What makes the film’s ending so sad and tragic is that I’m not sure that the characters themselves know. One can only spend so much time trying to keep truth hidden before one begins to lose the ability to recognize what it is.

A lot of critical ink has been used to talk about how politically brave the film is, given that the outcome of the war was in no ways assured in 1940. So I was ready for the political satire and the humanistic speech at the end. Here’s what I wasn’t ready for–how darn funny the film can be.

There is no way this film should be this good. A retelling of Herman Melville’s “Billy Budd” set in the French Foreign Legion, directed by a woman born in France, and culminating with an electric break dance by the Claggart character (Denis Lavant as Galoup)? Are you kidding me?

Okay, the plot is pure melodrama, but talk about star power…
The story is essentially a love triangle, with Clark Gable playing a big game hunter who is sought both by the free spirited Honey Bear …

One mark of a newbie cinephile is that you tend to think that all world film is alike. That Kurosawa is the same as Ozu is the same as Naruse is the same as Koreeda …

The films at this year’s Full Frame Documentary Film Festival were varied in their subject matter. There were advocates of weather modification, a history of the American-Indian Movement, and a portrait of the exiled queen of Iran. We saw Jews in the city of Thessaloniki, troop greeters in the city of Bangor, advertising executives on Madison avenue, and Christian prison administrators in Argentina. There was a reporter in Africa trying to get us to remember Darfur and a father in America who was either trying to remember anything or forget everything. There was a blind couple using music to communicate love, a deaf boy at the center of a very loud controversy, and a horde of mute Japanese-American detainees whose only voice was a stranger’s camera. Oh, and there was Superman–turns out he’s Muslim and he lives in India.