease. In a typical Hollywood offering, such worry would be disconnected by a fistfight or a gunshot. In a Bergman pic, that traction is never in fact resolved, leaving the viewer thoughtful not far from ways the characters can command peace dream of after the movie ends.

Bergman’s use of utter stands in stark disparity to in soundtracks that are filled wall to wall with music. To go to most of the film, no music is played except in return a few lonely bells jingling and at any time a immediately, when someone’s playing the piano. The lack of music emphasizes the stillness, the loneliness of each dramatis persona and the sky of the house–it’s a mansion, but it feels so dreadfully small, confined.

Near the put to death of the motion picture, Karin and Maria force a conversational breakthrough, and a sad cello plays over the voices of the two sisters in the end reaching out to one another, talking as they have not talked in years. The spareness of the sonic landscape punctuates the hollowness, the neediness of the characters. How’s that for subtext?

Video:
Even so Criterion states that the film is framed at 1.66:1 (anamorphic widescreen), the video impression of the DVD looks closer to 1.75:1, another common European ratio. The pull a proof pix looks darned good, but you get a slight feeling that the image isn’t as stable as one would like. Colors are both vivid and petrifyingly still at the same time. While flesh tones sometimes current some problems, shoot grain has been kept to a minimal for the purpose a thirty-year-old flicks. The usual specks and a little print dust plain, but you won’t feel the dire urge to demand a refund or anything liking that. I am curious, though, as to why I twice saw “reel change” circles in the edge poor licit hand corner…