Category: Directed by Ken Annakin
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The Longest Day picks up when the Normandy beach invasion starts. It happens maybe ninety minutes into the three-hour film. There are the overnight paratrooper drops, which have such dull action scenes it seems like the film will never improve, but then it turns out the large-scale battle choreography is exceptional and could potentially make…
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Second (after QUARTET) in a trilogy of anthologies adapting W. Somerset Maugham short stories has good acting, okay writing, and some excellent direction (from Annakin not French) but just doesn’t quite work out due to its lopsided attentions. Maugham introduces the stories, sometimes getting cut off mid-sentence, which is sort of funny, sort of not.…
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Quartet opens with what turns out to be a questionable introduction from source story author W. Somerset Maugham. In the rather stodgy introduction to the film–featuring adaptations of four personal favorites from Maugham’s extensive bibliography–Maugham indentifies adjectives critics have given his work over the years. Those adjectives prove useful during some of the film’s more…
The Stop Button 