Reviews

Movies don't tend to pass a test of logic and cogency, but as this one is about a comprehensive argument and a GUT, it unusually, necessitates a logical analysis.

The development of an anachronistic anthropological unified theory is perilous and this film's presentation of that work does not succeed for a few clear reasons.

It is reductionist; it relies on fundamental informal, and formal, fallacies of inference which are central to the project,and because of its logical deficiencies, fails to make its final conclusion valid. The vaulted ambition to unite phenomena into a single entity is a common fault of human reasoning, and whilst plausible and excusable in everyday thinking, it is absolutely wrong.

As an undergraduate university essay it would be failed on those grounds; qualified logical reasoning should not make such simple errors.

This analysis does not necessarily dispute the arguments about social hierarchy, disadvantage and the bogus historical racialist theories, but examined, rather as discrete, noncontiguous identities, not in aggregate.

As a piece of art, the movie is quite commonplace, at least in terms of contemporary production and directing style, which is not to give it a plaudit, but it is certainly too long A sharper edit would inject a sense of intellectual pursuit.

To criticize this movie so many decades later seems belated, yet the book is a classic and the eponymous character is a sort of media type we all know very well today.

Sanders's Bel Ami is one of the great portrayals of its era, but it ain't the book, and as such, the phrase, based on, is more weighty than usual.

Whilst the movie largely uses the plot - with one major caveat - it also deviates from it for several reasons from the book. For a start, Bel Ami on screen is not like the Maupassnat's creation. He is too clever and well spoken from the get go,whereas the real Bel Ami is a hillbilly who is a very vulgar and crude speaker, let alone, writer. He develops abilities but is still not even a bourgeois, and certainly not a gentleman.

Secondly, the women use him as a gigolo because he's good looking and sexy and they help him but the female sexuality in the book is way too racy for a Hollywood film of this period, and so it is erased in favor of his cunning, which he has, but only because the woman take him in for their own pleasure. Ultimately, they play each other in a self interested game; Bel Ami uses the women but they had exploited him too.

As to the ending, well, Hollywood had a morals police ensuring bad actions got their just deserts, which the recent film version ignores and follows the book. ( It has its own faults in Patterson but that is another thing). Maupassant's Bel Ami's is a clever observation of a political and media culture which is not so distant to now This film tale is the ersatz kiddie version as if to protect the viewer from real insight.

Raymond Chandler remarked: The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers.

He could have said this about Saltburn where class consciousness is coded in the English DNA like nowhere else and furnishes enough material to retain funding, however threadbare it is.

The themes of Saltburn are like pieces filched from Howard's End and Brideshead Revisited and no doubt other, lesser, books about country piles, as well as the 1930s detective novels that Chandler was referring to in his spiking of English writing.

Class, real estate and sex could be the holy trinity of a certain type of English writing, lazy, dilettantish and effete. Add Oxford undergrads to the plot and the languorous destiny of the story is foreknown in the opening credits.

With such worn material adding some spice is required and thus, drinking bodily fluids, instigating - or simulating - necrophilia through a meter of dirt on a grave, should supply the necessary frisson to an audience that could be comatose. These disingenuous tactics, however, do not dispel Chandler's remark of it being dull. Immeasurably so.

Nor does the photographic eroticism of the demi-monde in the fields and the sunlight flaring in the lenses cover up the shallow sentiments displayed. Rather like the cliché parents of Saltburn, who talk like stock characters from a 1930s parlour play that ought to have been forgotten, these tropes should be in a theatrical and cinematic op-shop.

But where it really falls over is the end which chooses facile plotting to provide some ending with its redundant ballet through the newly acquired pile; intended to show victorious power, though it comes across rather like Benjamin Field.

A hollow, grubby, film which ought to have understood the motto at the beginning of Brideshead: Et in Arcadia ego.

Nominally this film is about Bernstein and Cooper's performance - with the magic of prosthetics - but the most memorable element is Mulligan's performance as Felicia, which is more expansive, deep, and finally, more critical to the whole work. Indeed the second half of the film is more engaging than the first and it's the tension within the Bernstein marriage which shifts attention from the stellar career of golden boy, Leonard, to his wife and her illness. The transition is helped by Cooper's almost Bergmansesuqe direction: the shot duration, framing, the lack of cuts, the focus on the humanity and human face take the movie bio into a more personal space and Cooper, the director, may have outdone Cooper, the actor.

The recreation of the post war era is done with great attention and that includes the actors' performances, the voices, their accents and cadences (Mulligan again is superb). The progression through time is done episodically but if there is a weaknesses it is that these sequences merge into one with Bernstein, cigarettes in hand, grinning, being a great collaborator, etc and everyone is his friend, very intimate or just and admirer.

The ballet scenes works especially well (pity it was not used again in some way) as does shaping the entire film in the relationship between Leonard and Felicia. Other would be bio movie makers take note: use a significant element of a life and develop it synecdochally ( marriage); do not try to condense a whole life (Oppenheimer) into a film and make it like speed reading 800 page biography.

Bernstein's dilemma between conducting and composing is shown as well as his relative sense of achievements. The conducting sequences are adequate but some more may have been feasible although running time and whether it was comprehensible to audiences without a context for conducting history could have been a consideration.

But for all the good work here, ultimately it is Mulligan's Felicia that elevates the film to high status and if she wins many accolades for it, they are truly deserved.

It is likely that a film theorist has a thesis that Flowers fits into a Scorsese oeuvre of American crime stories such that its part of a Goodfellas and Casino arc. It may seem improbable but it is not without justification insofar as Flowers is also the story of male friendship and loyalty just as the two mafia movies were, and let's not forget, Mean Streets too. It is a theme that Scorsese has turned over and over for 50 years.

But, as with The Irishman, the running time is contentious. In the future, when most of the participants in this film are long gone, this movie maybe considered a late great achievement by its director. It is that but for the duration which taxes the attention, and in a world of shorter attention time spans, tests viewer commitment on one condition, that is: If it had many twist and turns it might not seem as long as it is, but once the story is set in motion the unraveling goes along at a steady pace - like a novel actually - and although more events are added, nothing like a plot twist adds shock and surprise. It is this which adds to the sense of excess duration. Alternative formats are questionable but there is no obvious fault in the writing in the direction so we have a product which will inevitably viewed in distinct sessions rather than in a single sitting.

Having got that out of the way, the movie is strong, and if ever the phrase the banality of evil applied it is to the two protagonists, who are opportunistic greedy psychopaths. The De Niro and DiCaprio performances are as good as ever and opposite each other play well. Supporting roles are effective but there is a cameo effect where some are short, they fill in the necessary plotting; the visit to Washington for instance - though that is an unavoidable trade-off for this type of movie.

Production design, the look and feel is compelling as is the photography adding the period. The historical story is the core and it does have enough to it to keep the interest, even if a break is required at times.

This film's silly English title does not serve its material. Indeed, the original Italian title, which was probably a good marketing trick for the time, is also seriously misplaced. A better title would be Foreign Illusions, or just plain Illusions.

Sure, the story plays with the idea of sex, but Sordi is rather wistful, almost pathetic, in his loneliness and search for a connection. There is comedy but it's restrained and wrought with middle-aged perspectives, not bed-hopping and giggling.

Sordi is always good and here shows his acting nuances and ability to extract some comic moments, rather ironically, from his failed foreign adventures. Don Giovanni, he is not. The script is solid and explores all the characters with warmth and humanity.

A real feature is the photography, and the snowy landscapes look excellent in monochrome. In a way the frigid landscapes stand as a metaphor for Sordi's travails.

Language presents another barrier, and while Sordi's English is a lingua franca with the Swedish women, it hardly allows for more intimate communication.

Overall, well worth catching up with this part of the Alberto Sordi catalog.

This comes out at an opportune time as there is an appetite to find lost composers and record their works. The fact that this composer was very good in his own right - as much as having a role in the young Mozart's life - makes the story more interesting.

The film itself is excellent. It has a slightly different angle on straight biographical narrative which is fine enough, but where it excels is in the mood, that is in the sense of contemporary space, such that we feel drawn into the scenes. This is as much in the writing as in the production which feel authentic. The time devoted to the actual music is well made and the music is strong; the set pieces around opera work especially well, not just for the staging but the singing too.

An artist's life is not predictable, nor often very easy, and Myslivecek's career exemplifies this arc in spades. He lived fast and easy for many years and then it didn't, but he may be unique in enduring a pompous lecture from a royal patron while the said royal moved his bowels. That particular scene does punctuate the quality of mood and moment that this film does very well.

For anyone interested in biography and classical music, this is highly recommended.

The ostensible joke is on the academics, but one of Charlie Brooker's older characters was called ''opinion-haver''; that is a nobody without education whose committed views only skewered themselves, not they knew it. Morgan/Cunk plays this trope brilliantly while the clever talking heads who signed up to this series would be in on the joke.

That leaves the object of the series the unwitting viewer, the person who is not well educated, lacks curiosity and lives in narrow, parochial world, also without of any historical sense so they see everything anachronistically - they judge everything by current mores and is therefore ignorance incarnate. The butt of the joke are the opinion-havers, of social media, of tabloid TV and talk back radio, who last read a book at school - and cribbed it - whose cultural compass is set by pabulum and pop music awards.

The early episodes are best while into the modern era it races through and lacks enough good material to keep the level of jokes going. The anachronistic conceit also plays better with the distant past too as references to technology are more absurd and highlight the ignorance being ridiculed.

The opening twenty minutes starts well with two couples in mysterious situations negotiating their circumstances. The fact that they are older, and that the actors are well-known, adds more intrigue.

But this interest does not last long as we meet the younger generation who are the very personification of bland, literal and boring. Their dialogue is of the earnest pop psychology, greeting card, coffee mug bromides that passes for incisive adult debate.

This fault should not be critical, after all Oscar Wilde wrote one of the worst plays by a professional dramatist, ever, in "A Woman of No Importance'' which is just a series of his prepared barbs and repartee strung into a plot. Audiences liked it, nevertheless.

In Maybe I Do the pivot to the droning younger couple means the entire work shifts down to twaddle, but worse, its garrulous drivel that yaps and yaps to cover the lack of intelligence and insight into the debate about married love.

Even the moment when the couples who started the movie meet up, is bathetic. It lacks humor and tension. A good writer and director could have done better - the cast have the chops - but on screen, we're presented with a limp unfunny plot point that had to be delivered to get to the last act.

Obviously the piece wounds down through multiple prosaicisms and platitudes to reach its destination. The experience is marginally less painful than surgery without anesthesia, but no less nauseous.

The typical adult male speaks at a so-called fundamental frequency from 85 to 155 Hz. At first this information may seem pointless, but in this film the characters, mostly male, do a lot of talking. They sit opposite each other and talk in clever - so the writer believes - dialogue which follows the same template almost throughout.

This may be represented in logical form, but in a standard way it uses an opening statement, followed by a refutation/contradiction and some clever use of analog/metaphor, with some more exegesis. This pattern tends to occur whether characters sit opposite each other in a formal meeting, or at a lunch table, or anywhere. It is a template.

Because everyone is so well-educated and English in that suppressed, or depressed, way of interacting; they talk at the same level all the way through. That is between 85 to 155 Hz. The women are all pitched in that lower register too. It is not easy keeping awake to such an unvaried vocal pitch and repeated pattern of scenes.

It is a shame because the actors can offer more which might have served the story better and engaged the audience more deeply, even if they been allowed to go to 160Hz.

This is not about plate smashing drama, nor histrionics for its own sake. Variation is a vital element in drama. Shakespeare and Beckett could manage existential tragedy, comedy and smut in different voices. And this is what a dramatist should be able to do, particularly with a complex story. Find a better a writer, any writer, or else film the BBC shipping forecast.

This is probably not the first film script to resemble a PowerPoint presentation but it executes the features of a PowerPoint deck with facile clarity. The voice over track from the colonel is like a VP telling us about sales in the Southwest market, while we are visually diverted with many tricks in the software to keep up with his presentation.

Terpsichorean swipes, overlays, vertiginous dives, inserts all dazzle the eye while the brain has gone into a long deep coma because there is no drama here at all; it is superficial rostrum camera and CGI with perfunctory dialogue and simplistic ''Biopic for Idiots'' script plotting that guides takes us through the story to its morbid high cholesterol end.

Even with these manifest faults, it is remarkable that a young man, who stirred the dormant loins of many women, became within a few decades, the ridiculous bloated cabaret parody. That story may yet be told, but, meantime, do not bother with this equally bloated music video from about 1987.

Having exhausted charming locations for a series in the UK this one is basically set in Wiltshire, Hampshire, or Gloucestershire with posh people and antiques and fine food and wine (no opera, though) mooching about in an old fashioned mystery, like Lord Peter Wimsey, with garlic mayonnaise.

There is nothing to suggest it is in France except when they use their character names: they talk in English idioms, talk with English theatrical RP accents, and the entire style is steeped in bourgeois ( ooh, a French word) mannerisms.

The alternative of speaking with a bogus French accent would have been absurd but even so, it is not French in any way.

Sure the locations are a big features along with the cafes and the food to give us that sense of France, but it might be a just charabanc of English tourists on an excursion.

In a wider sense this series sums up the common English view of France, cliched, shallow and without any effort to learn the language.

Assuming this is mostly accurate, and many TV/movie biographies use too much license for dramatic effect, then it is quite disturbing.

Being in the company of two conceited narcissists is not enjoyable; it is intriguing, but it is basically unpleasant because the manipulation and megalomania that is their currency is traded to exploit other people who believe in the drivel. When someone promises to change the world, they are full of it.

Again, if the material is accurate, the portrait can be just as useful in less time, brevity being the soul of wit as an Englishman said a while ago. And the Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui illustrates a similar journey more concisely.

The series offers perhaps too much material, a psychopath is a psychopath, and two for the same bargain is hardly a treat. The depth of self-confidence portrayed by Leto and Hathaway is compelling, even if the accent is grating, even though it adds to the verisimilitude.

But it should stand as a caution to anyone who believes in the slick sales self-actualization spiel.

The past is not a terrain producers understand anymore; they have transformed it with anachronistic tropes and thus made it unrecognizable.

Why they even bother with a past that is known in living memory, and is available in films, tends to suggest they are too lazy to find genuine new material, or that their industry, as many have proposed (Eno, for example) , is basically bereft of any new possibilities.

This ridiculous venture is not helped with a leading actor who resembles the puppet Joe 90, and who possesses the photogenic appeal of a stick of chalk. Surely wires were used to move the hands.

Such casting along, with many other poor choices, presents little more than a cheap con.

A remake can't be a facsimile and this is both faithful to the vintage film, while adding new elements - not just casting - to the whole piece. The elements we all know and are essential for it to remain the work are all there although some songs are not present.

The cast are all fine and some innovations especially around Moreno's role are seamless updates. Some reviewers have queried Elgort as Tony and while there are some shaky moments, the actual role is problematic, which is difficult for an actor. Tony we are told is a bad dude, but all we see, until the climax, is an earnest lovelorn kid, a musical stereotype. It's an idealization role, almost like Candide, a part that Bernstein knew well enough in that work which makes it rather awkward.

The craft in this movie is to make a movie that has musical sections, not a genuine musical in that tradition which somehow hangs together through the tunes, however patchily dramatically it coheres. The difference in motivation is evident in the extended scenes and the additional dialogue which add very little to the original and pad out for a contemporary audience such notions that need more explanation. It is also seen in the disjunctive nature of time and space which pervades the film.

The most egregious instance of that is in the signature song, ''America''. As a huge singular sequence this comment may seem just plain wrong but in the drama, "America" comes after another sour encounter between the gangs and the Puerto Ricans are seething about life in America. The men have their pride but the women remind them it's one of poverty, and so caught between two rotten choices, the women make the case for staying. (In the stage version it is women only but, being Hollywood, they had to give the men something to do.)In the original film the sequence is at night, and confined to a small space which is like a battlefield; the women dance at the men in waves of attack and every good proposition the women offer, the men reject. It is antagonistic and full of irony.

In this remake, by comparison, "America" is set the next day and is separated by time from the mix-dance, which had created the tension that leads to the expression through ''America''.

In this version it is morning, the Puerto Rican women gather from their apartments into the street and dance with their men, and they jeer and tease each other, as they dance along many New York blocks ending in grand finale with children joining the street chorines.

The sequence lacks bite and sneer and has lost its street battle setting as well as understanding of the song itself which pitches between two awful realities: poverty in Puerto Rico and racism in New York. The dancing children are enough to induce severe gastric reflux. Despite its sweep and grandeur, or rather because of it, the sequence is inane and disappointing.

There is no doubt that Arthur Laurents, who wrote the original book, would not like this film, but he disliked the 1961 film too, mainly for the actors and the unreality of real locations and musical theater conventions.

That aside, all things considered, it is pleasing enough, even if being new is not concordantly better.

In its cast and duration it is assured of its own strengths but they are misplaced, not just in the small anachronisms ( language': ''moving on'', ''situation'') but also contemporary custom, and, more significantly, in the overall structure.

Presented in the Rashomon form the empirical details between each tale are not so varied as to be very interesting. There are minor nuances of emphasis but not enough to make them worthy of being presented in 3X40 minute chunks.

The most telling difference, and one that exposed the whole medieval mentality, was in the section devoted to Driver's version of events. There the character makes confession after the event and with a form of post hoc logic that would not stand up today, he believes he's exonerated. This was a very common view at the time and allowed men of his status to commit the most dreadful acts to anyone, as long as they settled their account with God.

Apart from that sequence, and the meaning it carries, the film's story is rather obvious and offers little, apart from the high production detail and simulated violence. This view is somewhat underlined by the epilogue.

There are questions as to why French actors and French writers were not employed on this as this genre of film is made well in France and they know the history. Certainly, another writer might have seen the core problem in the narrative and how to shift it.

The cast were fine enough, though that sense that the world and the words they are portraying are foreign to them is inescapable.

Driver looked imposing while Matt Damon drew the unlucky characterization with a mullet that looked more at home in a trailer park.

In the same duration of such masterpieces as Macbeth and Coriolanus, this Bond adventure proves that duration and budget cannot guarantee excitement. Or interest. Its length really hurts because into the second hour it is almost painful to sit through more of the monotony to reach the end.

Apparently $250millin does not buy very much these days. Sure, the technicians and the effects are all leading edge, or whatever, but the creative side: the script, the acting, and the rest, are mediocre, at best.

The essential flaw is the collective team behind his have forgotten that Bond was always ridiculous nonsense. It had no semblance of reality - Britain a leading world power, pluh-ease - and the capers as well as the fixed tropes, were part of the fantasy, the escape from the mundane world into adult comic action with some jokes and sex. It was trash, but fun trash.

This Bond is humorless, Craig has the charisma of a lampshade, so maybe his successor can be a credenza. The tropes of the brand are all fixed but extended into sequences that go way past their use-by date; physics no longer counts for anything, just as body mass and weight, so we have physical contests that bore everyone, except perhaps the stunt team, and fill in time.

The script, over which there was much media attention, is a dog. It fills the same template as Bonds must do but is witless and tedious with dialogue that would shame a third rate 1970's TV sci -fi. It's bathetic and even more awful; just gestures that smugly nod to updated shibboleths.

It has the depth of characterization that one expects from this genre but the pretensions to elevate the psychology to something like Le Carré. The inner life of Bond is neither interesting nor entertaining.

It's probably too much to hope that Bond will never return, but if he does, the folks in charge should remember that the films are fantasies, Bond is not real, he doesn't have to grow, nothing is real, and it's escapist nonsense that should not overstay its welcome, or the actual material.

Old men and their dogs living a simple life in a rural landscape is what this film is about. To fill in time they hunt for truffles, but being in the country and the bond with their dogs is the essence of the story here.

The landscape is where it all happens and the sense of place, of mood, even of smell, is captured in the scenes at various times of day. It's quite immersive with the action of hunting being a good part of the film and how the men connect with their beloved dogs.

The men are distinct, but also, paradoxically they blend as one in many respects: their lifestyles, their lack of vanity and their bonds with their dogs. If there is one scene that summarizes the film, it's the man who resembles the ancient Leonard da Vinci trying to express why he's frustrated with truffle hunting. He wishes to go back fifty years to a time when being the country, and with the dogs, was what counted, not what happens today where greed is the key motivation. His analogy with seduction is both amusing and telling.

The film is structured in short sequences photographed in a static setting, as if they were paintings, with the subjects composed accordingly. There is no voice-over telling us what is happening, no backstory, we have to understand it as the film develops and this works with excellent editing that expands the story while telling us a bit more about each man and his own personal circumstance. It's very direct, unmediated, except it isn't, but it feels that close, as if we are in their homes, in the musty barns, out of the paths and in the hills.

The dogs complete the three key parts to the film and without them it would not be as an engaging. They are working dogs as well as much loved members of the family, even addressed as such, receiving birthday songs and treats. The dogs' relationship with the men is captured so well, so intimately and authentically, it is sure to make this movie any dog lovers' top film for a very long time.

Many films crave authenticity; they say they are based on real events and inspired by a true story to appeal to our sense of what is true. This movie has authenticity down to the dirt under the fingernails and muddy paws.

The writer of the source play dismissed this film as awful and his reasons are perfectly correct. Without his analysis the movie is quite pleasant, offers very good location photography, a sense of atmosphere and feeling for characters too.

The first half is better, with Hepburn's character, Jane Hudson, making great efforts to enjoy her time in Venice, (luckily oblivious to the Neapolitan songs soundtrack), and the difference between the button-down America she comes from and the more liberal Italy. Henry James had this story covered on many occasions, but it works as the movie develops with the romance and the inner moral conflict that Hepburn's mousy traveler must undergo.

And then it hits the problem that Arthur Laurents, who wrote the source play defines: they removed Act 2 and that means the second half of the film is a pedestrian holiday romance with too many montage scenes.

The reason Act 2 was removed was it debated the moral conflict which led to the Brazzi's de Rossi character leaving the priggish Hudson-Hepburn. That would have been much more dramatically interesting, but in a medium where platitudes are accepted as insight, such things pass.

The film is British and was not subject to the Production Code at the time, which means the loss of the dramatic content was more unfortunate. In any case, for a star vehicle, such an episode was not possible.

Not everyone will share Laurent's view that is it awful, Hepburn certainly didn't; she thought she was wonderful, but then, Dorothy Parker said of Hepburn years earlier in a Broadway play, that she ran the whole gamut of emotions-from A to B. And with that astringent voice, is not wrong here, either.

Those faults apart, the scenes of Venice are sufficient to hold the attention.

Writers, novel writers certainly, should rise up against their movie cliché. In movies, painters and musicians are presented as sociable, attractive even, characters, but book writers are alcoholic misanthropes whose only company are cats.

This film takes this and similar tropes and applies the movie cliché of incompatible partners/opposites coming to like each other as well as the old man and young woman dichotomy, both of whom are on their uppers, albeit in different ways. Formulas are proven and so we are set on our way.

While the premise is established, the journey, literally, does offer some fresher angles, at least in terms of the publishing business. The blunt speech, calling cant for what it is, the pervasiveness of social media and celebrity, the shallowness of our culture, are done comically and with effect. How the calque curse word took hold is a mystery.

The pacing and editing keep things going well as we move from one plot point to the next and although it's not necessarily new material, the energy does not flag. The photography and locations are striking, somber and moody, wintry light which adds a more realistic edge to the narrative.

But the reason to stay with this story are the performances. Casting can elevate a film even if the other aspects are a little staid and that's what is on show here. Caine and Plaza hold it together as both leads take us through the journey where their antagonism turns to friendship. It's sentimental, just like the movie poster of Caine grinning.

They are supported with a good team of actors too and while the humans did their job admirably, the cat deserves an award for a memorable and nuanced cameo performance; perhaps even Best Supporting Actor would be fitting, if species rules are not still enforced.

This series should be subtitled, "Can the women keep their men?" Giving the answer is not right and it is worth seeing how our heroines try to find happiness.

The evolution of the story is interesting. The time shift has progressed and we are on the brink of the youthful 1960s with more rock n' roll music and some other minor changes. The characters, who we know quite well, have not undergone huge changes, but there is enough movement to stay engaged with them.

As with Ku'Damm 56 and 59, the writing and overall story arc are well-handled, and, in this series the various plots have been better managed. For a mini-series where emotional highs and angst are essential, the balance between each character's stories blend well.

Still at the center, so to speak is the formidable mother, Caterina Schöllack as played by Claudia Michelsen. She dispenses her displeasure, steely glares and contemptuous snorts at anyone who crosses her iron will. Even with a back brace.

This series has enough to progress the stories of the Schöllack women into new phases and so it looks as if a Ku'Damm 68 could be a possibility. If that does happen it will take the themes forward and resolve some other things to, such as the struggle between children and parents.

And later in the 1960s, with Germany experiencing youth rebellion, very heavy rock music, drugs and sexual revolution, we can imagine Caterina Schöllack stubbornly playing "Preußens Gloria" in defiance of such social depravity.

This film pushes at the limits of what film can do in the sense that most interesting things in it are not what are shown but what the writer can express about the inner life of the character and other non-narrative aspects.

Cinema must show through the lens; it is a complete image. Text is borderless, frameless, it can be objective, or as abstract as is necessary. This is why every film version of "Madame Bovary" is a disappointment because Flaubert never tells the reader what Emma looks like but every actress is an incarnation of Emma.

In terms of this film, when the story progresses in its first half, it work rather well; perhaps a bit slow for some minds, but the characterization and the dilemma are intriguing and contemporary. The camera is fluid and Binoche appeals in her restrained and deceptive role.

The reflection on technology, social media, and how it has changed the way humans see themselves and their relationships is typical, and while the psychological exploration of its effect is engaging, it may border on the slightly too subtle.

Where the film loses some momentum is in the second half which ties the elements together. As a novel the story and the inner narrative would be better presented. That is not a fault of the screenplay, rather it is the possibilities of the medium.

The performances make this worth watching and the depiction of contemporary relationships is another part of the discussion on how society is changing.

Some films do not help their own cause. Land has many good features: the overcoming of adversity and pain, the stunning landscapes, the weather, and is a generally well-made work that allows Wright to display her skills.

In such circumstance it would be agreeable to rate his highly. But the faults in the writing, which tends to ignorance - the title for instance - and the descent into platitudes make it difficult.

The narrative has a backstory which is not hard to infer, although the actual details are saved to last, but it is a McGuffin in any respect. Regrettably, it takes a mawkish and almost trite conclusion to ram the general themes home.

Even so, the main part of the film has enough to hold interest in the place and setting, and the landscapes are a minor character in themselves.