Second only to Wilder's Witness for the Prosecution, this is my favourite Christie adaptation. When executed well, I have an undeniable soft spot for whodunits that I owe to my mum: an itch that Poirot, Branagh aside, rarely fails to scratch.
Ignoring its dubious accents, this is the definition of a star billing. But the real heavy lifting here is done by Dehn's screenplay; his dialogue is deliciously crisp, more than Christie's, imbued with narrative clarity and wit. Murder is…
'We find ourselves in a crisis. In the past, we performed Shakespeare and the great Molière. We were even so bold as to let Henrik Ibsen's voice be heard. They no longer wish to hear the songs of giants. They are content with the tunes of dwarfs.'
Across three Winter nights, Fanny and Alexander revealed itself to me, one episode at a time, as the song of a giant. Painterly in a way paralleled only by Barry Lyndon, this family…
A Faustian piece that carries subtle emotional heft, that moves with the tonal current of the architecture it rests upon, both grand and minimal, eviscerating the American Dream - the weight of history felt on the shoulders of László Tóth.
Art and life stand stripped of their agency: a past haunted by the Holocaust, a present corrupted by capitalism, a future promised and broken by Zionism, an appendage to the lie that refuge exists. Triumph tainted by trauma. A score…
Perhaps the best death sequence ever put to film - I was enthralled by how meta-theatrical this is. Themes of addiction and infidelity, our poor life choices, all wrapped up in fishnets and bowler hats. Darkness disguised as light. Decay and decadence.
Avant-garde editing straight from a fever dream; a surreal self-portrait, vivid as it is visceral. Existential crisis now pending.
