Breaking Away (1979)

You’ve got to admire a movie that champions a modest and austere heroism for an unheroic age, but you don’t have to love it.

Margarethe von Trotta’s moving story of a few brave German women who successfully defied the Nazis after their husbands were arrested gets a bit lost in the complications of the telling

Artistic innovation tends to follow a pattern, which begins with the reaction of the young rebels against the prevailing style, after its tricks become too familiar. So Wordsworth and Coleridge’s manifesto in the preface to the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads drew attention to the tired “poetic diction” of the time and called for a…

[See discussion under “My Diary” of June 25, 2014] Discover more from James Bowman Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email. Type your email… Subscribe

A funny-serious adventure in the photogenic New Zealand wilderness that, like the author’s Boy has coming-of-age pretensions

All the way through The Winter Guest, which was directed and co-written by the fine British actor Alan Rickman, I was bothered by the fact that the action (I use the term loosely) was supposed to be taking place on “the coldest day in living memory” in East Fife, Scotland. Anyone who has ever been…