Very much the strangest film adaptation of a Dickens novel I have encountered, Little Dorrit was adapted and directed by Christine Edzard, a noted costume designer who has written and directed a few films, most of them far more obscure than this one. Her approach to the novel is fastidious in the detail of its costuming and in the suggestion of inner lives of the many, many extras and bit characters, but it diverges from virtually all Dickens films of…
Graham Greene's mildly satirical and picaresque 1982 novel becomes a superb vehicle for the inspired pairing of Alec Guinness and Leo McKern as a modern-day reincarnation of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. In Greene's version, Quixote is a Roman Catholic priest and Sancho the Marxist mayor of their village. Taking a holiday together, the priest and the communist find both contrasts and similarities in their worldviews, with each eventually questioning foundational aspects of their own beliefs. The setting, post-Franco Spain,…
It took many years, but I finally found a science-fiction movie I hated worse than Star Wars. This pseudo-mythic melange of Islamic-Gaelic-Hebrew-Christian nomenclature and ponderous Sir Gawainish “dialog” has virtually no intelligible story beyond the barest framework of presumably good guys in conflict with assortments of monosyllabic bad guys. No effort is evident in making the characters identifiable humans one could connect with emotionally (although Jason Momoa, through force of personality, comes close). It’s all sci-fi fanboy wanking, with all…
This remarkable tale of loneliness, purpose, and what we now call "unfriending" is another in the stunning emotional explorations by writer-director Martin McDonagh. In a performance that tops anything of his I've ever seen, Colin Farrell is heartbreaking as a provincial Irish lad who cannot understand and will not grasp that his closest friend no longer wants his friendship. As the former friend, Brendan Gleeson is also superb, but the picture really belongs to Farrell, who plays exquisitely the balancing…
