L'Accident de piano

Adèle Exarchopoulos
           

Quentin Dupieux's L'Accident de piano is a typical pratfall filled misanthropic farce from the eccentric Gallic talent. Adèle Exarchopoulos stars as Magalie who we eventually learn is a social media star whose online sobriquet is Megajugs. The first act consists of an injured Magalie, assisted by her PA Patrick (an excellent Jérôme Commandeur), settling into a chalet near the Alps. Dupieux has endeavored to make Ms. Exarchopoulos as unattractive as possible, a Herculean undertaking, and succeeds with padding, a frugly wig, and braces. Apparently a stunt involving a piano has gone awry, but this first section of the film is intentionally obscure and off-putting. We do learn that Megajugs is a narcissistic diva who enjoys bullying the apparently long suffering Patrick. Their solitude is broken by some hooligan fans and a phone call by a blackmailer who knows the details about the piano accident.

Simone, the blackmailer played by a tightly wound (like her braids) Sandrine Kiberlain, is a reporter who seeks not cash, but the legal tender of the age: an interview. Megajugs accedes to this and the resulting confrontation takes up most of the middle section of the film. Simone probes Megajugs' background and, through flashbacks, we view her path to fame. A viewing of an episode of Jackass inspires the 14 year old Megajugs to become the distaff Johnny Knoxville, a goal she embraces whole heartedly thanks to a "congenital insensitivity to pain." Megajugs posts videos of her masochistic exploits in which she always assumes the Wile E. Coyote role. Sandrine assumes the voice of reason in the interview. She wants to know why. Something, in the tradition of French dualism, that Megajugs is loath to do. She represents the credo of the unconscious artist reacting against interpretation. Megajugs and by extension Dupieux feels that it is pointless to analyze her nihilistic behavior.

I feel that, even though the character of Megajugs is artistically aligned with the juvenile provocateur Dupieux, that the film, which ends with Megajugs indulging in a quiet frenzy of Dionysian destruction, is ultimately an auto-critique on the limits of nihilism. Megajugs is still her 14 year old self, an aging adolescent who is hopelessly self absorbed. L'Accident de piano also stands as a visual meditation on the psychic link between comedy and violence. The flick reminds me of the old Mel Brooks joke: "Tragedy is me getting a paper cut. Comedy is you falling into a hole and breaking your leg." I'm surprised Dupieux didn't utilize a falling anvil. Regardless, Ms. Exarchopoulos makes a magnificent monster. 

El Jockey

Ursula Corbero and Nahuel Perez Biscayart          

Luis Ortega's El Jockey, released in the US as Kill the Jockey, is amiable light entertainment. Ortega is only 45, but the Argentinian writer and director has built up an impressive filmography over the last two decades. El Jockey wears its influences lightly: dashes of color and queer sensibility (Almodovar), deadpan surrealism (Kaurismäki), and comic zaniness (Jerry Lewis). Nahuel Pérez Biscayart is the lead, a hapless jockey named Remo who is under the thumb of a small time crime boss. He has a pregnant girlfriend, a fellow jockey named Abril (Úrsula Corberó), a tip of the gaucho to Victoria I suppose. Remo has a bad crash at the track and ends up at the hospital suffering from some whacky form of amnesia. He escapes the hospital, for no apparent reason, wearing a stolen mink coat and little else. While he wanders amongst the homeless and dispossessed of Buenos Aires, Abril finds consolation in the arms of another jockey, the sassy Ana (Mariana di Girolamo).

The dramatic contrivances that take up the last act are paper thin, but Ortega's visual imagination never flags. El Jockey boasts 2025's best sight gags. The colors in this flick really pop thanks to Ortega and cinematographer Timo Salminen, a longtime collaborator of Aki Kaurismäki. Both leads are superb, Biscayart does a great deadpan and Corberó smolders impressively. The dance numbers are a hoot and are a great showcase for the players. The music is outstanding, both the Argentine pop songs, old and new, and the score by Sune Wagner, of the Danish band The Raveonettes. El Jockey is not the type of movie that will change the course of film history, but it provides more entertainment than some of those that do. Currently streaming on MUBI.

Dracula

Radu Jude and f(r)iend

Sometimes an artist becomes so successful that they are written blank checks to pursue whatever folly fancies them. Griffith followed The Birth of a Nation with Intolerance, both a riposte to his critics and an expansion of an already overly epic vision. Spielberg followed the one two punch of Jaw and Close Encounters... with 1941, a film that reeks of Hollywood excess. Those who have seen Apocalypse Now Redux will know how close Coppola came to creating an unwatchable fiasco. In the publishing world, it seems that Stephen King and JK Rowling reached a point in their careers in which their popularity prevented helpful input from their editors. Radu Jude seemed to be reaching this point on his last film and has crossed the Rubicon of self-indulgence with Dracula. 

It is not that there aren't any interesting ideas in the film, Dracula is teeming with ideas. There are riffs on past representations of Dracula on film and in literature. There is much rumination on the traumas of Romanian history, Jude's primary preoccupation thus far. There are endless digressions in the post modern style.There is purposefully cheesy AI generated CGI. There is an unreliable narrator. There is a burlesque of vampiric cosplay. There is much lowbrow humor and more phalluses on display than in a locker room. Some of the ideas are good and some fall flat. I laughed more times than when I watched Spaceballs, but Mel Brooks knew enough to keep his farces succinct. Dracula runs almost three hours and never coheres. It is divided into fifteen parts and I would have jettisoned or severely pruned half of them.

If I found Dracula to be Jude's worst film, I still somewhat enjoyed it, but, then, I prefer 1941 to Close Encounters. Like 1941, Dracula has the virtue of an antic and lunatic vision despite its indulgent excess. Life seems to be imitating art in that a theme park called Dracula Land is opening in Romania in 2027. One thing that buoys me is that the player who gives the best performance in Dracula, Eszter Tompa, stars in Jude's upcoming film, Kontinental '25, which opens in the US on March 27th. 

Apart From You

            Mitsuko Yoshikawa and Sumiko Mizukubo                

Mikio Naruse's Apart from You is the best of the silent melodramas he directed in the early 1930s. The plot of this 1933 flick concerns aging geisha Kikue (Mitsuko Yoshikawa) and her disapproving teenage son Yoshio (Akio Isono). The sullen Yoshio is skipping school and slipping into juvenile delinquency. The possibility of redemption is embodied in Terugiku (Sumiko Yoshikawa), a younger colleague of Kikue who has known, and pined for, Yoshio since childhood. Terugiku tries to steer Yoshio to the straight and narrow, but is hampered by a toxic home life. Does Yoshio return to school? Does Terugiku succumb to the lecherous advances of an older man or does true love prevail in the end? I'll never tell, but Apart from You's ambivalent ending moved me.

The film is superior to other Naruse film of this period partly because there is no child on hand to be run over in the next to last reels, as in Flunky, Work Hard! and No Blood Relation. Apart from such melodramatic contrivances, Apart from You benefits from some directorial restraint. Naruse was fond of dollying in and out from his players to add punctuation. In some of his features from this period, he employs this technique so much that I felt seasick, but Naruse employs it only once in Apart from You. That said, Naruse shares with his colleague Ozu a dazzling grasp of technique at this point in film history. He also shares with Ozu a way with his players. The two lead females of Apart from You are particularly sublime. Like all master directors, the details of Naruse's work fall more into place the more you see of his work. Apart from You shares many of the same players and themes in his other films of this period. As Neil Young said, in reply to a heckler who said all his songs sounded the same, "It's all one song."

Caught by the Tides

Zhao Tao       

Jia Zhangke's Caught by the Tides is film that spans two decades in the Northern Chinese city of Datong. Zhao Tao, Jia's wife and muse, plays the part of Qiao Qiao who we meet juggling multiple jobs (singer, dancer, model, and bar girl) amidst the gig economy of the year 2000. She has a boyfriend, Bin (Li Zhubin), but he is her manager and the relationship dynamics between them resemble that of whore and pimp. They part when Bin's shady dealings catch up with him. They reunite in 2022 in a China recovering from the COVID pandemic. Bin spies that it is Qiao Qiao checking out his grocery items, but their reunion proves more bitter than sweet. Qiao Qiao has moved on emotionally and the finale has her doing literally just that.

Despite the curdled romance at the film's center, Caught by the Tides is more a meditation on progress, for good and bad, in 21st century China than a fictive narrative. Jia was able to assemble the film, in which his characters really do age, from documentary footage, abortive films, and outtakes from other projects. The film feels haphazard, it leaps about through time and space shifting from grainy video in the Academy ratio to gorgeous widescreen film. Cuts are predicated on poetic links rather than plot development. The use of different modes of travel in the film, air, rail, boat, and road, denote this as a film about life's passage. The soundtrack ranges from Shanxi opera to Chinese punk rock: the only constant is change. We visit an area not basking in the lap of China's economic miracle. Rather, it is an area and culture that has been subsumed since the construction of the 3 Gorges Dam. One of the best films released in the US in 2025 containing a performance for the ages by Zhao Tao.

Envy

Ben Stiller

I was not even aware that Barry Levinson's Envy existed until I stumbled upon a DVD of the film at my local library. Apparently, this 2004 film was such an ignominious flop that it left not a trace on the public consciousness. The two major film companies responsible for its financing had so little faith in it after its box office demise that it never had a release on disc until Shout Factory, champions of pop culture errata, snapped it up. I decided to give it a chance based on the cast alone: Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Rachel Weisz, Amy Poehler, and Christopher Walken. Alas, the film is direly unfunny. Stiller and Black play SoCal neighbors who work at unfulfilling jobs at a 3M plant. Weisz and Poehler are underutilized as "the wives". Black invents an aerosol spray that eliminates animal waste dubbed Vapoorize. That is the level of the humor. The film's primary focus is on Stiller's resentment over his friend's success. 

There are moments of humor, but they are few and far between. Walken fares best because he is well cast as an eccentric barfly. Black is underused. The only moment that captures his comic energy is an infomercial in which he pitches his product. Stiller is really the lead here. Leon Redbone contributes a song cycle reminiscent of Jonathan Richman's efforts in There's Something About Mary, but comic lightning did not strike twice. Stiller has a good moment telling off his boss, but pratfalls and physical schtick, which the Farrelly brothers handled well in ...Mary, are not Barry Levinson's forte. He is more adept at verbal comedy linked to characterization and characterization is extremely thin in Envy. Stiller and Levinson's attempts to milk physical comedy from a dead horse flop badly. It seems to me when Levinson ventures outside his native Baltimore, the results have been feeble. Avoid Envy.

A Woman of the World

                       Pola Negri and Chester Conklin                    

Malcolm St. Clair's A Woman of the World, released in 1925, is an amusing fish out of water trifle than runs only 70 minutes. The Tubi stream is only so-so in terms of visual fidelity and sharpness, a pity since Bert Glennon (The Scarlet Empress, Stagecoach) manned the camera, but it still gives us a chance to see a relatively neglected silent. The film was based on Carl Van Vechten's recent novel, The Tattooed Countess. Tasked with turning this into a vehicle for one of Paramount's big stars, Pola Negri, screenwriter Pierre Collings dropped the age of the Countess by two decades and, thankfully, retained her tattoo. Morrie Ryskind was responsible for the intertitles which sardonically lampoons the narrow mindedness of the Babbitts and Babettes of small town America.

The film opens with a prologue on the Riviera in which Negri finds her husband, a no account count, in flagrante delicto. To get away from her troubles, Pola travels to America to visit his long lost cousin, who turns out to be...Chester Conklin(?!). Conklin, five years removed from Mack Sennett, was still the best second banana in the business and his rapport with Negri is priceless. His character, like all of the men in the film's fictional town of Maple Valley, is suspicious of her foreign ways, but becomes a puddle in her presence. The scene in which he reveals his own tattoo to Negri is priceless. The exoticism of Negri unleashes neurotic and erotic currents in Maple Valley. Two men fall in love with her, the most significant being the local DA (Holmes Herbert), a bluenose with a fanatical zeal for reform. They meet cute when he calls her a loose woman, she is smoking a cigarette after all, and he tells her to leave town. The road to true love is rocky and not helped by the local gossip mongers busy knitting on their porches. Pola ends up confronting the DA at a city council meeting brandishing a whip for a finale that inevitably leads to a clinch and a just married sign. 

Pola Negri: bangs were big in the flapper era

Malcolm St. Clair's career, like Ms. Negri's, nosedived in the sound era. His direction here is simple and elegant, his focus more on actorly byplay than panoramas. He rarely moves his camera and seems fond of close-ups of telling details: hands and balls of yarn. The one pan in the film tracks a bit of gossip as it goes from one end of the room to the other. Negri is playful and game. She suggests a real woman behind the guise of a vamp. I never have cared for Holmes Herbert, too much of a throwback to the 19th century for me, but he fits his uptight role. Charles Emmett Mack plays a younger admirer, the kind leading ladies of the day ultimately reject because they are only a boy. He is promising, but died, prematurely and tragically in an auto accident in 1927. All in all though, A Woman of the World is a delight.

Magical Mystery Tour versus The White Bus

Fab Four gone flab

I first saw The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour in 1978 or so, a scratchy and wan print at a midnight showing. After seeing the similar tour bus driven The White Bus, also originally released in 1967, I thought to give it a another chance. Was it still the witless psychedelic farrago that I remembered? Alas, yes. I guess it was too much to expect that the pop music darlings of that age could make an interesting film, but did they even try? The project seems hastily conceived and shot. Phantasmagoric moments as the bus tours the English countryside are interspersed with amateurish videos of the band's new material. The music, except for the truly mad I Am the Walrus, is subpar Fabs; the barrel scrapings of their psychedelic era. The only thing I can say positive about the film is that it is a link from The Goon Show to Monty Python. At least the band had good taste in genuine English eccentrics like Ivor Cutler and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band.

Lindsay Anderson's The White Bus mines a similar vein of English eccentricism in glorious black and white. The Beatles' film had been inspired by Ken Kesey's adventures with his busload of merry pranksters. No such foreign or lysergic influence pervades Anderson's film. The short, 47 minutes, film was made to be part of a portmanteau project that would also include short films by Tony Richardson and Karl Reisz that would prove not to be. Shot in 1965, The White Bus had a brief release in 1967, but has languished in obscurity since. The film was written by Shelaugh Delaney, edited by Kevin Brownlow, and stars Patricia Healey. Healey plays a depressed London clerk working in a Brutalist building who embarks upon a train ride in a very gray London. The unnamed she gets hit on by a bowler caricature of an aristo, but cheers up when entertained by the antics of a cadre of Manchester United fans. The group sing-a-long is more winning and better shot than the one in The Beatles' flick.

Patricia Healey

The gal disembarks in Manchester which looks even more sooty and sinister than London. Happily, a double decker tour bus happens by and our heroine hops on. The passengers are a mix of English types, international travelers, and the Lord Mayor and his Macebearer, both dressed in full regalia. The characterizations are less exaggerated than in Magical Mystery Tour and the whole enterprise looks great, probably at the cost of The Beatles' catering budget. The groups tours industrial sites, museums, gardens, weaving centers, cake factories and witness Anthony Hopkins sing, very briefly, Resolution der Kommunarden, a Brecht poem about the Paris Commune of 1871 set to music by fellow traveler Hans Eisler. The picture occaisionally explodes in sequences of color, as in Anderson's If..., but nothing should be read into this. Anderson admitted he did so in desperation. He would use whatever precious film that was gifted to him by hook or crook. The film addresses alienation from a secure distance. Anderson pokes fun at English nationalism, class strictures, and the Church: all safe and easy targets. The Manchester buildings still bombed out from the Second World War leave more of an impact on the mind's eye.

Despite its limitations, The White Bus, especially in comparison to Magical Mystery Tour, is a coherent and realized picture from a director with a true filmmaker's eye. Ms. Healey had a haphazard film career, including two cameos in subsequent Anderson films, but earned a moniker that many would envy, Mrs. Englebert Humperdinck. They were wed from 1964 till her death in 2021.

In memory of Erich Kuersten

Just Imagine

Maureen O'Sullivan and John Garrick

David Butler's Just Imagine is a justly neglected science fiction film from 1930.  The film is set in the far off future of 1980 in a world in which planes are the primary vehicles and numbers have replaced names. Marriage is dictated by the state which provides what little plot the film has. Lovebirds Maureen O'Sullivan (as LN-18) and John Garrick (as J-21) can't get a marriage license from the Politburo, so Garrick flies off to Mars to earn enough brownie points to wed his lady love. There, he encounters a planet of doppelgängers who alternately coddle and bruise him. There is also a refugee from 1930, played by vaudeville star El Johnson who specialized in ethnic (Swedish) humor, who is monikered 0 and serves no real purpose except to provide comic relief. Oh, as if things weren't bonky enough, there are musical numbers.

Joyzelle Joyner and John Garrick on Mars

The picture has the searing impact of a burlesque revue with jokes about the Volstead act included. The sets and costumes are endearingly gaga. The men's suits in the film's 1980 resemble maitre d's outfits at a French restaurant in Vegas. The tony dwellings of 1980 resemble the Art Deco look of the 20s and early 30s. Butler is a curiously lightweight director who was able to carve out a steady career in Hollywood despite helming a number of disasters like this one. He is able to create a few bold and startling images, Ms. O'Sullivan in close-up superimposed upon the surface of the earth or a passel of nekkid chorines (Pre-Code, baby) shimmying before their pagan idol, but the film doesn't really hold together. It resembles a night of vaudeville, alternating between comic and musical numbers. Neither Garrick nor Johnson were able to make much of an impact in their film careers and soon returned to the stage. I've never seen Ms. O'Sullivan look more beautiful, but she, like Garrick, gives a largely inane and callow performance. The second bananas, Marjorie White and Frank Albertson, fare much better. Ms. White was to die prematurely and tragically of an auto accident in 1935.

I would have enjoyed the film more if the songs had been better. The team of Buddy DeSylva, Lew Brown, and Ray Henderson were responsible for both the songs and the flimsy screenplay. They wrote some classic songs, like Bye Bye Blackbird, Has Anybody Seen My Gal ? and You're the Cream in My Coffee, but inspiration was lacking on this one. Most of the songs are light ballads designed for Garrick's tenor voice. They seem like knock-offs of the work of Sigmund Romberg, known for operettas like The Desert Song and The New Moon. Indeed, the drinking song in Just Imagine seems like a direct rip from the drinking song in Romberg's The Student Prince. Only the White and Albertson number, Never Swat a Fly, has any razzmatazz. Just Imagine is streaming on Tubi, if you are in the mood for a real Hollywood hallucination.

      

Father Sergius

                       

I cannot recommend the print of Father Sergius (Otets Sergiy) that is currently streaming on Tubi. It seems to be the product of a Soviet re-release from the 1930s. The quality is murky and the film image seems pared down. The film is certainly truncated in length, eighty minutes of a film that was originally nearly two hours, but options are limited. Mubi ran a print of similarly shortened length a few years back. There are purportedly full length versions circulating on disc, but they are of dodgy provenance.

However, the film is of both artistic and historical value and I could not pry my eyes away. The film was begun during Kerensky regime, but not released until after the Bolsheviks had consolidated their seizure of power in 1918. Tsarist law forbade the depiction of priests onscreen, so this was the first adaptation of a Tolstoi short story that had been published posthumously. There have been subsequent versions, including an adaptation by the Taviani brothers in 1990 which transposed the action to Italy. Father Sergius, the film, adheres fairly closely to the arc of the original story. We watch the title character age from a hot-tempered aristocratic soldier to an aged holy man who embraces abject humility in Siberia. The story is typical of late Tolstoi, a predictable morality play tracing one man's spiritual regeneration; a story akin to that of the Buddha. Prince Kasatsky, the future Father Sergius, is on the eve of his wedding to a well-connected Countess whom he has pined for when he finds out that she has served as the mistress of Tsar Nicholas 1. Before you can say Platon Karataev, the prince has renounced worldly desires and status and donned the robes of a priest. Through the years his devout demeanor attracts followers, as a slew of female temptresses try to snatch him from the straight and narrow. Eventually, he succumbs to the charms of one of them and abandons his church. In order to fully embrace humility, he becomes a wandering beggar which leads to exile in Siberia. Thus endeth the lesson.

Yakov Protazanov was the primary director of the project, but after he fell ill Alexandre Volkoff, who adapted the Tolstoi story for the screenplay, filled in. Whoever was responsible, the direction is sturdy, if not astonishing. Foreground and background are contrasted for some nice contrapuntal effects. Images of Sergius' betrothed are superimposed over his meagre room to show that he has not fully escaped worldly desires. There are a few rickety 45 degree pans, but they seem designed to do little except show off the sets. Whoever did the makeup seems overly fond of kohl.

The primary reason to see the film is the title role performance by Ivan Mosjoukine, the premier film actor of pre-Soviet Russia. He gives a bravura performance in which he ages from sixteen to sixty. Mosjoukine reminds me, in terms of looks and talent, of John Barrymore without the hamminess. Both Mosjoukine and Volkoff headed for exile in the West in 1920. They even collaborated on a few films in France. Mosjoukine had a brief stay in Hollywood, where he was trumpeted as the next Valentino, but the rise of the talkies cut his stay short. He will remain immortal because he was the actor Lev Kuleshov utilized to illustrate his celebrated effect.

1917: The Making of a Revolution

Maxim Gorky

I was taken aback by how much I enjoyed Stan Neumann's documentary 1917: The Making of a Revolution which is currently streaming on Tubi. I am mad keen on the Russian Revolution and will watch even the blandest collection of archival footage and talking heads. However, this doc has no newsreel footage or talking heads. It switches from expertly chosen still photographs to animation and footage of historic sites as they look in present day St. Petersburg. Neumann was born in the Czech Republic and lives in France. The 53 minutes length of this documentary makes me think that it was probably made for French television, but I could not pin this down for a fact.

The French title for the documentary gives a better idea of the scope of this film: Lénine -- Gorki, la révolution à contretemps. The film uses the polemical blasts and op-ed pieces by Lenin and Gorky to portray the dialectical push and pull of revolutionary ferment in 1917. This is not the best approach for an overview of the revolution, Trotsky is barely mentioned, but it serves well the constrictions of a film this length. What is here has great impact. The animated sections are lively, I particularly liked the breakdown of political parties in the style of Malevich's Suprematist Compositions. I also adored the use of Alexander Blok's poem The Twelve. The narrator recites passages as we glimpse Jury Annenkov's illustrations for the original edition which gives as much a flavor of 1917 in Petrograd as any period photo.

The clincher for me was the use of the great Denis Lavant to portray Gorky in his Italian exile. Lavant's passionate yet mellifluous readings of Gorky's Revolutionary era essays are beautiful. History comes alive. 

Blue Moon

Ethan Hawke

Blue Moon is a another winner from Richard Linklater and another testament to his handling of ensemble work from his players. That said, Robert Kaplow's script is centered entirely on Broadway lyricist Lorenz Hart, played by Ethan Hawke, on the most humiliating evening of his life. Kaplow, who wrote the script for Me and Orson Welles, foreshadows Hart's demise in a brief prologue. We then travel back months in time to the night in 1943 when Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oklahoma! is making its New York debut to a rapturous reception. Hart, who had teamed with Rodgers for two decades before becoming increasingly drunken and unreliable, can't stomach sitting through the show. So, he repairs to a lovingly recreated Sardi's where the remainder of the film occurs. Rodgers and Hammerstein eventually arrive to toast their triumph, further nudging Hart towards despair and a relapse.

The downbeat and insular nature of the project is magnified by the closed in nature of the action. Instead of opening up what is essentially filmed theater, Linklater closes the action down as much as he can to reinforce our sense of Hart's claustrophobic debasement. Debasement is the key theme of the film. Even when Hart's muse (Margaret Qualley) confides to him about her deflowering, the story ends not with catharsis, but humiliation. Despite the downbeat nature of this picture, I actively enjoyed it. This is primarily due to Mr. Hawke's outstanding performance. Hawke not only captures the pathos of his character, but also his wit and warmth and that makes all the difference into keeping this flick from falling into morbidity. Hawke has always been a ridiculously talented actor, but this is most soulful effort.

Linklater and his editor, Sandra Adair, masterfully weave the staff of Sardi's around Hawke.  They act as a contrapuntal chorus to the tragic hero in a picture attuned both to Broadway melodies and the music of dialogue. I particularly relished Bobby Cannavale's ripostes and double takes as the bartender. I also enjoyed the contributions of Jonah Lees, Patrick Kennedy, Aisling O'Mara, and Caitríona Ennis. Decades of accumulating evidence has led to this conclusion, but Blue Moon further cements Linklater's reputation as an American master. 

Bugonia

Emma Stone

Spoiler Alert...I enjoyed Yorgos Lanthimos' Bugonia, but I have always had an affinity for his work and can certainly understand those who are repelled by his misanthropy. Bugonia takes its premise from a Korean film that I have not seen entitled Save the Green Planet. Two small town Georgia cousins, Jesse Plemons and Aidan Delbis, kidnap a big tech CEO played by Emma Stone. They, or least Plemons character, is convinced that Stone is an alien from the Andromeda galaxy intent on supplanting the human race. Control and its abdication is one of the repeating themes in Lanthimos' work. Plemons is the dominant partner between the two cousins. We learn that his mother is in a coma and that the attendant stress has compelled him into a paranoid spiral. He wants Stone to bend to his will, but she remains obdurate. 

Delbis is to Plemons here as Lennie is to George in Of Mice and Men. This is the film's most glaring flaw. Every time the two talk of maybe finding a new home in another galaxy, I can't help but think of the dream of the rabbit farm in Steinbeck's book. Delbis' character is a few bricks short of a load and too good for this savage world. The contrast between the two cousins is over much in an already schematic movie. The warm tones of the cousins' rustic house is juxtaposed with with the cold contemporary feel of Stone's home and corporate headquarters. She drives a loaded Mercedes truck while Plemons navigates a ten speed. An elitist versus the common man, etc., etc. The contrast is a comic one though Bugonia is the blackest comedy one can imagine. ECT torture, a murder, a suicide, a beheading, and more, ultimately culminating in the extinction of the human race.

The finale is soundtracked by Marlene Dietrich's version of Where Have All the Flowers Gone?, an ironic capper akin to Kubrick's use of Vera Lynn's We'll Meet Again at the conclusion of Dr. Strangelove. Lanthimos has the same chilly remove and misanthropy as Kubrick. There are no warm close-ups in Bugonia. Most shots are at a remove. There are almost as many Easter eggs and threads to pull in Bugonia as in any Kubrick film and like Kubrick, Lanthimos is under appreciated for his work with actors. Stone and Plemons both do superb work in the film as does Stavros Halkias as a clueless cop. Lanthimos represents a humanism that can conceive of the extinction of humanity as a positive for the planet. As one character puts it, "this isn't Death of a Salesman." Bugonia is another of Lanthimos' portraits of man as a "sick ape".

The Wonderful World of Tubi, February 2026

Greta Garbo in The Kiss

Jacques Feyder's The Kiss, from 1929, is the last, and perhaps best, silent film that Greta Garbo made for MGM. The witty script, based on a George Saville short story, was by Hanns Kräly, a frequent collaborator of Ernst Lubitsch. However, Kräly's career in Hollywood would be severely affected after Lubitsch discovered that Kräly was carrying on an affair with Lubitsch's soon to be ex-wife. Kräly soldiered on as a screenwriter, but was consigned to B pictures after 1930. The Kiss is a romantic melodrama with comic flourishes set in France. Garbo is married to an older banker, but is in love with a lawyer played by Conrad Nagle. A young swain, wonderfully played by Lew Ayres, is also infatuated with her which leads to tragic consequences. Cedric Gibbons' Art Deco sets are eye popping. So are Adrian's outfits for Ms. Garbo, but sometimes for the wrong reasons. Feyder's direction is light on its feet, resulting in a melodrama that never bogs down or loses momentum. It is a great pity that this was the only English language feature that Feyder directed in America. Highly recommended.

Joe May's Asphalt, from 1929, is an Erich Pommer production which makes me wonder if Pommer produced any poor or even mediocre films in Germany during the 1920s. Asphalt is a melodrama that combines romance and crime in Weimar Berlin. Thief Betty Amann seduces young cop Gustav Frölich. It ends badly after the requisite trysts and heists. The picture boasts extraordinary subjective POV shots and impactful close-ups. A masterpiece on par with Pandora's Box and Diary of a Lost Girl. Joe May's reputation declined when he was consigned to B pictures in Hollywood, but for me he is now a subject for further research.

Tubi has three musical comedies from the early 1930s, all starring Eddie Cantor, that are worth a peek. The best of the three is Roman Scandals with completely gaga musical numbers directed by Busby Berkeley. Berkeley also contributed to Whoopee!, shot in two strip Technicolor, which is bogged down by its stage bound presentation; like the film version of the Marx brothers' The Cocoanuts. The runt of this litter is Kid Millions, but it does contain wonderful turns by Ethel Merman and the Nicholas brothers. All three films were typically classy Samuel Goldwyn productions and all three films are greatly helped by Stuart Heisler's editing. Cantor was a quadruple threat talent who was already a huge star on stage and thanks to his recordings. Cantor's lineage of wisecracking smart alecks includes token goy Bob Hope and Woody Allen, though Cantor always remained a naif. He never employed a leer. Cantor proved to be good value for Goldwyn in response to the success of The Jazz Singer. Both Jolson and Cantor's film careers suffered parallel declines in the late 1930s. Scholars of the Production Code can note the difference between 1933's Roman Scandals and 1934's Kid Millions. 

Jiří Weiss' The Golden Fern is an epic Czech fantasy film from 1963. The film is shot in wide screen black and white, gorgeously lensed by Beda Batka (Marketa Lazarova, and, um, Little Darlings). The film concerns a 18th century shepherd who happens upon the titular and magical fern. A forest sprite morphs into a beautiful woman in order to retrieve the fern, but falls for the studly if arrogant shepherd. They have a brief idyll until the shepherd is pressed into service for the Austro-Hungarian Empire in their latest conflict with the Ottoman Empire. While serving the Empire, the shepherd become entangled with a haughty aristocrat played by Daniela Smutná who gives the film's best performance. She is just toying with the lad, but true love is betrayed and the fern crumbles to dust. The film is uneven. Some of the action and supernatural scenes are quite clumsy, but the scenes of life in an 18th century military camp are compelling. These moments left their impact upon Kubrick's Barry Lyndon much as Jaromil Jireš' The Joke influenced Full Metal Jacket. Interested parties should check out the immaculate disc from Deaf Crocodile.

Frank Borzage's Song o' My Heart, from 1930, is Fox's attempt to concoct a vehicle for Irish tenor John McCormack. McCormack was one of the top recording stars and concert draws of the day. His repertoire ranged from traditional Irish ballads to opera. Fox paid him 500,000 clams and he liked Hollywood enough to buy an estate there. However, the film is a slipshod affair. I guess Fox figured they had already shelled out enough on this project, so every expense was spared. The story is drivel and the acting is horrid. The version on Tubi is mostly silent with 14 songs. Other, all talking, versions exist, but a 70 mm print is presumed lost forever. A half dozen of the musical numbers were taken from a recital, so this is one static picture. Featured are Alice Joyce, Maureen O'Sullivan (an Irish discovery by Borzage), John Garrick, and J. Farrell MacDonald, billed here without the J. Unless you want to see what McCormack looked like while performing, this is eminently skippable.

Even with its commercials, I can't think of a better streamer for budding cinephiles than the free, for now, Tubi. Right now you can watch scores of films by DW Griffith, John Ford, Sergei Eisenstein, Kenji Mizoguchi, Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Buñuel, Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, Francois Truffaut, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, Ingmar Bergman, David Cronenberg, Werner Herzog, Blake Edwards, Ernst Lubitsch, etc. I think Tubi has a better lineup of classic films than any streamer, including The Criterion channel. Also check out these classics currently streaming on Tubi: Godard's Contempt, Chabrol's This Man Must Die, Brian de Palma's Sisters, Franju's Eyes Without a Face, Carol Reed's The Third Man, Dryer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, Jarmusch's Dead Man, Andre de Toth's Pitfall, GW Pabst's The Diary of a Lost Girl, Sirk's A Scandal in Paris, Zhang Yimou's Shadow, Bigelow's Point Break, Clive Donner's What's New Pussycat, Melville's Le Samourai, Rossellini's Journey to Italy, Davies' A Quiet Passion, Friedkin's To Live and Die in LA, Siegel's The Lineup, Leni's The Man Who Laughs, Tarkovsky's Solaris, Rush's The Stunt Man, Marquand's Eye of the Needle, Lynch's Eraserhead, Margarethe von Trotta's Sheer Madness, Stroheim's Greed, Borzage's A Farewell to Arms, Chaplin's The Gold Rush, Keaton's Our Hospitality, and many more. A cinematic feast awaits.

Betty Amann in Asphalt

L'Empire

Fabrice Luchini

Bruno Dumont's L'Empire is a pleasantly lunatic vision, meshing Dumont's beloved northern France settings with a science fiction parody. Two dueling extraterrestial clans seek to renew their legacy by assuming a human form and propagating in the Côte d'Opale. Mythic themes are parodied and burlesqued: rival dynasties, star-crossed lovers, and an anointed child preordained to lead the next generation. Unlike the George Lucas efforts it mocks, L'Empire offers genuine spasms of violence and sex. The aliens races are equally eager to decapitate with their light sabres and to copulate in their newly acquired human flesh. The cheekily comic couplings occur in nature, on land or sea, in landscapes worthy of Courbet.  

The two warring clans are monikered the 0s and the 1s, the building blocks of our digital age. The 0s have a spaceship that looks like Versailles. They have a patriarch (Fabrice Luchini) and resemble, in their non-human forms, merde emojis without  Gallic charm. The1s have a mother ship that resembles Reims Cathedral and resemble rays of light. Dumont is parodying the French dualism that has dominated it national discourse even before Descartes posited a mind/body split. French discourse and French humor have never really caught on in the States and L'Empire opened here with barely a ripple.

Dumont contains this film within his own cinematic universe of northern France seen before in his mini-series L'il Quinquin. As in that project, he strikes gold with youthful performers. Based on her previous work, I expected  a fierce and committed performance from Anamaria Vartolomei, but Dumont gets equally compelling work from newcomer Brandon Vileghe. Only Fabrice Luchini overdoes it, but what can you expect when Luchini is playing a character named Belzébuth. 

Crime 101

Mark Ruffalo and Chris Hemsworth

Bart Layton's Crime 101 is the most satisfying noir in some time. Layton has relied heavily, but not slavishly, on Don Winslow's sleek and superb novella. A number of critics have compared this new film to Michael Mann's Heat, but the surface similarities between the two films, both are LA based heist flicks, are simply that. Heat, like most Michael Mann films, is focused on the mythos of machismo. I revere Heat, but, frankly, that daylight robbery of the bearer bonds or whatever the hell they were is ludicrous. Now I enjoy the kinetic rush of the sequence, but it is not, in any way, a realistic portrayal of how and where to go about an armed robbery. Nevertheless, the whole tone of the film is mythic rather than realistic, so why carp. Winslow's novella and Layton's film(s) are more interested in realistic characterization than mythic figures. At the end of Heat, the cop upholds his duty and nails the perp. That is not what happens at the end of Crime 101. The cop in the Layton film knows the beast of societal justice must be fed, but he ultimately follows his own code.

Every character in Crime 101 masks his true self. This Layton makes plain in the scene in which Halle Berry goes through her daily make-up routine. One's true self is irrelevant to one's success in society. This is as true for the cop (Mark Ruffalo) as it is for the insurance agent (Ms. Berry) and thief (Chris Hemsworth). It is when these character put down the masks they have constructed for themselves that they can find a sense of commonality. The main problem I have with this movie is Chris Hemsworth. He's ok when the mask is in place, but he telegraphs his character's moments of vulnerability. Think of Brad Pitt in this role and you might see what I mean. I also felt that Nick Nolte's performance is disastrous. It was like watching Willie Mays when he played for the Mets. Otherwise, the ensemble is superbly cast and at the top of their game. Excellent work from Ms. Berry, Mr. Ruffalo, Barry Keoghan, Monica Barbaro, Corey Hawkins, Tate Donovan, and Jennifer Jason Leigh. The score by Blanck Mass is spine tinglingly effective without being obtrusive.

The Best of Robert Duvall

1931 -- 202

                                     To this day, I still think Lonesome Dove was my best part.

1)     Lonesome Dove                                       Simon Wincer, etc.                                   1989

2)     Apocalypse Now                                      Francis Ford Coppola                              1979

3)     The Great Santini                                    Lewis John Carlino                                  1979

4)     Tomorrow                                                 Joseph Anthony                                       1972

5)     Colors                                                       Dennis Hopper                                         1988

6)     The Godfather                                         Francis Ford Coppola                              1972

7)     To Kill A Mockingbird                             Robert Mulligan                                       1962

8)     The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid  Philip Kaufman                                         1972

9)     The Apostle                                              Robert Duvall                                          1997

10)   Tender Mercies                                        Bruce Beresford                                      1983

He rarely made a bad performance. Often, as in Apocalypse Now and The Betsy, he gave by far the best performance in the film. I want to stress the above rankings are not based on the overall quality of the film. Tomorrow is a poor film and I've never been too thrilled by either To Kill a Mockingbird or Tender Mercies. However, the sheer volume of his varied film work rivals any of his contemporaries, even Gene Hackman. I especially enjoy his work in The Chase, True Grit, The Rain People, MASH, Joe Kidd, The Outfit, The Godfather 2, The Killer Elite, Network, True Confessions, Rambling Rose, Geronimo..., Something to Talk About, Sling Blade, Assassination Tango, Thank You for Smoking, and The Road. 

There was a chameleon quality to his work and he never suffered typecasting. He was not sought out for romantic leading man roles, but his turn in Assassination Tango showed he could command oodles of charm if need be.  After he had established himself in Hollywood, he was often called upon for villainy at which he was adept: his Jesse James is the most vicious in film history and Duvall was also quite pungent in True Grit, Joe Kidd, The Killer Elite, and Network. His death scene in Colors is a model of his realistic understatement.

   

Quick Takes: February 2026

Mirjami Kuosmanen

Erik Blomberg's The White Reindeer is a 1952 Finnish fairy tale film set in a gorgeously glacial Lapland. Mirjami Kuosmanen stars as a Sami maiden cursed with a legacy of pagan gods and witchcraft. The horror elements of the film are mild and predictable, but the ethnographic documentary aspects are stunning in their beauty. There is a little animal cruelty, reindeer are lassoed and wrassled like steers, but children would be entranced by the sequences featuring the reindeer both in the wild and harnessed to sleighs for races. Currently streaming on Tubi.

Robert Day's The Initiation of Sarah is a mildly horrific exploitation film made for ABC television in 1978. The direction is indifferent and the story is a Stephen King ripoff: mostly Carrie and the maze out of The Shining. Kay Lenz stars as a college freshman with telekinetic powers who gets involved in sorority shenanigans. The California Institute of Technology locations are attractive and the cast is way above average. Ms. Lenz offers a sensitive performance and Morgan Fairchild is delightful as the head mean girl on campus; a role that led to her being typecast forever as a conniving bitch. I also enjoyed the efforts of Tisa Farrow, Shelley Winters, Tony Bill, Kathryn Crosby, Morgan Brittany, Robert Hayes, and Talia Balsam. What a cast for a throwaway piece of crap!

François Ozon's When Fall is Coming is an ironic melodrama set in Burgundy and spanning a decade or so. The tone is subdued, especially for Ozon, and autumnal. The focus is more on a decades long friendship between two seniors (Hélène Vincent and Josiane Balasko) than on the more feckless younger generation. The film contains three deaths, sins of the past, poison mushrooms, and a ghost. I could have done without the ghost but found When Fall is Coming droll and arresting. The cast is sublime and the production design, costumes, and cinematography unostentatiously gorgeous.

Howard Bretherton and William Keighley's Ladies They Talk About, from 1933, is a subpar Barbara Stanwyck vehicle from the Pre-Code era. The plot, in which mob moll Stanwyck falls for milquetoast evangelist Preston Foster, is tommyrot with one of the worst finales I've ever seen. Ladies They Talk About was originally a play, but passed through the hands of many scribes before reaching the screen: too many cooks, etc.  The chemistry between Stanwyck and Foster is nil, but at least Stanwyck ends up in prison, San Quentin, twenty minutes into this 69 minute flick. The prison depicted is the cushiest jail I've ever seen in an American film, it even has a beauty parlor. Stanwyck is well cast and wonderful, but the picture is haphazard, veering from crude to punchy. This is one weird film. Lillian Roth is a welcome sight as Stanwyck's best bud in stir. She even gets to warble a love song to a studio portrait of Joe E. Brown, then a Warners contract player. The picture's racial humor is particularly offensive.

Kogonada's A Big Bold Beautiful Journey is a miss, but not the debacle some have declaimed. Kogonada's Bressonian distance doesn't ever mesh with the twee romantic fantasy penned by Seth Reiss. I loved Benjamin Loeb's cinematography and the performances of Kevin Klein, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Hamish Linklater, and Lily Rabe. Rabe, who is 42, plays the mother of Margot Robbie, age 35. The appeal of Robbie continues to elude me. Colin Farrell's charming performance is the reason to see this flick, particular when he gets to relive his character's high school performance of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.

John Sturges' The Law and Jake Wade, from 1958, is an average Western from MGM. Surges handles the action scenes well, particularly the opening in which top billed Robert Taylor busts old pal Richard Widmark out of jail. Robert Surtees' cinematography makes stunning use of the Death Valley exteriors. The production design stands out, especially the ghost town in the finale where a bag of loot is buried. However, the script is an assemblage of cliches. Studio shots mesh poorly with magnificent exteriors. Widmark is outstanding, as are Robert Middleton, Henry Silva, and DeForst Kelly. Unfortunately, Robert Taylor is a black hole at the center of this picture. Any Western associated leading man would have been better, but he was MGM's (aging) boy. 

Claude Sautet's Max et les ferrailleurs (Max and the Junkmen) is a genuine sleeper, a film that lingers. Max (Michel Piccoli) is a divorced robbery detective with a wintry heart who is getting heat from his superiors. He needs to take down a crew and, to his dubious fortune, finds a patsy in the person of an old Legionnaire buddy named Abel (Bernard Fresson). Abel and his small time hood pals strip precious metals from abandoned buildings and construction sites in the suburb of Nanterre. However, Abel has a prostitute girlfriend named Lily (Romy Schneider) who turns tricks in Paris and thinks Abel should ditch his penny ante career. Max becomes fixated on her. Posing as a wealthy banker, Max manipulates Lily into convincing Abel that a local bank is easy pickings. Things end badly for all concerned in this 1971 flick.

Max... is a low key, almost humdrum police procedural. It is more of a character study than an action film. The Nanterre cafe that serves as the clubhouse for Abel's gang is dappled with the pop colors of the era. The police stations are a putrid blue, grey, green. Max's fake love nest, a study in beige. The characters' cigarettes are matched, also: Marlboro for Abel, Kool for Lily, Gitanes, bien sûr, for Max. The story all told in a flashback as distant as Max who prefers to tinker with clocks instead of schtupping Lily. Sautet may not be a master, but he directed many fine films and has received insufficient attention in the anglophone world.

 

Send Help

Rachel McAdams

Sam Raimi's Send Help is genuinely exciting cinema, his best film since Spider-Man 2. As usual, the pulpiness of Raimi's style has led him to be underrated; as Hitchcock was in his day. Yet, history will show that Raimi is just as expert a craftsman as Hitch with an equally mordant sense of humor. Raimi, however, is devoid of Catholic guilt. The screenplay, by the team of Mark Swift and Damian Shannon, swiftly engineers a battle of the sexes on an uncharted desert isle. The combatants are office mouse Linda Little (Rachel McAdams) and her odious nepo baby boss Bradley Preston (Dylan O'Brien). Linda is a hardworking grinder, who talks to her pet bird and eats tuna fish salad sandwiches at her desk. Raimi has frumped up Ms. McAdams as much as one can and dressed her in tones of beige to make her as dorky and unappealing as possible. Bradley doesn't prefer the image she projects and passes Linda over for a long overdue promotion. She objects and her moxie gets her a ride on the corporate jet to Thailand where Bradley plans to jettison her.

Of course, the tables are turned after Raimi provides us with one of the most hair raising plane crashes in cinematic history. The duo are stranded on a small island in the Gulf of Thailand. Bradley has an injured leg and is as helpless as a baby, a whiny and entitled one at that. The casting, McAdams is a decade older than O'Brien, plays up his lack of maturity. Linda, a Survivor fan, is in her element. She thrives in this environment where survival is a true battle of the fittest and Daddy's riches can't bail one out. Bradley becomes a mouth to feed in a film in which the central motif is what is going into and out of people's mouths. The level of gore and effluvia is high. Raimi really emptied his amniotic sac on this one. That the film champions women as the stronger and more resilient sex should be no surprise to fans of the director who has broached feminist themes since Xena. 

I admired Dylan O'Brien's performance as Dan Ackroyd in Saturday Night and he does equally good work here in tamping down his natural charisma to play a spoiled and aging adolescent. Bradley is never able to countenance that Linda could be an equal partner and that helps bring about his downfall. Thus, McAdams has the plum role and she delivers a gutsy and memorable performance. Raimi has said that he felt he under utilized McAdams talents in Dr. Strange in The Multiverse of Madness, but this role makes up for that neglect. I have been a big fan of the actress since I first spied her on the wonderful first season of Slings and Arrows and am glad she gets to strut her stuff in a good genre film as she did in Wes Craven's Red Eye. You don't get an Oscar for appearing in pulp horror that open in February, but McAdams has already racked up enough great performances for a lifetime achievement award in, let's hope, forty years.

Art College 1994

          
Liu Jian's Art College 1994, from 2024, is an animated drama that looks at the intersecting lives of college students. The main characters are feckless art student Zhang Xiaojun and his best bud "Rabbit". Most of the film is taken up with ruminative BS sessions between the two in their dorm room and on the quad. The two indulge in navel gazing while they drink beer and smoke cigarettes. Zhang flirts with a shy piano student, but their furtive relationship eventually evaporates. Liu juggles over thirty speaking parts, some impersonated by noted figures in Chinese music and cinema like the director Bi Gan, to create a broad picture of academia that is both warm and mildly satiric. 

The only classroom lecture shown in the film, which the students largely ignore, lays out the twin poles of artistic influence that the students must individually confront. The shifting perspectives of Eastern art is contrasted with the single fixed point of view which the lecturer says categorizes Western art. The mise en scene of Art College 1994 reflects this bifurcation. Nearly all of the conversational scenes in the film resemble the rotoscoped animation used by Richard Linklater in A Scanner Darkly and Waking Life. Art College 1994's hand drawn animation is cruder than those films, but captures their first person immediacy. Between these scenes of digressive dialogue are snippets that focus on nature: a butterfly floating above the quad, bugs and lizards negotiating rocks. These are the moments that reflect Asian art's influence upon Liu Jian, reminiscent of Eastern landscape painting and the films of Hayao Miyazaki. Zhang Xiaojun ultimately rejects traditional Chinese painting and embraces Western experimentalism, bringing an end to his academic career.

The funny and frank dialogue redeems the more aimless sections of the film. It is hard to capture the puffed up bubble of academic life without indulging in the rabbit holes of digression. Art College 1994 often feels jejune, but it is true to the limited scope of its youthful characters. 

Broken Rage

Takeshi Kitano

Takeshi "Beat" Kitano's Broken Rage has languished all 2025 on Amazon Prime with little notice. It is an odd film, divided in two discrete parts, the former a crime drama, the latter a comedic parody of a crime drama, à la Jerry Lewis. Kitano plays Mouse, a hit man who lives anonymously and follows an almost ritualistic existence. We follow him as he executes two jobs, but he is then apprehended by the cops who put the screws to him. Mouse agrees to infiltrate a yakuza mob who control the heroin market. Mouse helps brings down that gang and struts off, presumably to enter the witness protection program. The tone is tossed off and minimal, like the protagonist. The comic second half of this very short film, 67 minutes, has the same narrative, actors, and situations as the first half; with the addition of pratfalls and very broad humor. 

Broken Rage is certainly a self indulgent film, but it is an accurate reflection of the bifurcation of Kitano's career. He is best known in the US for directing and starring in hard boiled action films like Sonatine and Fireworks. Kitano had a brief vogue here in the 1990s, but has fallen off the map critically in America during this century. In Japan, he is best known as a comic performer and that has been his bread and butter in his homeland. Thus, Broken Rage displays the poles of his talent: half Jean Gabin, half Leslie Nielsen. Broken Rage barely qualifies as a feature, but it has structural integrity and strong performances. It further establishes Kitano as a minor director, but a major performer.

He Who Must Die

Pierre Vaneck

I've been itching to see Jules Dassin's He Who Must Die (Celui qui doit mourir) since I read Peter Wolf's memoir, Waiting on the Moon. In it, Wolf recounts his being taken to the film by his parents whereupon he eventually falls asleep on the shoulder of the woman next to him. That lady was named Marilyn Monroe who was there on a date night with her husband Arthur Miller, just two everyday New York intellectuals paying homage to one of Joseph McCarthy's victims as Wolf's parents were. The movie is a French language wide screen version of Nikos Kazantzakis' 1948 novel Christ Recrucified. Both works are set in a Greek village under Ottoman rule in the year of 1921. Refugees from a town sacked by the Turks arrive, are spurned by the town's ruling class, the Church and bourgeoisie, and flee to the hills. The village people are rehearsing their version of the Passion Play which they put on every seven years. However, events spin out of control and Christ's sacrifice recurs after a class war erupts. The battle rages on as the film ends. 

In his review in The New Leader, Manny Farber detected the "tang of propaganda" in the film's images and I concur.⛨ However, I don't think this was necessarily a problem since Kazantzakis was fellow traveler if not a doctrinaire Communist. I am not so sure about Jesus. The film reminded Farber of Steinbeck. Nevertheless, Dassin's allegorical groupings of the lumpen rural proletariat results in stasis rather than movement, posturing rather than acting. This is social realism at its most ham-fisted, turning an ambivalent and questioning book into a Marxist fresco. There are endless shots of the choreographed peasantry happily warbling or intoning their dignity. I, unlike Peter Wolf, did not fall asleep, though. Enough of Kazantzakis' dialogue remains and I especially enjoyed the readings by Jean Servais and Fernand Ledoux as the film's good and bad pharisees. However, the film's performances are all over the map. Melina Mercouri has a bad case of the cutes as the picture's Magdalene figure and Pierre Vaneck is hopeless as the film's creeping Jesus. The film's Pilate figure is the most broadly drawn, a Turkish Snidely Whiplash avec catamite. A pretentious curiosity, all in all. 

⛨ Manny Farber, The New Leader, Three Art-y Films, pg. 26.