Smart Words About Cinema
[Originally published in Movietone News 54, June 1977] In Annie Hall Woody Allen has created his most personal, most serious, most painfully funny, and best film. The first three don’t necessarily imply the last, but in this case that’s the way it works out. The concern with the interrelation between comedy and pain—a transformation of [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 60-61, February 1979] As if to avoid distracting mumbles of “Oh, guess where he got that!” in the middle of his unashamedly imitative first non-comedy, Woody Allen gets his most Bergmanesque shot out of the way right up front. It’s a soft, dreamy, quiet interior of a woman running her [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 62-63, December 1979] The title of Alan J Pakula’s latest film echoes the old stock melodrama line “Along comes Jonesâ€; and that’s no accident. Here we have a tough-but-tender cowgirl working her dead father’s ranch with only a lovable grizzled old coot for a ranchhand; a somber villain moving through [...]
[Originally published in Movietone News 64-65, March 1980] When Richard Fleischer visited the Seattle Film Society last spring, he bridled at the suggestion that Sven Nykvist, rather than he, had been responsible for the frame compositions in The Last Run: “That’s something a lot of people don’t understand.” Certainly no theory of film directing I [...]