peteg's blog - noise

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with co-writer/director Jaydon Martin. Both were excited about the film receiving a prize at Rotterdam. More slow cinema.

I was hoping for another work that explained Queensland and Queenslanders to the rest of us. Canonically there are Chris Master's The moonlight state (1987), Cane Toads: An Unnatural History (1988) and Rick Morton's A Hundred Years of Dirt (2018), each of which digs deep from a distinct perspective. John Birmingham and Spiteri add essential colour. In contrast this "docufiction", funded by VicScreen and featuring, at a guess, zero Victorians, tries to mine a new-age spirituality whose time has passed. One suspects that Victoria's civilising mission has stalled out far south of Bundaberg where the film spends most of its time.

Notionally the lead is dying from some malady and is looking for some kind of redemption, or at least a spot in the Christian section of God's heaven. He had a lot of fun in Kings Cross as a young man and has suffered a lot since. We're shown him, second-bean fish-and-chipper Andrew Wong and some randoms in a variety of locations: at home, in the shower, in an MRI machine, at the takeaway shop, a ten-pin bowling alley, watching a biff in the carpark of a pub that is nowhere close to a Bruce Springsteen ballet. Bibles are bashed, the old codger gets baptised in a non-flooding river somewhere. Some blokes unload some guns, perhaps gratuitously killing some wildlife off screen. (Come on guys, we've seen Wake in Fright (1971), we know the score.) Toyotas! Living in caravans. The archaic, iconic burning of the cane fields is referenced. So much pain, so many quacks. All soaked in alcohol. I do not recall any mention of sport.

The black-and-white cinematography is lush, like Ivan Sen's, but lacks his sense of belonging to country. There are some great images but not enough propulsion. That decaying Queenslander was crying out for a proper horror movie treatment. But for all the craft we never find out where he buys his smokes.

Wikipedia has a roundup. Wendy Ide says it is "unvarnished" while Martin Kudlac says that it "exhibits a level of formal polish uncharacteristic of a straightforward documentary." Most reviewers do not distinguish (regional) Queensland from the rest of the country.

Second time around with the first two seasons of Lars von Trier's classic (or at least cult) TV series, prompted by him producing a third. Also an improbable Udo Kier jag from The Secret Agent (2025).

There's some inspired stuff up front: the Bondo arc is great, as is the playing up of the Danish and Swedish cultural conflicts and (sometimes) the juxtaposing of the spiritual and the scientific. The first two seasons also function as proto-Dogme 95 time capsules. The third season fails to cohere — perhaps because Ernst-Hugo Järegård's Helmer was so effectively stagey whereas Mikael Persbrandt's half-Helmer is so bland — and the steadier digital cinematography looks a lot more generic. I couldn't get excited about "Swedes Anonymous" or von Trier's take on sexual, etc. politics; the dumb stuff here is too often just dumb and not funny. That may be Willem Dafoe's most inert performance. In any case the whole thing owes a lot, too much, to David Lynch.

Brian Tallerico at Roger Ebert's venue: three-and-a-half stars and all the context.

Since reading Dean Ashenden's view from the north, and having enjoyed David G. Marr's excellent work, I figured I should try more history. I was hoping Reynolds would provide an overview of evolving conceptions of sovereignty and property across the Australian continent and lay out just what native title is and allows, but this is not that book. (This text suggests I consult Reynolds's Aboriginal Sovereignty: Reflections on Race, State and Nation (1996) but surely that lacks reflection on the impact of the Wik decision of the same year.) Indeed Reynolds's (revisionary) focus is on the British/European settlement of the country and race relations; he does not discuss, for instance, the bombing of Darwin by the Japanese in World War II, the Kokda Track, Cyclone Tracey or other natural disasters, anthropology, science, culture/arts (no Gulpilil!), why treaties weren't signed, etc. Perplexingly he takes the Northern Territory to be just the Top End (the Yolŋu of Arnhem Land), despite Alice Springs being just short of his Tropic of Capricorn demarcation and Ashenden's Tennant Creek well north of it.

Overall I didn't find it as good as his essays; a few chapters needed another round of editing and I often wished he'd expanded on the assertions and self-citations in this text. In brief his thesis is that the indigenous peoples of Australia's north generally remained on their lands while working for cockies/squatters on a mutually-beneficial or at least placatory basis, in contrast to the south where the connections were mostly severed. This was due to labour shortages, of the unwillingness of the young colonials to settle in the harsh climate, which of course led to misunderstandings about how things actually worked in the faraway centres of power. There is also an account of nineteenth-century multiculturalism in the new tropical towns: Chinese merchants, tailors, miners, railway constructors, etc., Japanese pearlers, South-East Asians, Pacific Islanders working the cane fields; Australia is forever short of agricultural labour.

The final chapter is the best as it is succinct and clear like his essays. We're told the pastoral leases of the mid-nineteenth century already required that access be provided for cultural purposes but this provision was not enforced. (Reynolds asserts that plain-vanilla common-law leases would have extinguished native title which makes it all the more perplexing that the imperial regime (out of London) did not sort out their intent towards the indigenous peoples well before Federation in 1901.) He does not explain why the British colonial powers took three goes at claiming sovereignty over the continent. I also wanted to understand what the native title regime provides for; from the little I understand it is a very degraded notion of property, at least by the standard of freehold. This may be a reasonable or at least workable compromise in the context of pastoral leases, etc. (I don't know) but the legal regime in places where the people have never been dispossessed (cf the peoples of the Kimberley, the Yolŋu, the Torres Strait Islanders and elsewhere) needed more explication.

The north is now being occupied; where the romantic propaganda failed the military (specifically the U.S. military) is pulling people in and aiming to stay. At least until the next big one.

Broadly reviewed when it was released in November 2025. Glyn Davis. Mark McKenna sounds like he's read all Reynolds's books and can't separate this one from its predecessors. Judith Brett summarised it. Indeed it does add to the why-Queensland-is-different canon. And so on.

Written and directed by Bart Layton who based his script on a novella by Don Winslow. Widely billed as a derivative of Michael Mann's classics — I'd say it's Heat (1995) with a Collateral (2004) of Thief (1981) — but, perhaps because of a semi-recognisable Halle Berry, Australian slab of a lead Chris Hemsworth and a dodgy plot, it more often put me in mind of Swordfish (2001).

Basically Hemsworth (in the Robert De Niro role) is supposed to be a very competent high-class thief who abhors violence. That being the case, why doesn't he just get with the crypto or some other zero-contact sport? He gets sick of mentor Nick Nolte (think Jack Nicholson in The Departed (2006)) taking a cut and declines the next gig, leaving the floor to Barry Keoghan's psycho. Or perhaps it was because Monica Barbaro (Joan Baez in A Complete Unknown (2024)) is so very distracting. (She finds the mystery man appealing but remains a mystery to us. Apparently she trained as a dancer; I can only wonder what a pairing with Mads Mikkelsen may have achieved.) Mark Ruffalo got the Al Pacino role, or on another vector, John Hamm's. Much is made of Berry's disgruntled high-end insurance agent being an age-appropriate 53 but nothing happens between her and Ruffalo, or Ruffalo and his wife Jennifer Jason Leigh for that matter. The last is quite fine in a very small role.

It's all exit scams and one-last-gigs. The opsec and logic are generally poor and there is no James Caan or Tom Cruise competency here: Thor does not properly settle with Nolte and the ending is very unsatisfying. I don't know how Storm expected to get her cut, but near as I could tell she showed Thor a photo of the bloke who was supposed to be carrying the diamonds and that certainly wasn't the Hulk. This left two options: either Thor aborts the whole show due to excess risk or recognises the silly buggers going on and realises he could still get the cash. Similarly the Hulk must suspect Keoghan is going to show which again raises the risk too high for him to go through with things, being a police officer and all. Neither take a considered option.

The cinematography is sometimes OK but does not make the city pop: no neon on car hoods, no harsh fluoros, just the head and tail lights of endless commuter traffic against glass-and-steel skyscrapers. The editing (by Jacob Secher Schulsinger and Julian Hart) is often very good. The acting is generally no more than adequate. Humourless.

Matt Zoller Seitz at length for Roger Ebert's venue: three-and-a-half stars. Not cute. The "luxurious cinematography [..] transforms Los Angeles into a city of dark magic." Peter Bradshaw: four stars. Missing only two elements for it to be a full homage to Mann. Who knew there was this much pent-up demand for Mann-style capers? — but IMDB suggests the great unwashed masses were less into it than the paid reviewers. Ben Kenigsberg at the New York Times: the debt to Mann is "so immense that it’s hard not to come away feeling that the movie itself is stolen goods." Reheated. Barbaro got the Amy Brenneman role. Payman Maadi did not get the Adam Sandler role. Self help! Peter Sobczynski: achingly familiar. "Hemsworth [..] [never got] a chance to demonstrate the sense of sly humour found in his best performances."

Prompted by Jason Di Rosso's interview with writer/director Sergey Loznitsa. Georgy Demidov provided the source material. In two sittings due to tedium.

Loznitsa is Ukrainian and had interesting things to say in that interview, making me think there was going to be more going on than there was. The first half is pure slow cinema: we spend a lot of time waiting with freshly-minted lawyer now prosecutor Alexander Kuznetsov to visit political prisoner Aleksandr Filippenko during Stalin's purges in the 1930s. He provides an expository dump that causes the credulous protagonist to travel to Moscow in search of the Attorney General who will doubtlessly make things right for Party members in good standing. More happens in the latter half but nothing surprising; the entire project is riven by a naivete that might be touching if only the world wasn't as it is. There is a little of that signature black Russian humour but none of it bites.

Ben Kenigsberg at Roger Ebert's venue: "There isn’t, in the final analysis, that much that happens in the movie [...]. The suspense is simply in waiting for the totalitarian machinery to grind into place." We have ample time to admire the care taken with the details. Nicolas Rapold made it a Critic's Pick at the New York Times. Peter Bradshaw: five stars. "It is a very disturbing parable of the insidious micro-processes of tyranny." — but surely everyone is familiar with weaponized slow walking these days.

A Dick Powell jag from Murder, My Sweet (1944). Apparently he directed despite the credit going to Robert Parrish. William Bowers based his screenplay on a story by Jerome Cady.

Powell returns to Los Angeles after a five year spell in gaol after ex-marine Richard Erdman (Stalag 17 (1953), good) claims he didn't do it. We soon find out that "it" was a theft of 100k USD and indeed Powell did not do it. Erdman gets distracted by "available! that's me" Jean Porter (spouse of Edward Dmytryk who directed Murder, My Sweet (1944)) while Powell puts up a fight with old flame Rhonda Fleming (Out of the Past (1947), Spellbound (1945)) who just happened to marry his best mate after being turned down a few too many times. That bloke is still in the can on a related rap. Things sort of circle the drain as Regis Toomey's cop hovers and inscrutable underworld boss William Conrad tries to err on the legitimate side of things.

Perhaps because he was distracted by his directorial duties, Powell is a bit wooden here, at least against the solid performances he got from the rest of the cast. As a noir it's not that twisty but sufficiently fun. Erdman gets all the good lines, somehow putting me in mind of Miguel Ferrer in Twin Peaks.

Bosley Crowther.

Third time around with this Pixar classic, perhaps prompted by co-writer/director Andrew Stanton having a new picture out just now (In the Blink of an Eye (2026)) that by all accounts is a bit dire.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. What more could he want? Dana Stevens. Stephanie Zacharek.

Ken Loach directed a script by Jim Allen; they did it again a few years later in Land and Freedom (1995). This won Loach the Jury Prize at Cannes in 1990.

Journo Frances McDormand (in one of her less convincing performances) and human rights laywer/boyfriend Brad Dourif are wrapping up their activities in Belfast when he receives an apparently vital lead that takes him into the Irish countryside in the early morning. They've just completed their collection of testimony about the British authorities' dirty business in Northern Ireland but it is this last piece that somehow tips someone over the edge. Brian Cox (fine) arrives to investigate. Things go along OK in a TV police-procedural mode until we get a few zoomed-out tail-end expository dumps. McDormand's character makes little sense: she has absolutely no op-sec and shows little awareness of the danger she may be in or the damage she causes others. Why did she return to Belfast? — and who would ever expect justice from the very regime she's just spent all that time documenting?

There is some good but insufficient footage of British troops occupying the streets of Belfast.

Roger Ebert: three stars after a not-too-careful watch. Caryn James at the New York Times. "Variety staff" reckon it was based on the Stalker Enquiry of a few years earlier. IMDB trivia: McDormand and Dourif were also coupled in Mississippi Burning (1988). Some pointed to Costa-Gavras but really, come on.

Jim Jarmusch's most-recent feature, his first (fictional) one since The Dead Don't Die (2019), and therefore inevitable. He wrote and directed, and pulled a few of his usual ensemble. In two sittings due to banality.

The film is comprised of three vignettes, all gentle, unfunny comedies of manners, involving familial obligations that seem so obsolescent in these days of low and no contact. Tom Waits leads in the first as Father. I did not enjoy Mayim Bialik or Adam Driver's performances as his kids and spent most of it thinking that Jarmusch missed a trick by not casting Lily Tomlin as his wife. The ending just emphasised that the whole thing was skew-whiff. Next up matriarch author Charlotte Rampling was Mother, hosting an afternoon tea. Cate Blanchett has a nothing role as one of her daughters; at least Vicky Krieps as the other seemed to have some fun. Finally Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat played Sister Brother. Nobody covered themselves in glory.

The entirety reeks of mortality. It sort-of wanted to go where Happiness (1998) and Festen (1998) awkwardly did but is mostly just boring; I was more bored by this than by The Limits of Control (2009). The nostalgia for skating seemed so quaint. The repeated/shared motifs were trite. Apparently Jarmusch did not do the soundtrack.

Ben Kenigsberg at the New York Times. Peter Bradshaw: four stars. I wish I'd seen what they did.

Inevitable having read Chandler's source novel Farewell, My Lovely (1940). Edward Dmytryk directed a screenplay streamlined by John Paxton; they later collaborated again on Crossfire (1947). Dick Powell struck me as too graceful and insufficiently battered and bulky for Marlowe but it mostly worked. Claire Trevor and Anne Shirley did what they needed to do as the femmes fatale. Mike Mazurki's 'Moose' Malloy slotted straight in; he lived entirely in his own world. The rest of the cast is fine too. Fun and I think they succeeded in making it make and not make sense as required.

Bosley Crowther: "a superior piece of tough melodrama".

A Jane Alexander jag from Brubaker (1980). Directed by Robert Benton who adapted a novel by Avery Corman. Heavily Oscared. Not being a fan of either of the leads did not help.

For reasons unexplained creative Meryl Streep found herself hitched to fellow creative Dustin Hoffman in NYC and after too many years discovered she didn't like that very much. The first half sets Hoffman up as a loving and increasingly capable single father to their six-year-old son. The last half has her return from California and demand custody. The ending is tidy and unsatisfactory, an unstable state to leave things in. Alexander played the ambiguous neighbour who also had singledom thrust upon her.

The whole thing is hard work. Despite her lengthy absence you know Streep is coming back but she has so little character that you can't realistically hope that she's developed in any interesting way. Indeed her therapied older-and-wiser woman presents as fragile, teary, grasping and still unaware of what she really wants or can make work until she's forced to. We never see how she functioned with Hoffman, what drew them together or how it's still possible for there to be tenderness between them. I had no interest in the advertising backdrop.

Roger Ebert: four stars. He claims it doesn't take sides but clearly it does: we spend most of the movie with Hoffman.

Gus Van Sant's latest. I'm not a big fan; I saw My Own Private Idaho (1991) a long time ago and (I think) nothing since. He directed a script by Austin Kolodney. There's not a lot to recommend it.

The poster and early scenes clearly signal Arnie-in-T2 shotgun (but no roses) retro-nostalgia. It's 1977 and in this inspired-by-real-life flick, despite being at most two years since Dog Day Afternoon (1975), no reference is made to that classic. Bill Skarsgård leads as the semi-hinged Tony Kiritsis who kidnaps mortgage company scion Dacre Montgomery (entirely personality free, a thankless role) in some fantasy vengeful scheme that will only lead to good things. Colman Domingo is the golden-tonsiled Black man on the radio, the voice of Indianapolis, just like Cleavon Little in Vanishing Point (1971), charged with intervening. Many scenes just drag on. The outcome was predictable — the only variable was whether our main man would get killed by the police, but of course those were more civilised times. I had no doubt at any point that he should have hijacked a plane instead.

This thing does not even function as a proof-of-life for Al Pacino.

Ben Kenigsberg at the New York Times: low energy, needed more crazy. Skarsgård impersonates an imagined Michael Shannon performance. Peter Bradshaw: gripping.

A Judd Hirsch jag from Ordinary People (1980). He doesn't get much opportunity to show his range or humour. Apparently Stanley R. Jaffe's sole directorial effort. Beth Gutcheon adapted her own novel which was, of course, inspired by actual events.

Columbia arts prof Kate Nelligan (Franky and Johnny (1991)) sees her young son off to school in Brooklyn but he doesn't make it. Hirsch is the investigating police officer. Things unwind over months.

I felt the script let the show down, especially in the last third as the scenario lost its shape on the way to an unearnt happy ending that leaves the few clues we're informed of mostly dangling. The leads are fine but too many scenes do not work; one has everyone sitting around watching TV coverage of the very events they're involved in. Early 1980s NYC (Brooklyn) is portrayed as a very trusting place where the highly cultured rub shoulders with the hoi polloi until they just can't take it any more.

Janet Maslin. Needed more thought put into it.

More Robert Redford; apparently he finished acting in this just before he directed Ordinary People (1980). Also for Yaphet Kotto who is fine but mostly just rolls his eyes at everything. Directed by Stuart Rosenberg (Cool Hand Luke (1967)) from material drawn from real-life events. In two sittings.

We're told Redford used to run a military prison (I think) and has been charged by Jane Alexander's intriguing but insufficiently drawn political animal to fix a prison farm somewhere in the South. This fixing involves the usual stuff and reducing the exploitation of the inmates by the trusties and local merchant class; the prisoners mostly just take it, as if they are nowhere near breaking point. Things fall apart over the last third or so. There are too many dangling loose ends pretty much all the way through. Some of it is funny but mostly it's just trying to make the obvious points about how corrupt the system is.

Apparently this was Morgan Freeman's first movie and he's very hard to miss. M. Emmet Walsh is unchallenged in Southern greaser mode as a lumber merchant. Everett McGill, inexpressive but perhaps that's what he was asked to do.

Roger Ebert: two-and-a-half stars. Grim and depressing. Needed more focus on the characters and less on the issues. Redford's performance is of "a frustratingly narrow range". Needed more action between Alexander and Redford (in what is otherwise a sausagefest). Vincent Canby. Both observe the characters just espouse points of view. I think they did not account for how these movies function as time capsules.

Idle Wes Anderson completism. Much of his usual ensemble was there: Ed Norton as a scoutmaster/maths teacher, Bill Murray, the father of wayward Kara Hayward (Manchester by the Sea (2016)) and three indistinguishable boys, abidingly but unsatisfyingly married to Frances McDormand who's having a thing with Bruce Willis, Island Police. Harvey Keitel an unmodulated scout camp commander. Tilda Swinton is Social Services! Jason Schwartzman. Anderson directed and co-wrote with Roman Coppola.

Notionally this is about two twelve-year olds (Jared Gilman and Hayward, both later in Paterson (2016)) who meet cute at a pageant in 1964 (?) on an island and decide they'd like to spend some of the next summer together far away from the adults. Events ensue but I wasn't invested enough in Anderson's way of doing things to care too much. There's an air of innocence over the entire production, even the violent bits.

Roger Ebert: three-and-a-half stars. He too thought it was played seriously/earnestly. Dana Stevens: "maybe it's OK to find Moonrise Kingdom both dramatically inert and aesthetically entrancing." And so on.

On the pile since Robert Redford passed last September. This was his directorial debut. He worked from a screenplay by Alvin Sargent and Nancy Dowd that was derived from Judith Guest's novel. He did not appear onscreen. Won Oscars for best picture, best screenplay, best director, best supporting actor.

The scenario is a classical Amercian one: success has been attained but the rot has set in. (See, for instance any of Death of a Salesman (1949), The Swimmer (1968), The Great Gatsby (1925/2013), The Sun Also Rises (1926/1957), etc.) The genre generally requires that the tragedy (if any) be offset by at least a glimmer of hope for a better tomorrow, and so it goes here.

Redford takes us to Lake Forest along Lake Michigan in the northern suburbs of Chicago to a huge suburban house similar to the one in Risky Business (1983). This is financed by even-tempered father/husband Donald Sutherland's tax lawyering and is inhabited by his picture-perfect housewife Mary Tyler Moore (Oscar nominated) and increasingly troubled son Timothy Hutton (Oscared), who despite the billing is actually the lead. We also spend some time at the high school where M. Emmet Walsh is the swim coach and a very young Elizabeth McGovern makes a pass at Hutton after enjoying his breath down her neck at choir. But perhaps the best scenes (in a neo-noirish style) are those between Hutton and his shrink Judd Hirsch (Oscar nominated).

The impact of Redford's direction is abundantly clear and he definitely earnt that Oscar. There's some fantastic and effective proto-Hal Hartley loops in the dialogue and mistimed responses. Hutton is often lost but never absent. Hirsch is (even) better here than he was in Running on Empty (1988). This was the best performance from Sutherland that I can recall seeing. Moore initially seemed less effective but the latter half clarifies it all. I'm not sure they entirely stuck the ending, which seemed to want to head off a charge of misogyny.

Roger Ebert: four stars. Mostly about love, a concept which somehow combines an emotional state, misperception and a building material. Vincent Canby: Chicago's poshest suburb! — so we can add humanising the upper classes to Redford's achievements. The fragility of "the contemporary white Anglo-Saxon Protestant psyche." Janet Maslin interviewed Redford at (worthwhile) length. "It's a paradox, really — I've played so many roles where the character is alone, he's apart," [Redford] said. "But I respond to work most when it's integrated, when the actors are integrated into relationships. One of the sad things for me is not finding enough films with the kind of relationships that interest me. This time I found it in something I really didn't want to be in." Redford also asserts that The Great Gatsby (1925) is overrated. Wikipedia. IMDB trivia.

Kindle. Flabby Brunner: he had some mystery in this book that he did not want to reveal too soon, leading to extreme repetition of scenes that don't progress anything. The delay in uniting his main character with the interlocutor that enables the exposition dump is unmotivated. The intro was sufficiently disjointed that I was intrigued by how he was going to stitch it all together but soon enough (20% or so) it became a slog. I didn't come away with a clear sense of what he was trying to say.

I think it's set in a present-day London that never recovered from World War II: there are aspects of 1984 privation and lifts from Doctor Who (a room that functions much like the TARDIS) and Douglas Adams's contemporary Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980). We'll make great pets, some of us anyway. There's a rocket attack with effects perhaps somewhat like those in Francis Spufford's Light Perpetual (2021).

Goodreads. Faust, Mephistopheles.

An aging photographer goes looking for where the wave broke out near Yucca Valley in the Mojave Desert, not too far east of Los Angeles. It seemed like such a quaint thing to do this late in the day. Director/co-writer Joshua Erkman did the slow cinema thing well enough (Bossi Baker was the other co-writer), and Jay Keitel's cinematography and framing are fine. But the just-stay-home dogma, dialogue and scenario are witless — just too much cliche. Sort-of-lead for the second half Sarah Lind was in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and Die My Love (2025).

Calum Marsh saw more in it than is there. Indeed, the two parts, the cruising of that white centre line and that gap-toothed Ashley B. Smith's look is enough like Patricia Arquette's to support a charge of theft from Lost Highway (1997). Simon Abrams: two stars at Roger Ebert's venue. The score by Ty Segall is fine too. Dennis Harvey: lost in the desert.

The latest from writer/director Kelly Reichardt (Meeks Cutoff (2010), First Cow (2019)). Once again with the slow cinema but this time in Massachusetts, not the Pacific northwest.

This is yet another nostalgic period piece: black-and-white televisions, ancient drab fashions, unruly beards, yank tanks without seat belts, Pepsi at the waterbed shop, all dating from before the birth of the lead actors. There's a low-tech heist and a slow unwind in Reichardt’s signature style.

Over-exposed lead Josh O'Connor got to demonstrate both his range and limitations; I enjoyed his efforts in La Chimera (2023) a while back but not so much in Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery (2025). Here he tries to trade on a shambling 1970s never-quite vibe reminiscent of Oscar Isaac in Inside Llewelyn Davis (2013) with the odd grope for Elliot Gould's charisma (that elusive universal solvent). Not much is asked of Alana Haim but even so her acting struck me as poor in a bedroom scene where (I think) she is supposed to be shocked at the way her life is turning out. On the other hand Bill Camp and Hope Davis easily dominate the parental scenes.

Reichardt's slow cinema schtick only works if the arc of what we're shown is engaging and what's in the frame speaks. Fatal to my interest were a series of inert urban driving scenes where the camera tracks the driver so closely we have no idea what the town is like; the actors' expressions do not vary enough to make up for that. Things just trundle along until they don't.

Jason Di Rosso had a chat with Reichardt. Peter Sobczynski was fascinated.

One of the few movies where ants are the main protagonists. Sophisticated and glamorous Eleanor Parker (The Man with the Golden Arm (1955)) is sent up-river in Brazil (actually Panama?) as a mail-order bride from New Orleans. At the dock Charlton Heston isn't waiting — his plantation needs him so badly — so she gets an introduction to the hacienda from the number-one right-hand man Abraham Sofaer, who, despite his early protestations, plays no significant role in what follows. She's more-and-less than he had in mind. He's the alpha thing she wants. She's always keen but he puts up a fight.

After about an hour of abrasive setup (of the when-will-they variety) we're shown how destructive the army ants can be (at least in Hollywood). This unleashes a flood of romantic expression. It's all a bit ho-hum.

Byron Haskin directed a screenplay adapted by Philip Yordan/Ben Maddow and Ranald MacDougall from a story by Carl Stephenson.

Bosley Crowther at the time. "Credit [to] Byron Haskin for directing in a slow rhythm and a mordant style."